 If you are interested in using Ecammalive's interview mode, either as a host or a guest, then stick around because I'll be diving into how to do that from both sides of the equation in this video. Hello and welcome to Take One Tech. My name's Alec and in this video, we're gonna be diving into interview mode in Ecammalive. And if you didn't know exactly what that was, well, as part of the Ecammalive Pro level subscription, you do get interview mode. And that basically allows you to bring in up to four guests into your live streams or your recorded productions. And you simply send out a link and they get to join in the conversation with you and you can add them in just as I'll show you shortly as basically another camera source. So the thing is, if you are a host, then there's obviously things that you need to do to set this up. But if you are a guest, the first time you do it, it might be a little bit daunting. I know it was for me, when I joined at somebody's live stream for the first time and they'd sent out the link and I clicked the link, I didn't really know what to expect. We're probably all familiar with things like Zoom and Teams and Skype or any other things where you kind of know what you're to expect when you click a join link. Whereas with this, it might be completely new to you and it might be something that actually puts people off clicking the link because they don't know what to expect. Are they gonna go straight into the production? Are they gonna get to choose their camera and things like that? Well, this video will answer all of those questions, hopefully, as well as all of the ones that you're gonna have as a host as well. So let's start with things from the host side and the things that you will need to set up first of all. As I've said, it is something that is available on the Pro Ecam Live subscription level. So there are two levels of subscription and this is on the higher level. So the basic plan doesn't have interview mode. But if you are on the Pro level, if I come into my demo mode, then we can activate interview mode. Either come up to the window at the top, window menu and then come down to interview and that will open up the little panel or from the main sort of preview window here we've got, then you can click on this little one that looks like two people and that will bring up the interview mode panel. Now I should have actually switched this off because when you click it for the very first time, it will be toggled off. So this is where you can switch it on and off and you just need to click the little toggle switch to turn it on. And here you can see I mentioned you get to 20 hours a month with the pro plan of interview mode. And here it says I've got 16 hours remaining at the moment. So that's where you'll know how many hours of interview time you've got remaining. And there is a link basically that you send out to people or you give to people who you want to join. And so you just click on here and it will copy that link. Now what you can do is you can also, if you've got a domain and you want to remap the link to make it easier to remember because the link is a join.ecamlive slash and then a series of numbers and letters. So if you want to make it more memorable, you could actually do domain forwarding and forward your URL forwarding rather to forward our URL to your interview link. So I have takeonetech.live slash join and that is the link to join in my live streams. So before I actually go and show you how to use this from the other side I will also just run through some other settings. So if we come into the preferences in ecamlive and here we've got some interview preferences. So we've got all these different sections at the top or we've got one specifically for interview here. So if we come and have a look at these most of these are the default settings by the way but I'll just run through them anyway. So the first one is when somebody actually clicks your link and goes through the process of getting themselves set up on their end and dials in then do they dial in? Not sure. But anyway, when they click to join then it will play a ring chime on your side. So you want that obviously just to let you know that somebody's calling otherwise there'll be nobody will know they're there. The next thing is auto answer guests. Now this is off by default and I would recommend leaving it off because it's basically just leaving the door of your house open. You don't want people gate crashing your productions if you're not ready to receive them. So definitely leave that off so that you get to see that somebody's calling and decide whether you want to let them in or not. Next one is send guests to the green room. So that's a virtual green room with virtual tea and coffee and virtual cakes. That means that when they join they're not going to come straight into your production they're going to be in this little sort of holding area a holding pen and you can decide when you're going to release them into your stream. So that's what the green room is but we'll see how all of this works on a practical level when I do the little demonstration afterwards. Next one is called musician mode and this says turn off audio processing for guests. So when it is unchecked then audio processing is on but when you check it on then audio processing is off. Does that make sense? Because basically as a default you have some audio processing that goes on that e-cam live does so that basically it stops any echo so if the guests are not wearing headphones for example then the e-cam live itself will do the sort of it's called mix minus where it's basically listening for your