 If you want to create great-looking, well-proportioned scene layouts in Ecamm Live, then stick around because I've got a great video and also a free downloadable template for you as well to help you with that. Now, this is where I would normally go into my little intro sequence, but I don't have one today, so welcome to Take One Tech. My name's Alec because I have basically just started from scratch with a new profile in Ecamm Live so that we can build this all out together and I can show you exactly how it works. Now, there was a little hint there that I said profile because I am doing all this in the Ecamm Live beta at the moment, version 3.9, which hopefully should be coming onto the mainstream version at some point in the not-too-distant future. But for now, I am using the beta and the reason for this has come about because of all of the great new features that are coming into version 3.9 that allows you to create great-looking scenes without the need for graphical overlays with little holes cut out for where our cameras and screen sharing are going to be like we used to have to do in the olden days before this beta. So this is what I'm here to show you is how I've basically done this and the template that I've created that allows me to create these scenes and make them all look well-proportioned and relatively attractive in terms of the layouts that I've got and then you can take this download and use it yourself. So if you aren't on the beta, don't worry. These features will be coming to the mainstream at some point in the not-too-distant future. But also the actual template, you can equally just download it and use it in something like PowerPoint or Keynote if that's what you make your overlays in or any other graphical program for that matter and it's still got the same sort of proportions. You could use it in there as a guide for how to lay your scenes out as well. So let me just come straight into my screen sharing then and I'll explain a little bit more because the features specifically that I'm talking about that have been added in or that are going to be in version 3.9 are first of all we've got the camera overlays which we already had but we've also got screen sharing overlays which makes it a lot easier if I just come down to here the overlays tab. We've got this little one with a screen which wasn't in the existing version of Ecam Live but is in the beta and it allows us to add in a screen sharing window and we can drag it and resize that. It's a lot better functionality than the old screen sharing way of doing things where you had to have it as basically the scene source whereas now it can be just an overlay and the other thing about it is you can actually have more than one of them so I could just drag this over here and have more than one of them. Why would you want to share more than one screen sharing when they're both sharing the same thing? Well, you've also now got cropping so I can hold down the option key and I can crop into a different part of the... Whoops, a daisy. I just clicked on the wrong thing there. You can basically just crop into a different part of the scene so if you're demonstrating two different apps or different app windows or something like that that you needed to show at the same time then you can do that like that and just crop into a different portion of the scene or maybe you want to show the app itself and then a portion of the menu bar or something like that. There are lots of reasons why you'd want to do it. You could always before share a specific app but it was only ever one at a time because you could only ever share, have one screen sharing element at a time and so we used to have to use NDI and things like that to work around it. So that makes screen sharing a lot easier and a lot more versatile but the thing that is going to kill the old school overlays to my mind is the fact that we can now also do things like adding on a border to any of our overlays so we can add this little border like that and we can also do rounded corners so we can add rounded corners and you can see that I'm basically choosing here which specific corners I want rounded so you can see that from here I've got the top corners rounded there it is rounded there, square at the bottom, square at the bottom and rounded there so it just makes it quite versatile really that the sorts of shapes that you can make with it and how you can make your scenes look. So this main camera here as you can see because I'm moving it around is also a camera overlay so let me just show you how we might build a scene where you wouldn't need to have those old school graphical overlays and the reason for all of this. So let me just create a different shape here I'm going to create one where we've basically got the camera on the screen sharing I'm going to adjust the position in fact let me just reset this one second to make it the oops Daisy that's gone a bit too big now hasn't it? Hang on a minute let me try this again I've just suddenly reset it and it's gone too big I'll try that again there we go I'll take this one back and that is the full screen and then I'm going to change the border width so let's make that five there we go and then I'm going to drag that to make it a bit bigger and then I'm going to drag the camera over the top of it like that I'm going to change that to be something like that so that is the sort of scene that we might have had in the past or now in fact let me just add some rounded corners to that so you can get the effect make that one five as well I'll come to the borders on this one make them all rounded just for the sake of the demonstration so now we've got a shape that is similar to the sorts of shapes that we might have had before where we'd created this with a sort of an image overlay and sort of had little windows popped through them for where we're going to put our screen sharing in