 Ecam live version for beta one has just been released, and it is a massive update with some great new features, some of which we were expecting and some of which are a nice surprise and a couple that I'm not too keen on to be honest, but we'll come on to those in a little moment. First of all, though, I thought we'd just have a look at the main interface straight away and see what we can notice that is different. The first thing that I'll point out is that these buttons down the right hand side, we've now got an extra button at the top here, which is to show and hide the window controls. And when you click it for the first time, you'll get a little pop up that says if you want to get these controls back, you can press the function key, and when you press the function key, then the controls pop back again. Incidentally, this is not a new feature in itself. We've always had that in the window menu. So it is down here, hide main window controls. And we did have a keyboard shortcut for that that you can use to toggle it on and off. It's also available as a stream deck action. That's again, something that we've had since I think the previous update that was added in as a stream deck action. The reason I'm mentioning that is because the way that you get these controls back once they've disappeared is to press the function key. Now, I know that there is some issues with some keyboards that either don't have a function key or it doesn't function the way the function key should. I think that that is the case with some of the Logitech keyboards. So just bear in mind that if it disappears and you don't know how to get it back, you can always do it from this window menu. So if you if you suddenly feel like you're lost, you can't get it back, just come up here. So the other thing that has changed about the interface is rather than something being added, it's something that has been taken away. And that is down here at the bottom corner where previously you could select between either recording or streaming. And then you could also select the streaming destination. And if you were selecting a streaming destination that you weren't logged into, then you would get instead of a record button. There would be a little login sign here where you would enter your credentials to add that into that account to your e-cam. And then this would change to a go live button. There's been a few different changes around here. So I'll come on to why those are in a moment. So we'll we'll understand in a moment why that's disappeared. But let's have a look at something else that's been added, though, which is up here. And at the moment, it says record only. So in this little drop down, you can choose which ones of these you want to toggle on either streaming, recording or virtual cam. So you may want to actually just stream and not be recording or have it recording and not streaming, which is often, you know, the one that I would use. But what they've also added in is the virtual camera option here as well. And the reason why this is quite useful is because sometimes you might be neither streaming nor recording. And by toggling off the record, it means that you are only using the virtual cam. And so anything related to recording and streaming has just gone from the screen. So the majority of time I'm using e-cam, I'm actually using it to go into Zoom or Teams or something like that. So I don't actually need to have the record button on or the stream button on either for for much of that. So that just gives you a way to hide that. But also you can then toggle the virtual camera on and off itself from here as well. Previously, this would have been done from the output menu and the virtual cam and virtual mic are down here. When they are on, you'll notice that we have these little icons just up in the top left corner to show you that they're on. Well, now you can just toggle them off from there. Incidentally, it says virtual cam, but it does just toggle on and off both the virtual cam and the virtual mic as well. So that's just something to be aware of. But if I come back to add in streaming, you'll see what's now changed with some of the other elements on screen. So if I activate streaming, then what you'll see down here is if you haven't got any streams scheduled on any of the accounts that are linked to your e-cam account, then you will just only see this new button. And that is where we're going to create a new stream. And if I just click on that, let's just assume we're going to go through that process. We haven't got anything scheduled. Then this is the new way to schedule streams directly from within e-cam. We did have a scheduling box before, but it's just now activated by clicking on this new. And there's some other obvious changes that we'll get to in a moment as well. So here we can select the destination of any destination that we've got linked to the account. The way that we add in those destinations now, rather than that little login button at the bottom of the screen that we used to use before, it's all done in preferences. So I'll come on to that in a little while. But here you would enter the, as I say, the destination, enter the title, the description, whether it's public or unlisted, some additional platform options. So the latency and things like that. And then also you could just go live now, or it could be scheduled. So if you click go live now, obviously all of that disappears. But if you click on a schedule, then you can pick a specific time and add a thumbnail and things like that. Now what you'll also notice is it's got a little indicator down here telling you what the required speed is. So that is useful to know what your required bandwidth is going to be in terms of the upload speed. And why is that important for them to show you that? Well, because now it has got, we need a drumroll really, don't we? But they have now added in the multi-streaming feature. And