sound coming back over your guest speakers and then it's removing that from the signal that they're sending back over their microphone. So that sort of echo cancellation is quite important if you don't know the audio setup that your guests have got. But there may be times when you want to turn that audio processing off because you know that they've got a good signal on their end and they're all set up for it properly and perhaps you don't want to have any sort of distortion or anything like that going on with the audio and I guess that's why they call it musician mode but just note it does give you a little bit of a description here. This will use a higher bit rate and also it says note that since the guests echo cancellation will be disabled as I've just mentioned, headphones must be used. So definitely if you're going to ever have this one toggled on, so audio processing is off then they've got to be wearing headphones. Otherwise you'll get this sort of feedback loop. It also says a Chrome browser is required for this and also on the desktop. So people can join from their mobile phones just as easily as they can from the desktop but if you're going to have this one toggled on they need to be on the desktop in Google Chrome. Next one is the guest web interface defaults to dark mode. Now I always just used to force that on people because I like to force my opinions on people and I think dark mode is the best. I'm just kidding. But Doc Grock actually had a great point about this which is the reason why you would want to force dark mode onto the viewer's browser is because otherwise if you have a bright white screen then it might affect the lighting. You might find that there's a lot of glare in their face and it might just affect the picture. So having a sort of dark screen is going to be much better if they've got otherwise got good lighting. So that is the reason why you may want to toggle that one on not just to force your dark mode opinions on people. So the next one down is guest web interface displays comments and view account. So I leave that one on so that the guest can also see comments and the view account as it says there. But then you could choose to have that one off if you thought it may be distracting or if the guest wasn't going to be a part of that for some reason, I don't know. I'll leave that for you to decide. I just leave it on. The next one is lower music and sound effect for guests when in off air mode. Now off air mode is basically defined as if I look over at my sound levels panel over here you can see that I've got my own sound level here but then I've also got the interview sound level. So that's the sound that's coming over anybody who's joined on interview mode. And basically off air mode is defined as any time where the guest is muted. Muted as well. And the reason why you would have that is basically if you think about maybe you're doing a live stream something like that and the live stream is about to start and you've got guests in that are waiting and that are there ready to go but you've got some music playing out or maybe you're playing a movie or something like that. So off air mode is defined as when you are both muted and what it will basically do is it won't affect the volume of everything that's going out in the stream but on your guest's side they will hear the output volume reduced for any music or movie sounds or anything like that so that they can basically hear you better. One thing to note though is it doesn't actually at the moment work both ways. So you will still hear the full sound levels that are going out in the stream and there won't be any audio ducking which is where they sort of reducing the volume of the music so that you can hear your guest. It has been submitted a number of times as a feature request but it's one of those things that depends on how many people want it really but having that sort of two way may be useful but it's not currently available so just in case you were wondering. The next thing down is the guest view so this is basically what your guest is going to see on their end when they are in the call and we'll see how this is gonna work in a moment when I do the little demo of somebody joining the call but basically this is where you choose what they see. So I have this set as broadcast and it is the default and that means that basically they're going to see whatever you are putting out into your production and so that seems logical really doesn't it because you're gonna want them to see what's going on you're gonna want them to see when they may be spotlighted so they're sort of full screen or something like that or maybe when there's other guests talking or things like that that are spotlighted you want them to be a part of the sort of overall production and be able to see what's going on I would have thought but you can also have it to be just the host camera so that basically they're only seeing you. Now I am actually gonna change it to that just for today for this demonstration and the reason is I don't want there to be a sort of infinite loop of me showing you somebody looking at me showing you something else if you see what I mean. So I'm gonna change that to host camera for now but it should become quite clear what we're looking at in the end when I do the demo. So I nearly tripped over my words then. So let's just close the preferences for now and what I'm gonna do now is I'm actually gonna go over to my guest computer so I'll come out of demo mode here and then I'll go over to my guest computer so this is now basically, I'm all ready to go on a computer where I've put in my little shortcut link