 In this video, we're going to take a look at the new features that have been added to the Stream Deck in version 5.3 of the software that was just released. So whether you are using the Stream Deck for live streaming or productivity in general, you're really going to love these new features. So let's jump in and take a look. First off though, we do actually need to get the update, don't we? So how do we do that? Well, if you come over to your app, your Stream Deck app, and then click on the little cog wheel just up at the top here. And then from the preferences screen, what you need to do is just click on that check for updates button. If you are not on 5.3.anythings or any previous versions, just click on the check for updates and you'll see that there is an update available. Go through the update process and update the Stream Deck. But we're still not quite ready to go because what you need to do then after you have done the update is go back into that same panel again. And what you'll notice is there is now also a firmware update, I should say, available. So just go in and click that one and that will update the firmware on your device. So let's have a look then at these new features, shall we, now that we're all up to date. So I'm going to start with some that are actually pretty irrelevant to me and that is OBS Studio Integration 2.0 as they're calling it. So they've basically redone the OBS plugin for Stream Deck and they've added in 10 new actions. And those are, cunningly, I've got them here to pop up on the screen for you. So first is the ability to pause and resume an active recording, turn on or off a replay buffer. The next one is save the active replay buffer. By the way, these are relevant to me because I use Ecamm Live. One feature request for Ecamm Live has been those replays. So maybe I should note these down as a feature request for Ecamm. The next is switch scene collections. Next is play, pause, restart and so on for the media controls for a media source that you've got in OBS Studio Mode. Toggle this on and off, review to program. So send the sort of preview scene to the program window, I guess a bit like we've got preview mode in Ecamm Live. And then filter, turn on or off a filter that you've got applied to a particular source or whatever it happens to be. Take a screenshot of the current preview and finally switch transition and set a duration. So that is what those updates are for specifically for the OBS plugin. Now I should just say, if you are using OBS and you're on a Mac, then I wonder, have you heard about Ecamm Live? I've just mentioned it enough times. Ecamm Live is basically live production software built purely for the Mac and it is very Mac-like in its implementation. I did go down the OBS route by the way when I first started out looking to create this type of video. I pulled out all of the hair on my head and then finally found Ecamm and everything has been absolute bliss ever since. Hair still hasn't grown back, but I'm a lot happier now that I've found Ecamm. You can get a free trial of it as I say, if you are familiar with OBS it does most of the things that OBS can do and a lot of things that OBS can't do as well, you can get a free trial at takeonetech.io.ecamm. And if you really like it then I've even got a whole masterclass all about it that you can find in the description as well. But with that said, let's get back to some of these features shall we? So back to the updates and the next new feature is device rotation. So this is something that you'll find in the settings if I come back over here, clicking on the cogwheel then we've got this new little option just here. This is in the general device settings where you can set brightness, screensaver, all that kind of stuff. So we've now got this extra field here which is device rotation. And what that's going to do, or sorry device orientation, what that's going to do is just rotate the button. So if you think about the way that you use Stream Deck, I've got mine here and I've got it in this orientation logo at the top with the text the right way round. But maybe you want to have this sort of like tilt turned sideways off to the side of your computer off to the side of your keyboard or something like that. There's any number of reasons why you might want to have this in different orientations, cable routing and things like that. Well now you can do that. And if I just come back over to here momentarily, I can come to this device orientation and basically you can choose standard 90 degrees, 180 or 270. So if I come back over to my device, if I change the device orientation 90 degrees, what you'll see is all of these icons will rotate by 90 degrees. They stay in exactly the same places on the device, or exactly the same place on the device but they've just literally rotated the icons. If I want to turn them upside down, maybe this is a good one to look at the house for my home icon. There it's upside down now. Turn it to 270 degrees and then finally back to normal. So it's just rotating the way that the icons appear on the keys. Now if I come back over to the Stream Deck app itself, you'll see that there's nothing that actually happens in the app. So if I come over here and I change this to 90 degrees, it hasn't actually changed anything on the device, in the app I should say itself, it's only changing it on the device. So that is quite a nice little feature there. The next one