that but then obviously we probably would have had some sort of graphic around the outside as well so the way that we're adding those in now is we've always had this by the way this show in background so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to drag an image and I'm just going to drag and drop it now when you drag and drop an image into the overlays tab if your scene is unlocked then it will default to being at the top of the stack in the show in current scene and so that means that that image will only be visible in that scene we want this to be visible in all scenes now if your scene is locked and you drag an image into the overlays tab overlays window rather it will appear appear in show in all scenes so we do want it to show in all scenes but we don't want it at the top of everything else this is currently as you can see covering up everything so what we want to do is just drag this from here all the way down into the show in background so I'm going to drag that down there so now it's in the background and now you can see if I just come out of demo mode we've got something that looks a little bit similar to what we might have created before in something like keynote where we have like an image in the background and then we put the space for where our desktop screen sharing is going to be and a space for where our camera is going to be and then we make a transparency through those particular parts and then we lay this over the top and it sort of gives us this border effect but as you can see I've now got this created just in e-cam by having an image in the background and I could actually just say well actually I want this over this side this time and you can see how easy it is now to just make these exactly as we want them or maybe we might say well okay then we've got a guest in now so I'm just going to hold down alt and drag to duplicate that and let's say I'm going to add a guest in so here instead of that I'm going to add guest number one and in fact maybe we've got three guests in so something like this so now if I was using interview mode then my two guests rather three people two guests would be like that and then perhaps I could actually just resize this or maybe I want to just crop in on a particular part of this the scene and then drag that like that and so you can see how basically quite quickly we can create a scene just from having a background image that looks something like we would have had to have done previously with graphical overlays in a separate editor and then bought them in and it just makes it so much easier to change all of these things on the fly the other thing is it also makes it easy to make animated backgrounds as well so what I've got here is as well as this image that I've added as the background image I've also got a looping video now I've mentioned this several times before but if you go to pexels.com P-E-X-E-L-S you can download just search for abstract background loop and then go in the videos section and there is a whole series of videos that you can use in there so this is one that I just grabbed at random so I'm going to drag this and drop it in now when you drag and drop it in let me just come back to my screen sharing a minute my demo mode rather I've just dragged and dropped that over onto the overlays and it's saying do I want to add it as an animated overlay or play full screen with audio well we want to add as an animated overlay so I'm going to add that in there this is what I've got as my background and now I'm going to come to the little down arrow here at the bottom select that and say that we want to when it's finished we want it to loop so now when it finishes it will just keep looping around like that so now we've got that as a loop going on in the background and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over to this side again and move it from showing current scene into the background so there we've now got this going on in the back of our scene I'm not sure whether you want to have that or not but it's just to show an example of how we can now create a whole series of scenes over the top of some sort of background you could have created your own animation or you might just download one from Pexels or somewhere else or whatever stock video footage site you want to use but anyway that is what we've got so how do we now go to use this template that I've created because I haven't actually introduced it yet have I so let me just come and create a new scene in fact I'm just going to create a completely new scene there we go that's a bit harsh isn't it my green screen so let me take that off I'll put my usual background on and the source for this at the moment is camera so I'm going to change that to blank we've still got this running in the background so I'm just going to hide that one and I'm also going to hide this one because now I'm going to show you the template that I've created in fact before I show you the template let me just add in a camera overlay because there's something else I want to show you and I'm going to just take these off these corner radiuses off and the border off so when you've got some sort of element some sort of overlay on the screen in e-cam live there are a few little alignment tools that they give you that help you with getting things in the right place so as I move this towards the center you'll notice that it is sort of snapped to this vertical line that is showing me that it's on the center if I keep moving across I should hit a one about a quarter distance there you go there's that one and if I move a bit further across then there should be a little bounding box that appears there we go I've just hit it let me just take off the UI for a moment you can see that light blue box that's going all the way around so that you will sort of snap to that on each side and if you go to the top corner you can snap to it there