 Do you want to know how to show and hide your Ecamm Live utility windows with Stream Deck? Or do you want to know all about keyboard maestro sub-routines? Well, if so, you're in the right place. I'm gonna tell you about both of them in this video. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec. And in this video, I'm continuing with my little series where I talk about how I'm using Stream Deck and Keyboard Maestro to basically improve my video production workflow with Ecamm Live and how it gives me a little bit of extra integration that isn't currently available with the Ecamm Live Stream Deck plugin, although Ecamm Live has the best Stream Deck plugin with the most actions programmed for any known application that I've come across certainly. But that said, there is still ways that you can improve upon this and add an extra little bit of productivity and functionality. But specifically today, as I mentioned in the little intro just a few moments ago, I'm gonna be talking about sub-routines in Keyboard Maestro and basically how you can nest macros within one another. So creating one as like a little loop that you might want to run but then include that in other macros. So the point of this is to show this use case for Ecamm Live but if you're not an Ecamm Live user, don't worry, there is something for you here in any case because this is all about Keyboard Maestro too. So let me first of all explain what I'm talking about and the problem that I'm trying to solve. So if I come into my demo mode and show you my full screen, you don't need to worry about being able to read anything on the screen. All I'm doing is showing you my screen layout. And when I'm making a video, this is typically how my screen may look. I've basically got all of my Ecamm Live stuff over on that side, this side where I am. And so this includes my Ecamm Live window and then it also includes my scenes, the camera effects, sound, audio, things like that, the overlays panel. And so that's all nicely tucked over here and then I may have on the screen other things over on which side, that side and down at the bottom or down beneath me of things that I'm demonstrating as part of my tutorials that I'm recording. So that is my sort of typical layout. And when I'm talking about Ecamm Live utility windows, I'm talking about these ones here. So I'm talking about all these panels that I've got around me with my scenes, camera effects and so on. Those are what I mean by utility windows. When I'm live streaming, however, there are a whole other set of utility windows that I want to have up and those would include things like this. So now over at the top here, I've got my comments and reactions. I've got the interview mode panel. I've also got the interview chat and then I've also got bandwidth statistics down here as well. So you can see that there's some different layouts of these windows that I've got and I want to be able to activate those windows for live streaming. But then when I'm just recording, I don't wanna see those and I just want these other windows. Now, the reason why we're gonna get into nesting of macros is because I also use Ecamm Live for a number of different use cases. I make these videos for my channel but then I also use Ecamm Live for other work related things, maybe with completely different profiles, completely different setups. And I want to be able to basically get ready to record or go live or whatever it happens to be with the touch of a button for each of those. And so I don't wanna have to reinvent the wheel as it were each time and create a whole set of macros that's gonna set absolutely everything up and duplicate this multiple times. If I can just have one macro that is going to set up my windows and then another one that's gonna activate my profile that I want for that particular recording case and so on and so forth. So that is where I'm talking about nesting macros. If I've lost you, don't worry, hopefully this should all become clear because we're gonna go through this all step by step. So first of all, let's have a little look, shall we, at what windows there are available in Ecamm Live in the utility windows bracket, or whatever you wanna call it. I just completely lost my train of thought there. The utility windows list, let's come back to that. So in Ecamm Live, you've got a window menu up here and this is where you've got a list of all the different utility windows. So this is what I mean by utility windows. In Ecamm Live, you can toggle these on and off using these buttons over here. So you've got these buttons for, this one is for the overlays panel. So you can see I can toggle that on and off. I can toggle the audio, volume, sliders. Then we've got the camera effects and things like that. So I can just toggle these on and off by clicking the buttons. So that's great. So let me turn off the camera effects one. I can also come into the window menu at the top and then I can come down here and toggle the camera effects one on here. I say toggle, it's not really a toggle. I can just make it show. I can't actually hide it now. So if I go back into the window and click on camera effects, it does nothing because it's already showing. So one thing I was hoping was that I would be able to just go and use that as a toggle and then I could just assign a keyboard and a maestro shortcut to it to basically go and activate that menu command, which is the common way that we activate menu commands for applications that are running in the background. This will all become clear in a moment as well. But unfortunately we can't do that because it isn't actually a toggle. It's only a toggle in the button on the screen itself. However, they do have another function in window which is this one down here to hide all utility windows. So we can hide all utility windows and then I could go through and activate them one by one as I wanted them. So that's basically the approach that I'm gonna take. If this is still not making sense, don't worry. It will all start to fall into place as we go through it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come over to my keyboard maestro editor and I'll just get