the way that you activate that is simply by coming up to the top here, we've now got this multi-streaming button. And all we do now is instead of just going to one destination, we can just click this little drop down and add in any other destinations that we want to add. And notice as I add in more destinations, then the required speed down here is also increasing. Because whereas with multi-streaming using a service like restream.io, with those services, you are streaming a single stream from your computer to that service. And then they are dealing with all the bandwidth to actually stream it out to all of your other destinations. With this one, you are actually streaming from your computer individual streams to all of the different destinations. And so that is something that you do need to be aware of. If you want to stream to lots of different places, you need to know that you've got the bandwidth. Fortunately, they have got something built in to help you understand if you have got the capability to do it. That's all in preferences. We'll be coming to that in a little while as well. I should mention that this is a pro feature. So the multi-streaming is something that you will require the pro plan for. And that will give you up to 10 streaming destinations that you can stream to concurrently. You can have more than that in your list, but only 10 that you can actually stream to at one time, which I think is probably maybe about eight or nine too many in fact. But in any case here, you can just click on add and as I say, just add whichever new destinations that you want. And as I've said, you'll see that the required speed just down here is increasing. Once you have added in everything that you want to add and add in any different platform options, and if you've got any that are related to any of the other platforms, then you can see that these additional options will appear down here for each platform that you are streaming to. But assuming that you have then scheduled something from here, or you might have scheduled it in the platforms themselves, of course, then what you'll see is we've got this now this upcoming button. And as I say, if you've got nothing scheduled, this won't be there. But if you have got something scheduled, then clicking on this will give you a list of just everything that you have got scheduled. You will then select the particular live stream that you want to stream to. Very similar to how it used to be before with the little drop down text in the bottom, except now you do actually get the full thumbnail and a lot more information there. And then assuming that you were within a 15 minute window of the start time, you would then just be able to click the button down here to go live. Now I mentioned that we can adjust these destinations or add more destinations in the preferences. So let's have a little look at exactly how we do that. So here we are in the account preferences. There's been a couple of new tabs added here. So first of all, we've now got the destinations tab just up here. But then we've also got this other tab here called remote control. We'll come onto that in a little while. But if we just bring up the old preferences, you'll notice that we've also just lost all of those different tab specific for platforms because that now has all been just incorporated into this destinations tab. So when you click on the destinations tab, you'll see a list of all of the different destinations that you've got. Now, whereas before, if you were linking, say, Facebook, you would just link your one Facebook account. And then when it came time to do your live stream, you would just go from the list and pick whichever group or page or whatever that you wanted to stream to. Now what you're going to do is you're going to actually add in all of those pages individually, because it may be that you want to stream, obviously, using the multi-streaming stream to multiple different pages. So rather than just having your sort of root account, if you like, and then selecting them at the time of streaming, you would just come and add in all of those different pages from here. And all you'll do is just click on New Destination, and then it will pop up a little window like this. And then you can just select Facebook, all of the other destinations, YouTube, Twitter, and so on. And then it will prompt you to go through, do the regular connection thing, and you can pick out the particular page or group or whatever that you want to stream to. So you can see in this case what I've got is I've got my regular Facebook page. I've also got my Facebook profile, my personal profile. But then I've also got the Ecam Live beta, Ecam Live community as separate locations there. What they've also got, of course, is the RTMP keys, which they had before. But now, obviously, with multi-streaming, we can have multiple different RTMP keys. And so you just come down at the very bottom of there, you can say to set an RTMP destination from there. And so I've got a couple of those in here as well. If you have got one of those, then you can actually come and edit this after the fact as well. So whereas any destinations like these, Facebook or LinkedIn, oh, and by the way, I mentioned about scheduling. You can now do LinkedIn scheduling directly in here, just as we looked at just a moment ago as well. I forgot to mention that at the time, but yet LinkedIn scheduling, you can now do as part of either a single stream or a multi-stream using that scheduling interface that I mentioned. But let's get back to this. The stream keys here for these RTMP ones, I'm not going to open this up because it'll reveal the key, but basically just click on this and you can edit it after the fact if that is something that you need to do. Now, I also mentioned about the whole issue of being able to have the right bandwidth to stream to all of these different locations and how these were going to