so that's takeonetech.live.join and when I click the enter or return you can see how it's changed to a guest.ecamlive. And then a series of letters and numbers that is my handy code for joining my productions and here you can see that it is loaded up my camera and my microphone. Now it will default to whatever you've last used but as you can see I can choose any camera that I've currently got. So it's basically, it's just like you would have in Zoom or any other application like that you can basically choose any of the system cameras. So this is me on my little Logitech that I've got plugged in to my laptop. So there's where you can set the camera and then you can also just as easily set the microphone. So if you are using something like, it says for getting the name of it, loopback. For example, if you use that with Zoom and things like that then you can set that up with, you can have a loopback set up for Chrome or something like that so that you could have a virtual device. In fact, I beg your pardon, not necessarily loopback. It would be more something like audio hijack. I mean, if you've got a signal processing and things like that going on. So for example, in here I have a processed signal from my short MV7 so that I could select although my short MV7s now moves over to my new computer. So I'll just leave it as the default internal microphone although I would obviously strongly recommend that you avoid using those or tell your guests to avoid using those if at all possible. But I've actually turned the muted it internally so that we don't get any feedback. But hopefully now you can basically see what the interface is looking like for the guest. So here we go. If I scroll down a little bit, you can also put your name in. So I've entered my name as mini me. And it will remember all of these settings as well for next time you join if you haven't closed down your browser window. And then you can click on join and so you'll see it is connecting. Now that little sound which you may have heard if I come back into demo mode it's now saying that I've got a guest joining. So here you can see mini me is joining. So what I'll do is if I just, you can see obviously this window in the middle is still what's going on on my other laptop. And so from here, you can see that we've got, it says that we're connecting and then it's also got my sort of camera output. So you can see what the view is that is gonna go out. You can also see just down here by the way that there is a toggle for light and dark. In fact, I'm not showing you what it is. My mouse wasn't moving was it? So just down in this bottom corner we've got a little toggle for light and dark if the guest wanted to change that. But coming back to the demo mode. So mini me is joining. So if I click on the answer or decline so this is why you want to not allow people to auto join because if you get the call unexpectedly and you don't want it then you can just reject it but I'll let him in, shall I? He seems like a nice enough chap to me. So there we go. Now we have got the guest is in the green room. Now you can see it on this monitor here but that's because you're obviously looking at what mini me is seeing. So if I just go back to that view for a moment. So here we can see that now the guest can see my view as the host, my camera because remember I selected that they could see my camera feed and we've still got my image there and you can see that mute sign and that is because that's to denote that the host has muted them or that they are muted because they are in the green room. So let me just come back to this scene and if I come into my screen sharing once again and I'll just change out of that one for a moment just so that we don't get confused by all of these different things. So now the guest is sitting there in the green room. You can add them into your production by clicking one of these buttons and either you can solo them. So that means basically they're gonna go straight into full screen and they'll be, yeah, oops, excuse me, the mic stand, there'll be a soloed on the screen. But what I'm gonna do actually is first of all I'm gonna create a completely new scene. So I'll create a new empty scene and I'm gonna put the source as a camera. So there you go. Now you can see me in green screen in all my glory. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change my background just so that we don't get confused by all of these green screens. So what's today's, it's the wrong one. I can't do two things at once. I can't click and think at the same time. So now I want to change back to my normal background. There we go, so we don't get confused. So the one that you see, if you see Alec with a green screen that is my laptop. And if you see me with this artificial background then that's me on my main computer. So what you can see here as well is that I've currently been added into the camera switcher. So we've got my Canon camera here and the guest is showing there. So what I could do is I could simply add the guest like this by clicking solo. And now they've come straight into full screen or I could add them left, which basically is, in fact, what I need to do now is I'd need to come back to this mode. If I click on add left, then it's gonna put them side by side with me. So if I just come out of this again and I'll just click close down that one or I could add right and they will appear on the right side. So this is a simple way to add the guest in. Now this is only going to work actually if you do have the source as being the camera source. So that is when you've got your source as camera. This is getting a bit weird to see