is the ability to resize the property inspector area on the app. And what is the property inspector area? You may also ask, well it's this whole area down here, down at the bottom of the device where you add in an action and you've got this area here that you can edit the settings. So if I was to come down and find something, there's one down here that I happen to know is, that's quite a lot of information in it, the custom shortcut for the zoom plugin. And what you'll see is in a moment, there you go. It's now got this information and settings related to that particular action. But what you can see is we've got this little scroll bar here. So that just sort of be able to move down to see the rest of the details and the information in there. Previously, the size of this window down here was always fixed and as we resize the window of the app, it was always this area up in the top that would be the one that got bigger or smaller. Well now what we can do is if I just make this window a bit bigger, what I can do is I can just grab this centre bar. I mean it's something that I went to try immediately when I first started using the stream deck because you just feel like it should be able to do it. Well now it can. So now you can see how I've resized that window. It's all fitting on our screen here nicely. And you can see that now we can see all of the information for that plugin. So just a little thing in terms of functionality, but it does actually make it a lot more usable because you don't have to worry about these scroll bars and things like that. So a nice little extra little bit of functionality that's been added in there. So moving down the list, the next up is integration and support for the Corsair Voyager laptop. Why have they got integration for a laptop by a company called Corsair? Well in case you weren't aware, Corsair actually own Elgato. Corsair make a whole range of PC streaming and gaming gear. They make PCs. They also make components and various different things like that. And they actually own a number of different companies of which Elgato is one. And the Corsair Voyager, in fact I can even show you, the Corsair Voyager A1600 features a built-in macro bar right at the top. You can just sort of see it over there. In fact if I scroll down here, this is it. So where you can see between the sort of base and the screen, you've got this line of keys here. Well these are basically all programmable keys just like you would have on a stream deck. He says knocking his stream deck over. And with those basically you can program those now in the stream decks app. So what you would do is if you are owning one of these laptops, you would just come into your stream deck app and you would see that the Voyager would appear as the device name. So just as you can select the device in the stream deck app. So if I come over here, you can see here we've got the different devices. So stream deck mobile, stream deck pedal, stream deck XL. So Voyager would just appear in there as one of those devices. And then you could just use the same familiar interface drag and drop to add your actions to your course at Voyager laptop. So again, I'm sure that's going to be really welcome for people who use those devices. Not one that I'm going to use, but nevertheless. Nice little addition. The next new feature though is custom multi-action delay. Not to be confused with multi-action delay actions. Let me explain. Perhaps if I come over here and I delete this action I've just created, if we want to create a multi-action, this enables you to basically string together a series of different actions in anything that you've got from the plugins. You can just chain them all together. There's two ways you can do this. You can either come into the stream deck and you can select multi-action and you can drag it across just like that. But actually there is a shortcut for multi-actions which is just right click and create multi-action there. Once you've created the multi-action, then you just click on this little arrow here to go into edit it. And now we basically just drag on any actions that we want to go there. So why might you want to do that? Lots of reasons you might have it opening an app and then opening a series of documents or various other different things. Lots of use cases for this. One that you might do is something like a stinger transition in Ecamm Live for example. So just to use that as an example, I do have a little stinger transition which is something like this. You can always have that pop up. And then whilst it is covering the screen, sneakily switch over to a different scene to give you some sort of effect like this so that when you come back, I'm back in this scene. So that is what it's used for. The way that you'd program that into a button so that it does those two things at once, the stinger triggering and then the transition to the next scene is, and this is by the way not the new feature. This is the way to use the built-in delay. So what we would do is I'd come into Ecamm Live. First of all, I'm going to play an animation which is my stinger animation. So from here, I'm going to select it. It's just thinking for a moment. There we go. It's actually taking that as a default, the first one up there. And then if I go to run scene and then I select the scene that I want as this main scene from all of my scenes. And now if I was to trigger this transition what might happen is