basically add up. The more places you stream to at any given time, the more bandwidth you're going to need and specifically the upload speed. Well, what they've done is they've actually added in a speed test. So if I come over to the stream settings here, the stream tab, I've got something weird going on with my internet. Usually it's 100 meg up and down, but seems to be something dodgy going on just at the time of this demo. So nevertheless, you'll be able to still get the idea. What we've got now is this whole box down here, which is a built-in speed test. And what they've done is they show you the required speed for, in this case, one stream and it will tell you that it is this particular speed. But if you click the dropdown, you can select up to 10 and then you'll be able to see what speed that you require. You can't do a speed test whilst you are in the middle of a recording. So I can't really demo this, but there is this button here that says test again and then click on that and it will tell you your speed, as I say. That is something a little bit weird going on there for me at the moment. But you'll notice that it is actually telling me, no, you can't actually stream right now to these three destinations with this speed. So just come in here, test your speed, select the number of destinations that you're going to stream to and this will give you an idea of if you have got the bandwidth to handle it. So just something to be aware of and it's good that they've put that in there. If you're only ever going to be streaming to one or two destinations, you can obviously change that and just check that you have got the adequate bandwidth. Now I mentioned that there is an extra tab that's been added in whilst we're in preferences and that is the remote control tab. And this is where you can grant or deny access to any third-party apps that have control of ECAM in some way. So the obvious ones for this are Stream Deck and Loop Deck. There are other third-party apps that have some sort of hooks into ECAM if you want to allow that. And so this is where you can control that if you want to revoke the access at any point. I should mention that when you do go through the update process and perhaps it's a good time to actually say where to get the update from as well. If you are not on the beta program, you'll find a link in the description to the page to go and download it. If you're already an existing ECAM subscriber, there is no sort of barrier to trying out the beta. Just go and grab the download. It runs side by side with the regular version. So don't worry about having to choose between one or the other. And of course, if you are already on the beta, you probably know this already. If you've just started the beta up, like open it up, then it should just prompt you to download the new one. If it doesn't, then come into the ECAM Live beta menu and then just click on check for updates in here. When you do go through the update process, just coming back to Stream Deck and Loop Deck, what you will find is that you'll get prompted to grant access to Stream Deck, so to download a new plugin. This has just got a few slight improvements, no new actions or anything like that. And then you'll go and do the same for Loop Deck as well to update the Loop Deck plugin as well. Now, in terms of the Loop Deck, again, nothing much changed there, although they have now added in the ability to switch profiles, something we already did have in the Stream Deck, but now they've just added that as a Loop Deck action as well. So another couple of new features that have been added are relating to the Camera Effects window. So for this, I'm going to come into Live demo mode. And over here on the left-hand side, you can see that I've got the Camera Effects window. And it's down here at the bottom, so where you've got camera options. Previously, we did have the black and white. Well, now we've got the sepia tone as well, sepia, sepia, which one is it? I don't know, you tell me. And then also we've got the blur effect. Now, at first, when I saw this, I thought that it might be something that's going to blur out the background, because I know that that has been a feature request in a similar way that you can do with Zoom and things like that, where it just sort of figures out the background and blurs it. This isn't that. This is basically just to blur the entire camera feed. So you can see, as I move the slider, it adjusts the level of blur that you've got on the whole camera feed then. Let's now have a look at some changes to overlays. And first of all, let's start with some camera overlays. And if I come over to the main window again here, this little area, what I've got here is basically three different scenes. And the first one obviously is this blank one. But the second one is used to illustrate this point that now if you have got a camera that you've previously assigned to a camera overlay, and it's now no longer there, then this will now appear like this. So it'll say double click to pick a camera source. Previously, the overlay would just not appear at all, which wasn't really very helpful if the camera was missing. You wouldn't even be able to see where the overlay is. Whereas now you can still see the controls, like over here, but you can also just double click on this. And then you'll see the camera is currently blank, but I can come in here and just pick another camera that happens to be available. Nothing plugged into camera at the moment, but you get the idea. It's still showing up there as an option. So that is the first thing. Now, next up is relating to the guests that you have when you are in interview mode and how those show up. So usually what would happen when you had an overlay that you had assigned to a specific guest in e-cam. In fact, let's just come over here and I'll show you what I'm talking about. So coming back over to here, I've got this camera overlay. And