two of me speaking and I'm sure one of me is more than enough anyway, if not too much. So yeah, if you've got your source as the camera then you can just basically add them in like that. But what you can also do is if you've got multiple guests you can also assign them to a guest number. So I could assign guests one, two, three, and four. So if I assign this as guest one now you can see that on the camera switcher it's actually changed to guest one. And what that means is if you want to add in the guests as a camera overlay, for example, just as you would do if you were adding your own camera overlays you could click the little plus button to get a camera overlay and then you could come to the little thing here to select the camera. And instead of my Canon camera I could click this little down here and down arrow rather and then select guest one, mini me. And there you go, you can do all of the things that you could do with another a normal camera view basically so we could change the look and everything like that. So you could have your guests over here if you wanted. So that is how you basically add in your guests and what I should just do now as well if I come out of demo mode for a moment and I'll go back to the view. So you should now be able to see what my guest is seeing. So as the guest you are basically, if you remember that I had it set so that it was gonna show my camera view. So this is what the guest is seeing. They are seeing me and then they're seeing their own picture there. But if I just quickly while this is running I'm just gonna toggle back to that default setting in Ecam Live for where instead of seeing the host camera they're gonna see the broadcast and this is where we're gonna get this infinite loop. So if I click broadcast now you can see how they're now seeing the production. So this is how most people would want to run it where basically your guest is seeing the production that you are putting out. So I hope that makes sense. So now let me show you how you can use this if I just come out of this mode for a moment come back to this one. And in fact, let me go back to that other scene. In fact, no, I'm very indecisive today. Let me come back into demo mode and I'm gonna show you how basically you can set up different scenes and just add in all of these cameras. So let me just close this one down for a moment and what I'll do is I'll show you some scenes that I set up for when I have a call in. So if I come to this scene for example so this is basically I've got a scene and I've got these two different cameras and you can see that I've just basically set this up and that is guest one. And now the reason why there's this big gap at the bottom is because what I usually do is I usually have a lower third that basically has my join link. So this is what I use on my live streams. It has a space for my lower third with my join link. And that's my new moniker, by the way, recovering perfectionist, look out for t-shirts and hats coming to a merch store near you soon. So then I've got a space underneath for comments. So if you are doing something where you're having a call in or something like that then just sort of bear in mind the layouts of these so that you do have space for things like comments and stuff like that. So I can also obviously have more guests so we can have up to four guests. So I've created another couple of scenes. So I've got this one. So if you have a guest two and if I come over to the demo mode here and if I assign to guest two instead then you'll see that I basically switch over to the guest two position and I could have a four guest setup as well. I won't add four of me and that's far too much for anyone to stomach I think. And then also because you've got five guests you could actually have a five guest setup. So in that case there'll be no need to have this on. Although this one actually doesn't leave much room for comments, does it? But I'm guessing if we've got five people on then there may not be time to actually talk about too many comments. So I'll probably need to edit this one though with hindsight. So there we go, that is the setup. So how do you set up one of these scenes? Well, let's go through the process of how to do that, shall we? Because it is pretty straightforward really. If you know how to add in scenes and things like that then there's nothing particularly new here. Still tripping over my words. So I'll start with an empty scene. I'm gonna assign this guest back to guest number one. And basically let me just call this scene two up. There we go. So just rename the scene. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add in a camera. So we come down to this area here and we just click on the camera overlay. So there we go. I've got my initial scene and my initial camera. And I'm gonna go and change this to be a green screen and change my backdrop just so that we're not confused. And you can see that there we go, that's my normal thing. And you can basically do anything with this that you can do with any other scenes. Obviously, I'm sure you all know how to do this by now. So I'll just change that to, let's say custom so that we can make it any shape or size we want. And then you can obviously zoom and adjust these. And I will show you how this is important when it comes to adding in your guests as well. Now I'm gonna add another camera. So I'll just click on here or I could just do option and drag one across. And if you do option and drag it across, then it's gonna just make sure that it's the same size which may or may not be helpful. So sorry, I've just got my ProMouse drawing tool there. I've been talking