because there's absolutely no delay in them, it's sort of the timing of it might all be slightly off, although actually I have to say it did work kind of well. But let me just go back here for a second. What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you what the sort of traditional delay that you might have added in would be. So in the stream deck plug-in, you've got this delay action. This only appears by the way when you are in multi-action. So you won't even see this as an option if you are just creating a regular action. But if I just drag this across here we might want to add in a bit of a delay. And the way that you specify delay in here is in terms of milliseconds. If I wanted half a second delay I would just type 500 in there and then, as I say it was working pretty well before, wasn't it? But that now after 500 milliseconds is switching the scene after starting that animation. So that's kind of how the delay works in there. But the thing is there is actually a sort of baked in delay in stream deck. And from all of the previous versions from 5.2 backwards there was always a 200 millisecond delay between any actions. So if you didn't actually want any delay in here and you just got a series of things that you wanted to trigger pretty much all at once it was impossible to do that because you'd got this 200 millisecond delay sort of baked into it. So even without the delay there was probably 200 milliseconds between this one and this one which is actually why this kind of just happened to work that way. But let's say you were doing something where you didn't want any delay that could sometimes cause a few issues. So what they've done now is they've actually added in the ability to adjust the built in delay if that makes sense. And the way that you do that is just down here. You've now got this extra little icon this one here, the customized delays and it allows you to select two different delays here. The first one is what they call the virtual key press. That is if you imagine, you know, pressing a button you've got a whole series of of actions in here for each one imagine that you're just kind of virtually pressing a button to activate them. Well the virtual key press is the time from when the trigger is sent to the imaginary button popping back up. A bit of a weird metaphor I know but that you can now change the time from basically 100 milliseconds down to one millisecond. So that is kind of like the time of like pressing the button and it triggering the action. One thing to bear in mind with this is in some of these cases you could run into issues where basically you're trying to do it too quick. Certainly when you're sort of chaining things together you might have things where apps need a certain amount of time to react to them. So actually, you know, it's not a case of well let's just set all of these to the lowest possible number and then everything will just happen quicker. There may be a bit of fine tuning that needs to go on here. Some things it may actually kind of stop the chain of events from happening. So there's not going to be sort of one size fits all for this. The next one here that we've got is the time between actions. So this again can be between one millisecond and 100 milliseconds. The default for these is basically exactly as it was in version 5.2 and previously. So this is set to the virtual button press or virtual key press is 100 milliseconds and the time between actions is 100 milliseconds given us that 200 milliseconds that there was always before. 200 milliseconds being 0.2 of a second if that puts it into a bit more context for you. But what we can do is we can now actually take this both of these down to get a theoretical minimum time between actions of two milliseconds. One for the virtual key press and one for the time between actions. So again not necessarily relevant to this particular use case here that I've got but with anything else where you're kind of stringing actions together something to play with. This is not going to replace that delay because obviously the maximum that we can get up to is 200 milliseconds. Whereas with the delay you can see that the default for that if I just drag it in the default here that it puts in is 1000 milliseconds being a second but we could equally do here if I'm doing my outro on YouTube then I would set that to 20,000 milliseconds which gives me that 20 second countdown to the end with my end scene and various different excitement. So that is these delays. If that is a little bit tricky to get your head around then if you haven't run into any issues with this before and timings of things and you haven't noticed that there's any this is taking too long or something like that it's almost something you don't need to worry about but if there are some things where you wished things could actually trigger closer together and they just can't because of this 200 milliseconds this is where this is going to help you. So I hope that kind of explains it maybe a little bit confusing having three different delays but I hope not. Now if you are relatively new to the stream deck and maybe you're not using multi-action features or indeed many of the other great features of stream deck then it may be that you might want to check out my beginners guide to stream deck and that is coming up right now as is my playlist for stream deck in general. So maybe check out those videos and I'll see you in there.