then when you come in here and assign it to a guest, guest one, two, three, or four, previously it would show a silhouette. So something that looked a little bit like this. Now they've just removed the silhouette. Personally, I'm not sure that that's an improvement. I'm not sure of the idea behind that, whether it just means that if the guest doesn't turn up, then you don't have that appearing on your scene. But I thought that was quite convenient. And incidentally, it hasn't been removed from where you do have a scene set up full screen with a guest a bit like this. So it is only where you've got the overlay. But you do still see the outline and you will still see any border that had been assigned to it. And as you can see, it does still tell you guest number two. So perhaps I'm just being a little bit picky because you can still clearly see what the camera is assigned to. Now they've also made a change with countdown overlays. And if I come back into my demo mode and I'm going to start up a countdown overlay. So we've just gone into either in the little count overlays window or you can come up to here into overlays, new countdown overlay like that. And what they've done is they've added in the option to countdown to a specific time. Previously, we did have time and date, but you may just want it the same repeating time, you know, every time that you do it. So you can just come and set a scene with a specific time. They've made a little bit of an improvement as well to the date and time as well. Because now you do actually have a calendar picker, something which wasn't in there before. Still on the subject of overlays, there's been a couple of minor tweaks to the widget overlays. Apparently they now default to 720p and also fixed an issue where a widget may stop working when switching between profiles. So we've already got lots of new features and there's plenty still to come. But this is one of the issues that I've always had with making videos of our e-cam live for my YouTube channel is that they're pushing out these features so quickly that often the older videos become out of date or may be partially out of date. And so it's a case of where do you actually go to find the latest up-to-date information? Well, that's why I created the e-cam live masterclass. And it's basically your online e-cam live encyclopedia. It's continually updated with all of the latest features as they're added so that you will know that whatever it is that you want to learn, you can always come and find it in the e-cam live masterclass. It's broken down into bite-sized videos as well so you don't have to face some, you know, daunting four and a half hour marathon, although I did make that video once before as well. And so if you want to know anything about overlays or scenes or how to do various different things, you'll find it all in here. And as I say, you get lifetime access and it is continually updated. So as these new features are pushed out in version four, all of the content will be refreshed where necessary to cover all of the new features. It doesn't just cover e-cam live though, it also covers all the things that go with it. So for example, Stream Deck, how to get your Stream Deck set up and working along with e-cam live, how to use e-cam specifically for live streaming, for recording, or for really leveling up your presentations and taking it into Zoom, Teams, or Discord. And so there's a whole section there, specifically about how to use e-cam with those platforms. And then there's also things related to presentation skills and how to use e-cam and applications like Keynote and PowerPoint together to really just level up your presentations. And then obviously once you take those into Zoom, you are just on another level all together. There's also stuff in there generally about sort of on-camera skills and things like that. And then all of the other different pieces of software and services that you'll find that will go hand in hand with e-cam. And of course, all of the gear recommendations in there as well. You can get instant access to this today. It's just $147. There's $150 worth of bonuses with it as well. So technically you're $3 up. But you can just head over to ecamlivemasterclass.com. You'll get instant access. It's currently up to date with all of the latest features. And as these new features are rolled out, it will be updated for those as well. So that is your, as I say, your online e-camlive encyclopedia, ecamlivemasterclass.com. But let's get back to this update, shall we? And let's have a look at... We've talked about the various different ways to get set up, some of the interface changes and things like that. So now we are actually live streaming. Assume that's then what has changed there and with recording. So the first change that they've made is you can now actually just drag and drop the comments into other applications. So if you want to collect comments that people have made, obviously you do get the full output of any comments after the fact as an SRT file. That's something we've had already. But you may just want to drag out selected comments, maybe into a Google Doc or something like that. But you can also drag them and drop them directly into the interview chat as well. So if you are doing an interview show and you've got comments coming in and you want to queue those up for the guest, then now you will be able to just drag and drop them. I can't actually demo that now because I'm recording not live streaming, but it's basically just a drag and drop from here. One other thing that they've changed as well is a really big improvement is if a moderator has deleted a comment during the broadcast, actually on the platform, on YouTube or wherever, it will also be removed from here. And that is really useful because sometimes these comments that come in, you know, if you get the spam bots and things like that that are posting things, it can