myself in. So a nice plain group so that it doesn't get confusing. So here we are in keyboard maestro and I've got my ECAM setup demo group. So it's completely empty. There's no macros in there at the moment and we're just gonna build this out. I have done a video all about an introduction to keyboard maestro. I'll leave a link to that directly above and that just basically walks through the sort of interface and the idea of how keyboard maestro works. But I'm gonna assume a little bit of knowledge here and then I'll go over all of that again. But we're gonna start with a new macro and I'm going to call this one. So let me just think about this. What we're going to do here and explain what we're gonna do is I'm gonna create a macro that basically sets all of those windows up ready for when I'm recording. And then I'm gonna have a second macro which is basically for when I'm live streaming that opens up those additional panels that I want for when I'm live streaming. So those are the first two steps and those are the first two macros that I'm gonna create after that and then gonna create a second, a third macro rather that basically calls in those two little macros and then adds on anything else that we need relevant to that particular setup. So that's just to give you some heads up but let's go through this one step at a time. So the first one I'm gonna do is I'm going to call this one and this one is basically gonna be for the windows that I have all the time. So I think of this as kind of like my base window configuration, if you like. So I'm gonna call this base windows, there we go. And then I'm gonna do another one similar which would just be live streaming windows. So basically I want these ones to appear all the time or use these ones all the time but then the live streaming ones are just gonna be the add-on windows that I have only when I'm live streaming. The way that I'm gonna do this is I'm gonna use a function which I've used quite often in my videos which is basically to be able to activate a menu command in using keyboard maestro, activating a window command in another application while it's in the background. And the way that we do this is if I come here and I type in, there we go. We use it that often, it's the last one that I searched for in fact. So search for menu and it's this one show or select a menu item. I'm gonna add that one in there. Now what I need to do is let me just move this down a little bit so that it makes it easier to see. There we go, I'll move it down here. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go through and activate a specific menu command. So you can select the application here but we can just do it directly using this key here which allows us to navigate through the menus of all of your open applications. In fact, let me just move this over a little bit. So if I click on here, you should see that we've got Ecam Live beta is open. And then this now is all of the menus in the menu bar of Ecam Live. So I'm gonna go down to the window if you remember that's where all the menus were or the windows were. And then in here, we've now got a list which is basically everything that is in that menu from the Ecam Live window menu in the menu bar. And basically we were starting from here, bandwidth statistics, that's the first of the windows that you can activate. These are other window related commands. And so basically I can go down and look at all of the ones that I want to include in this sort of base configuration. So bandwidth statistics I don't want, that's something that I only want for live streaming. But the camera effects one, yes, I do want that. And then let me just duplicate this because that's the easiest way. And so I can duplicate that. And now let me go down and instead of camera effects, the next one that I'd want is comments and reactions. That's only a live streaming one. Interview mode, I don't want that. Interview chat, that's for live streaming as well. Main window, that is the main window that you've got up. Well, that one is just open by default. Camera, network cameras, that is not something that I use. If you do use network cameras, you may want to show that panel overlays. Definitely I want that one as well. So that's basically what I'm gonna do. And I'm just gonna go in now and add in all of the other ones. So I'm gonna press the handy pause button on eCAM Live and save you having to watch me do that over and over again. Okay, so here you can see that I've now done that. So I want the camera effects window, I want the overlays window, the scenes window, the sound effects and the sound levels. So just coming back to my demo mode, these are basically all the panels that I have shown up here. These are the five panels that I want to have shown at all times when I'm doing my recording or live streaming as well. So now we've got those set up in keyboard maestro. There's one little bit missing though from here and that is that action that I mentioned at the beginning, which is to basically hide all of the windows. Cause if I just press this now, it's only gonna try and toggle them all on. So in fact, let me just give you a quick demo of what I mean. If I were to close down all of these windows like this, do it the hard way by clicking in the little button. And then if I go to run this macro just to show that it's working. Sorry for the small size, but my mouse is down here. I'm just gonna run that macro that I've just built and what you'll see is, there you go. It's just popped open all of those different windows. But if I press it again, it does nothing because the windows are already open. So it's not got that step to basically close them down if I was to have added in some other windows such as this one, let's say I'd got the chat in. How about if I wanted to get rid of the chat and just only show my core windows? Well, if I run that again, it still doesn't do anything to these ones. So what I want to be able to do in order to bear in mind that what I'm trying to achieve is here's my live streaming setup and then I wanna get back to my regular recording setup. Here's my live streaming setup back to regular again. So the way that