or you can snap to the bottom corner so it's just a little guide that helps you get things aligned and leave that little border around the outside there's also obviously one I say obviously there is one in the horizontal plane as well so here you can see that I know that this is dead center and I can basically expand this out if I want and just get it all lined up so we have got that element of alignment that we can do but what I wanted to do was create something that gave me a little bit more flexibility in terms of where I position things given that we are going to be adding on a lot more elements so what I created was this layout template so if I come down to the bottom here it's this one scene layout template now I'll leave a link down below and go and grab a copy of this and I'm just going to drag it in and I'm going to put it in the background again so that is basically the template that I've created now what I've done is these outermost white lines here so around here this one and this one this basically matches up with the bounding box that we have already in Ecamm live the one that I just showed you so if I move my thing up to the corner this is basically matching that bounding box that you already snapped to then what I've done is I've sort of split this up so the white lines split the screen up into essentially quarters in the horizontal and the vertical but it's not exactly quarters because I have actually also left a gap and the idea with this is that basically I can put something here like this I can drag this corner and put it over that box I just need to change the aspect ratio of this moment to be custom otherwise it will try and keep that 16 by 9 so in fact let me say that I'm going to bring this here so what you can see is this is basically I'm using sort of half of the height and I'm using a quarter of the width but I've left gaps for the buffer between them the other thing that I've done here actually is it's not quite split in the same way in the horizontal and vertical axis because you can see how I've got the same sort of bounding box at the top and the side but then I've actually also double the width of it at the side because I just think that when you have your camera or your shot in the middle it looks a little bit better to have that extra bit of a buffer at the side compared to the top and the bottom so then we've got these four equally spaced white boxes and that allows me to basically just grab this one and if I hold down option I can drag that over and hold it over that position and then I can drag it over here and do this one and then drag it over here again and so now I've got four duplicate shots now why would I want four? Well obviously, hopefully it's obvious I can now just come into here and change that to be guest number one guest number two somewhere, I've pressed the wrong one it always helps to hit the right button and then here we've got guest number three so there we go I've just created a layout pretty quickly where we've got four equally spaced boxes and they've all got the same buffer between them now what I should have done actually if I'd been a little bit more clever and not rushing ahead is actually put the border on these from the outset so what I'll do is I'll actually just do this again in a moment anyway and I will actually put the correct border on it because if I put the border on this first if I change this to 50 for the beta is going to be the ability to copy the style of one overlay and apply it to another that's currently not there but it would be a good feature so now let me just delete these ones oops, like that in fact for a three up what I would probably have for a four up rather I would probably, let's resize this one in a minute I'm going to create this one as a sort of tool like that and then I'm going to copy it across like this and then this one I'm going to copy to there and it makes it a lot easier to just sort of eyeball it because you know from the outset how wide it needs to be when you're setting the first one and then I can come in here I can change that to be the guest number one change, oops, didn't need to do that change this to be guest number two and change this to be guest number three and that leaves me some space at the bottom to have my sort of lower thirds or my live stream for example I do have something that's permanently at the bottom giving the link for people to call in and stuff like that and it also leaves a space for comments and things like that if people want to leave comments so you have your comment box popping up down here and then once you've set it up you simply come to here and you toggle the screen layout template off and then we could put our little balloons back if we really wanted to like that so now we've got a scene that's all perfectly laid out you'll notice that the gaps between everything is all perfect I mean if you wanted, if you were going to do a little bit of a screen share or something like that just for a particular window in fact let's just do this for the hell of it I'm going to just toggle my screen layout template on let's just say I want to share this window down here because I can see the sort of gaps between all of these these sort of elements or the gaps are part of the template if I just click on screen sharing now we might want to say okay well let's put this one down here and then let's expand it over like this in fact let me just get the cropping correct first that would help come in and crop in this and then I'll crop in on this part like that and then I'll just expand it out and then what we might want to do is just crop in from the top to get it like that I mean that's a bit of a bad example because I probably wouldn't make it that small or in that position and then we can just expand the actual window itself to get it to fit this is the drawback by the way of not actually planning these