be a bit of a distraction actually. So having them just being able to be removed from here is, I think, a great little addition. Now, I mentioned interview mode there whilst we're on the subject of interview mode. The feed from the interviewees now is at 1920 by 1080. Previously it was 720p. Many people may not have even realized, but that was the previous feed coming from the guests was 720. Now it is 1080. So that is just a nice little improvement there. Also apparently fixed a slight issue where live demo mode could be low resolution at times. I never encountered that one myself, but it has been an issue that has been changed. Let's have a look at a couple of changes related to recording now. So we talked about some live streaming changes. So if I come back over to this view, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to come out of stream and record, I'm going to toggle off the streaming and now we'll come to the recording. First of all, when we click the record button now, there is actually a countdown. A lot of people had asked for some sort of counting in. So when you click the record button, what you'll notice is it's going to count down three, two, one, and then the recording will start. Personally, I would like this to be an option rather than it just be a standard for everyone because what happens is, if you've got the screen over to one side, normally I'm not looking at my main Ecamm window. I'm looking either in my teleprompter with the video out, or I'm looking at something else. And so I like to just press the button and go straight into the recording. So this countdown is actually a little bit of a hindrance to me, but anyway, it was something that was asked for. So hopefully this can be added as a choice rather than just it being like that all the time. Now, one thing that I wasn't expecting but is a really nice little feature is if we come into the output menu, no, the recording menu, we've now got this option here, add marker, and that is to create a timestamp. And so if I just press M, and we're still recording in here, and if I press M, then what you'll find is it'll just pop up here to say a marker has been added. And if I press M again, it's going to create another marker, and I press M again, and you'll see what these look like in a moment. But what you can also do is you can add a specific title. So if I come back into the recording menu, we've got this option here, add marker with info, so that is shift M. So if I click on shift M whilst it is recording, I must be pressing something wrong on my keyboard. Let me try that again. So add marker with info, like that, there we go. So I could type something in here. This is section one or something like that, and click on add. Now if you are working solo, as it were, just like I'm doing recording this video, I'm not going to be stopping to type in markers all the way through. I suppose technically I could pause and be typing them in that way. That would be one way to do it. But if you are doing live production for somebody else, and then you would have the option then to actually just add that marker and type in the info, would be great as another option to be able to pre-define these different markers and then be able to just trigger them as you go through, if you know the sort of flow of what you're going to say. Yeah, but nevertheless, it is a great little feature, something that I was doing with a bit of a work around with Stream Deck to give me a text file with all of the locations of the markers, and then I'd go and fill them all in afterwards. Well now that functionality is just totally built in here. And what happens is, when I click on finish here and end the recording, what you'll see is, click on OK. Now in addition to the actual recording, what I've also got here is a text file and if I open the text file up, you can see here are those, let me just make this a little bit bigger so that you can see it. Here you can see I've got those three blank timestamps from when I just pressed the button the first three times without typing anything in. And then you can see the second two timestamps are where I actually use that function to be able to type something in. So that is a great new feature. So let me just close this down though and there's a couple of other things. Let's just get rid of that, get rid of this. Also while we are up in these menus here, there is a couple of new additions in the output menu. The first one is related to the video monitor. If you have the video monitor switched on, then you've now got the option as well to mirror the video monitor. So I know that some people find it a bit weird when they are looking at themselves on a screen, on a video monitor, on a teleprompter or something like that and they point this way and they're expecting it to point the other way and so on. Well now you can just sort of flip that. Just know that that is only what you're seeing is not having any effect on what's going out. If you do want to toggle your, flip your camera, then you can still do that obviously in the camera options window or the camera effects window that we had before. If you physically want to flip your camera on the screen. So just know that if you're doing it from in here, it's only affecting what you are personally seeing on your video monitor and nothing to do with what is going out. Finally, we've also got this other thing in this same menu while we're in here. Here we've got Declink output. So Blackmagic who make the ATEM Mini and various of the different things like that. Declink is their system for transmitting video over a network, as I understand it. So that is all for the updates that have come in the beta. But obviously lots of other great features in Ecamm and so what I'll do is I'll leave a link to my Ecamm Live playlist over here so you can find out all the other great stuff that we've already got in the software. Have a great day.