I'm doing that is in this sort of base configuration that we've got here, I'm also activating that command which was hide all utility windows. So that is just one more that I've got to add in here. So I'm gonna duplicate this. And so here instead of this being the camera effects window, the very first action I want to do is actually in the window then what I want to do is this one, hide all utility windows. So now when I press this, in fact, if I just come into, I think in fact, let me just put a pause in here for a moment just so that it does show you what exactly what's going on because it may be a little bit easier for you to see. So if I add in a pause and I'll just make that half a second and what I'll do is I'll actually put a pause in between a few of those. You don't need the pause, I'm just doing this so that you can actually see what is going on just in case it wasn't totally clear. So there we go, we've got a few different pauses. So now if I come into my demo mode again and then what I'll do is I'll run this macro, you'll see that it's slowly populating all of those different windows. And so if I press it again, it hides everything and then slowly populates all of those windows. So that is great if you are then in the live streaming mode and I want to just get back to my regular, it's closing everything down and then opening just the ones for recording. I think that that should be clear now. But let me know if it isn't. So what we need to do now is do the same for the live streaming. I'm gonna leave those delays just in just so that it does really emphasize it when I come to create the one for the live streaming. And so what we could do here is I could actually duplicate this one but I will just start afresh again. So I'm gonna create a new macro and then I'm going to call this one live stream windows. And then we're gonna do exactly the same thing here which is I'm gonna look for the menu command show. And I've mentioned this before but worth mentioning again when you are searching for commands in keyboard maestro just make sure that you do actually have the all actions category selected so that you are searching within all actions rather than just one of the little subsets. So we're gonna add that in there and then in here what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go through now and add in all of those different commands that we're going to want for our live streaming. So for example, e-cam live beta into the window menu and then bandwidth statistics was one that I do want to show. So I'm just gonna go and do all those for you as well. So there we are. We've now got the bandwidth statistics, the comments and reactions, the interview window and then also the interview chat window as well. So just to show you what's going on there if I then run this macro you'll see that it does open up those additional windows and put those on the screen. If I run the other one again so where was it here? The base windows if I run that again then it does close everything down and just open up all of those again with that delay. I'm just gonna take that delay out now because I think it's proved its point hopefully. So there we go. I'll just try that again. Come to the live streaming. There we go, that's that one. And then back to the base one again and it's basically closed all of those down. So hopefully that is clear but now what I want to talk about is basically how we can then use these as sub-routines because that is something that I talked about before. So what do I mean by that? Well, basically what you can do in keyboard maestro now that we've got these two macros so I've got this one to just open up my base windows and this one to open up my live streaming windows. Well, how about if we want to then create a separate macro which is a setting up for my take one tech videos and then maybe I have another one setting up for some of my other business related videos and things like that. Well, we can do that using creating a macro for each one that then pulls in these different setups. So let me show you how to do that and let me just move this to a screen where you can see it a little bit better over here, hopefully that's a bit bigger. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna create a new macro and what I want to do here is I want to say, right, well this is my one for recording my take one tech videos. So take one tech videos. So in here what I want to do is there are a whole load of other actions I could add in here. I'm just going to go with some basic ones and I'll allow your imagination to fill in the rest and I'll give you a few clues along the way. But here I'm gonna create a new action. The first thing that I'm gonna want to do is open Ecamm Live if it's not already open. So I'm gonna come up to here and I'm going to go to activate. That is the way that we activate a specific application if it's already open then it will just bring it to the front and make it the active application. If it's not already open, it will open it. So activate a specific application. Then what I'm gonna do is I want to change to my profile. So I wanna make sure that I am in the correct profile for Ecamm Live and fortunately we can use exactly the same command that we've just been using because in Ecamm Live you do have all of your profiles do just appear in the profiles menu. So if I just come over here for a second and I'll zoom in and I'll show you what I mean. In demo mode here you can see in Ecamm Live if I come up to profile, you can see that all of your profiles do just appear as menu items. So what that means is that you can actually trigger your different profiles with your keyboard maestro as well by activating the menu command. So in this case, as you can see, I'm in my TOT, take one tech profile. But if I had been previously recording something else I'd wanna make sure I changed into that profile or turned into that profile. Switch to that profile, I'm not turning into anything except a jibbering wreck sometimes. So let's come out of here for a moment. So what I want to do is come here. I'm gonna search for a menu command. We're gonna do this exactly the same as we