videos in advance because it means demonstrations like this don't always go the way that they're supposed to when I just go off the cough sort of thing but there you go that is how you can basically add it in the point I'm trying to make though is that the template allows you if I just toggle off my little background for a moment and come out of screen sharing and then or demo mode and I'll toggle that off you can see how the basically all of the gaps and everything just look neat and aligned and if I turn the background back on then it just looks a lot more crisp and sharp and everything in the right place and what this means is if you do want to create these scenes sort of on the fly as you are doing a live stream or something like that then you can come into preview mode and then I've actually got a button on my stream deck now which toggles on this particular layout so that then I can come into preview mode I can make all my changes toggle the template on and then toggle it off again and send the changes to be live so what I'm going to do now though is I am actually just going to turn this background off because it will apply to all of the scenes so we can always just turn it on once we're finished and I'm just going to make a few different scenes and show you a few sample layouts that you might want to do with this and I'm actually going to come back to this main scene I'm just going to fix this one because my main scene would normally just be my camera so I'm going to pull this up to here take it over to this side and then drag it down to the bottom like that get it lined up so that is in the right place and then we've got the I'm going to leave the radius as 50 and then I'm going to use the border width is 5 I'm going to come back into my demo mode if I'm going to show you this haven't I so I've got my radius there and my border width all we've got in this scene on the the scenes window is we've just got that we've just got the camera overlay so that's what we want so let's say I'm going to create another scene I'm going to come to my main here I'll just go to duplicate and then let's call this one screen sharing screen share left so I have depending on which part of the screen I'm actually sharing I have either my picture on the right or the left hand side so this one I would say let me bring this over to this side you might want to put this let's say we're going to have this one up here here full half width like that and then I'll add a screen sharing overlay over here now obviously there is a specific aspect ratio of your screen so there will be instances where it's just a case of this is whatever size it is and that's the way it is so like this one here because it's 16x9 if I line it up with the the line at the top and the line at the bottom like that and then as I bring it down like that it is we've got the same border width now that should just fit perfectly in there and then you've got space for comments or things like that in the in the bottom so you could have it like that but I tend to actually share more of my screen like or a specific portion of my screen so you might want to just do something like this and crop into a specific portion of the screen so let's say I've got this up here and then I cropped into that particular aspect that particular portion of the screen so there's that window gone like that and just make that a little bit bigger so you could do something like that so it's taking up the full screen so if that's screen-sharing with me on the left then I could just duplicate that and let's call this screen-share right move this over to the other side obviously this is all just going to fit perfectly because it's just an exact duplicate onto the other side and I'm just lining it up with these lines and then I'm going to create one that's basically two guests or me and one guest rather so in fact I'll come into this one that I created this scene that we've just created here that was I'll get rid of that screen-share element at the bottom and now I've got the alignment slightly out on those just knocked it out alignment somehow so what I'll do here is if I just duplicate this one, this one is the four up so let me duplicate that and create a three up so the three up if I just delete guest guest three from there and then we're going to use instead of the quarter markers which are the white lines the red one is basically splitting things up into thirds so if I create one like this I can just drag this across like that one will align up with this little red line here for this third and then drag this one across to here and then this one will drag across to here so now we've got three that are perfectly sized and with gaps between them that are all equal that one needs to be just across a little bit and then the other one that I'd need to have is a two up so again I'm just assuming that I've got a space at the bottom for a long lower third and comments but equally if you only just have comments coming in and you've not got another lower third in fact let's just do this as an example let's say you want space for comments at the bottom then you just do something like that drag them down to that line and then I'll do one for a two up which is going to be the same thing obviously isn't it but just for completeness like that so I've just duplicated that so I'm going to delete guest number two out of this one now and then we've just got me and one other guest like that and then I'll do another one just in case you're using the full capability of Ecamm Live and you've got four guests and yourself so in that case what you might want to do is let's just duplicate this and pull this five up so I'm going to move guest number one over here and let's think about the best way to do this we could make this one into thirds at the top like that and obviously the host front and centre like that and then we could add