about ProMouse and how it's great and I have no issues with it. And it's just obviously not quite set up right on my computer at the moment. So just started drawing on my screen of mind. So there we go. Now I've got another box the same size. So I can click here and I can change that to, let me just do guests too because obviously you can set all of these up in advance. This is the point you can set up all of your scenes that you're gonna want with however many guests that you may have. And I've just set up, I've never actually had five guests on my four guests on my live stream but I've still made the scenes for them already anyway. So you just add that in as guest one, two, three or four. And then when you come to actually add your guests in, then they will just magically appear there like that. So then you can obviously make whatever overlays you want to make. But let's just say that one of your guests joins and they are maybe sort of sitting like this. They're sitting in completely the wrong place and they're off to one side or something like that or they're not centered. Just bear in mind that what you can do is if you come over to the camera settings, you can actually change those just as you could for another camera. So you could come over here and I could change the zoom and pan. So maybe I would want to, I don't want to zoom out but maybe don't really want to zoom in either. But the point is you can actually move the camera around. So in fact, let me just move this out of the way a little bit, move it back slightly. So say I wanted to just adjust this picture. The trouble is the camera is pretty well placed really. So I hope I'm proving the point that you can actually make some edits. The other things that you can do is you can also adjust the colors as well. So if you want to change the brightness, we can change the brightness. So if they are in a dark room, you can adjust that from here. You can also adjust the temperature and things like that or the tint and you can apply LUTs and so on or if you want to mirror the camera or whatever. So sometimes people come in depending on where they're set up they might actually have a mirrored feed coming out to you. So writings backwards in the background and things like that. So you could actually mirror that for them. And so yeah, you've basically got all of the camera controls that you would have if you were on any other camera that you could have in Ecamm Live. So that is basically how it's gonna look from the guests standpoint and from the hosts standpoint. But let me just show you one other thing which I think I may have neglected to cover is basically if you are in the guest view. So let me just change this back because it does get confusing when you have this sort of infinite loop. So I'm gonna change this back so that I'm just giving my host camera back to the guest. And we're now looking at what the guest is seeing on their screen. So I'm gonna come down here as well and you have got the option here of, where's my mouse gone? You have got the option here of changing the settings. So if at any point you do need to change the settings of your camera then you can always change those in here. So if you need to change the camera or change the microphone or something like that then you can do that in here but I'm just gonna click done. And then also you can also click the mute button. So if you want to mute yourself then you can do that from within the interface itself there as well. And when you're ready to hang up then you can just click the hang up button. Or alternatively, if you are the host then if I come back to my screen sharing one second, this one, my demo mode then you can also hang up there as well. Now incidentally, when you are doing a live stream when you end the live stream the guest is still connected. So they haven't been booted off. They don't automatically get cut off when the stream ends. So that means that if you have got stuff that you want to talk through or you want to have a little summing up or whatever after the stream's finished or chat about how it went then there will still be there and you still will be able to talk to them. And the same things will apply so they'll be able to see whatever you've got that setting as. So if you want to change it to be that they can see you or if you've got an end scene for example and the broadcast is finished then if you remain on that end scene then they may well just be only getting that back although you'll be able to see them in this little preview window. So just bear in mind that once you've ended the broadcast and you maybe have like an end scene or something like that you may want to just change back to one so that they can actually see you when you have that sort of final conversation and sign off. So I think I've more or less covered it but if anybody has got any questions about interview mode or has got anything that any unanswered questions that I haven't covered in here more to the point then do let me know and if you've had any issues with it that haven't been addressed in here then let me know as well and down in the comments because it all helps not just me to learn and do a better job of providing information but also there may be other people who are having these issues as well and it could help them. And while you're down in the comments obviously don't forget to like and subscribe and turn on notifications so that you get alerted whenever I make any more videos. I've got a ton of Ecam Live videos so I will leave a link to all of my Ecam Live playlist over on the right hand side. So do check out those and in the meantime, have a great day.