just did. So I'm gonna go into menu here. Hopefully you can see this. Let me move my stream deck from behind it so it doesn't confuse you. Here we go, Ecamm Live beta. Then if I come into the profile menu you can see here all of my profiles and just off the bottom of the screen, typical. It is my TOT profile. So that's basically going to now, what's it, AZ? I've just realized I didn't activate the application. So step back, Alec. When I did activate an application, one thing I forgot to do was actually tell keyboard maestro which application we wanted to activate. Well, we do want to activate Ecamm Live beta. So that is the first important step. Make sure you get your applications right. But once it's opened that then it is gonna activate my take one tech profile. And because I'm recording, maybe the last thing I've been doing is a live stream for either my take one tech or for another profile, another work related thing. So what I want to do is just make sure that this is for recording. So I do just want to basically set up my windows as we've just done for my base window configuration. And the way that we can do that then, and this is the little subroutine part I was referring to earlier. If I click on new action and I come in here and type in macro, then what we can do is we can either activate a macro group or we can run a specific macro. So if you have got a group of macros, you can do a whole load of different things all at one time. But the one that we want is down here, execute a macro. So I'm gonna click on that one and then I'll come down here. And if I just select the macro, it will have them in here. So this is Ecamm setup demo is just off the screen. Let me just get that so that you can see it again. You can see it's basically listing all macros and it's still off the bottom of the screen. But basically if you go into any of these, then you can see all of the different things within them. So if I go to Ecamm setup demo and click on base windows, then that's basically gonna set up those windows as I want them. So if I was to execute this macro and Ecamm Live wasn't running, then what it would do is it would open Ecamm Live in whatever state it was last open in. It would switch to my TOT profile, take one tech profile if it wasn't already open. And then it would make sure that my windows were set up ready for recording. So how about if I was going to do this for my take one tech live streams? Well, we can just duplicate this because basically I wanna do the same things. So when I come down in my Saturday morning, when I do my live stream, I wanna just be able to press a button and it sets everything up for me. So here what I'm gonna do is basically exactly the same thing but all I wanna do is just add on the extra few windows that we've got for my live stream. So if I click on here, then I can come down to my Ecamm Live setup demo group and then I'm gonna activate my live stream windows. So now basically what it's doing is making sure I'm in my take one tech profile. If I'm not already, it's making sure the base windows are all open and then it's making sure that the live stream windows are all open too. So that is my little setup routine for those two things but actually my setup routine is a bit a little bit longer than that because what I'm also doing is I'm also opening anything else that I have open for those things. So for example, for my live streams, I also have open usually at the beginning of my live stream I do a quick update on my channel. So I tend to have my YouTube open so that I can show my YouTube analytics and all of that sort of stuff. So we can add that into this routine. Then I also generally have a Safari window open so that if I'm gonna be talking about anything or anything comes up on the live stream then I can show that. So all of these things can just be added into here. New actions of different windows you want to open, different applications you want to open and you can build these out as you want. With my videos, I'm sometimes doing stream deck videos. I'm sometimes doing keyboard maestro videos. I'm sometimes doing videos about something completely different. So you can just then tweak this and for my recorded videos one, for example, I've got many different setups that I use. And so I press the button depending on what it is I'm gonna be talking about and it opens all of those relevant applications and make sure that they're all in the right place. How do I make sure that in the right place I use a little application called Moom. You can do window placement in keyboard maestro by the way and I will do a video all about that as well. But personally, I find having started using Moom for window management, I'll leave a link to my video just up above that I did all about Moom. I find that that's just a lot easier to set those positions of where the windows are and basically remember like new layout. So if I ever sort of change things on the fly and decide, oh, maybe this is better for my workflow now, then Moom allows me to update my window snapshots and basically say window positions of not just the ECAM windows, but any other utility windows or Safari windows or things like that. So definitely check out Moom for the window management aspect of these things. And as I say, link is in the description for that as well. So I hope that you have found that useful and if you did then please don't forget, as always, go ahead, like and subscribe to the channel. Share it with some friends who need a little bit of extra ECAM productivity in their life or keyboard maestro in their life for that matter. And as always, there's always my buy me a coffee link if you want to go and support the channel on a one-off or ongoing basis as well. The series will continue. I shall be doing some more videos about how I'm using keyboard maestro with Stream Deck to control ECAM so those are coming up shortly. But in the meantime, don't go anywhere because there are, of course, as always, some more great videos coming up right now. I'll leave a link to one of my playlists and YouTube will choose a video just for you up in the top there as well. So until the next time, have a great day.