another one guest number two so whoops Daisy I've moved it too far over but never mind you can see the line so we can clearly see where it's supposed to go drag this one over to this side now and then let's change this to be guest number two and then we'll take this one and drag it down here so we're down at the bottom now and then this one could be guest number three and as you can see the lines just make it really easy to set everything exactly where you need it and then this one just obviously duplicate across and make the other one like that another couple of scenes that you might want to consider if I just come and create another one is maybe you're doing screen sharing because I'll start with this screen sharing one here let's say that one so let me just duplicate this in fact I'll start with a completely fresh one let me take this one let me take this two up as the starting point duplicate that and I'll call this two up screen share so what I'm going to do with this one is I want to have a screen sharing but we may want to have our pictures over on the other side camera overlays rather on the other side so what I've done here is in case you want to have squares these dotted lines basically correspond to the horizontal lines here so I'll just show you what I mean by that so I'm just going to put myself in a tiny little window here you can see that we've got this quarter line at the bottom down here well this dotted white line is basically the same size as that if you want to make a square so let me just delete this one that would mean that if you were going to have four people all talking about something that you were sharing the screen then you could just drag these down like this and let's change that to be guest number three this one guest number four two I can't count down evidently you get the picture it can be whatever you want obviously guest number one and then what we might have is we might have screen sharing overlay as a big overlay coming up here and so it would line up with the other dotted white line in that case and then we can expand it down you could either fix it by the width or you might want to actually shrink it so that it will fit perfectly so you might want to cut it off the screen sharing like this and then hold down the option like that so there we've got a scene that is basically we've got four, three guests and a host like that and then obviously the point of all of this is that once I just get rid of my background or my template and then switch on my background if we do want that that particular background I could have done this a lot quicker if I wasn't trying to talk and count at the same time but we've basically got our main scene we've got our screen sharing screen sharing on the other side we've got our four up three up, two up two up or four up plus screen sharing and then the five up just for total completeness let me just do one more as well because I have put those lines on there so it's a shame not to demonstrate them so this one is four up let me just duplicate this duplicate this one and I'll call this one let's say three and then yeah all I wanted to show you was basically the fact that we have got these red lines as well so these are the thirds so if I was to just expand this out to here then this is a square and then we could just have if we just got two guests obviously if you've got one other person then you could just use the half one there's not a lot to this I feel like I'm just going overboard a little bit but it's just to point out how quickly you can make a series of overlays that don't require you to have any graphical overlays at all it's just all done in Ecamm and all you need is this one template which I'll be leaving a link to for you to download and then you've got an easy way to make a set of nice looking well proportioned scenes in Ecamm Live now what I'm also thinking about doing is creating a few of these as profiles and then you just be able to actually just download the whole profile instead not quite got that spacing right I was a bit trigger happy on copying that because it wasn't quite aligned with the red lines there was it he was a couple of pixels off so let's have a look at that again and we turn that background off obviously it could just be on my my image background instead and let me come on to my full screen so you get the full effect so there you go I've got my image background and I can just cycle up through my different scenes like that or I can actually toggle on my my little animated one and then there we go we've got our scenes all set up like that so that is all I wanted to show you I should have created a little end scene in this really shouldn't I so I haven't got an end scene today so that is all I've got to show you but yeah I will leave a link down below to a way you can get that you just need to go to my website and then there will be a little thing for you to click to download the file and then yet just drag it in and add in whatever background you want and use it to your heart's content and if you find it useful or if you found any layout formats that should be included in it then do let me know in the comments as well so if you think that's all very well but what about this or that then do let me know about those in the comments as well always if you found it useful then leave a like and subscribe if you haven't already and do leave a comment I really love getting comments it's one of the joys of making these videos is getting all the feedback from everyone so that's all for me there are great more great videos coming up right now though so there will be somewhere in fact I can just choose can't I where they're going to be where should they be let me think I'll put a playlist up here and I'll put a video up here and I'll put a subscribe button there let's see if I can actually do that now so have a great day and yeah there we go