 In this video, I'm going to be talking about the scene source option in Ecamm Live so that you can understand when and how to use the different kinds of scene source that you have available to you within Ecamm. So first of all, what exactly am I talking about? Well, maybe if I come into my live demo mode, and then I'll come up into the menu. And you can see here under the source menu, we've got four options, either blank, camera, screen share or video file. And what this is, is it's basically the source of the scene, meaning like what is the core thing that is feeding into the scene. So at the moment you can see that I have this set to camera, so the scene source is camera. And that means that what you're seeing filling the entire screen is my camera. And that is before any overlays or anything like that are put on. Anything that is an overlay will be coming over the top of the scene source. Now there are, as I say, four different options, and you can choose three of them from up here in the menu as well. So here we are in the camera source, but you can also change to the screen share source. Or you could also change to a movie here if you were to just select a movie, and then that movie would play in the background instead or rather as the source. And once again any overlays would appear over the top of these different things. Now with the camera set as a source, you can change between any cameras that you've got connected. So if I click on this one, I can switch to that camera. I can switch back to this camera. There are keyboard shortcuts to do this switching as well. Which is simply if you come up to the camera from the menu at the top, you can see the different cameras numbered here. So one, two, three, four, five and six. So if I was to just press the number two and press one and two, it will flick back and forwards. So you can flick backwards and forwards like that as well. Now you can't actually just add in an extra camera. So where we've got my camera selected there, let's say I was on an interview and I wanted to bring my guest in. I could just click the little plus icon here and it would put them next to me. You'll notice how it has sort of cropped images so that we are fitting exactly into the space available. You can disable that if you want by just coming down to the little cog wheel here and then just unchecking this crop split screen. And then what it will do is it will try and fit us in. Now I've got my background image on there at the moment. Let me just get rid of that because the default would be it would be like this. And you can then go and add in multiple different people if you wanted it as well. So if we add three guests in, it just sort of arranges us to fit us on the screen. So now I could technically just have an interview where we were all fitting into the screen like this. Now this is the, as I say, the default way that it behaves in Ecam Live. But I'm going to suggest to you that this is not necessarily the best way to use Ecam. I do see people who are using Ecam like this and as they want to add more people in, they'll just be using this plus and minus. And then also when they want to switch to screen share, they will click over to screen share. And by the way, in screen share, we do have some options. For example, you can have the little picture in picture showing if you want to be in the shot as well. And you can just resize that as well. You can also turn that off if you don't want to see it. Same goes for the movie. You can show and hide that in there as well. Personally, for me, I always start with a completely blank canvas. And the reason being that instead of having these views, which are something like this with multiple different people in it, I prefer to be able to build these out myself. So the corresponding version of that would be something like this, where we've got the guest number one and myself. I've got space for another little lower third if I want down at the bottom. So something like that. I've got a view with three people or seen with three people rather, seen with four people and so on. And you can create all of those by starting with a blank canvas. And you have all of the flexibility that you've got with the scene source version, except you've got more so because then you can adjust sizes, positions and all of that sort of stuff. Now the way that you do that then is if you create a new scene, if I start a new scene and I have my scene source set to blank, then with that one, if I create the new scene now, now let me just take off some of these overlays for a moment. Then you're basically, whoopsie daisy, it's the wrong one. You're basically then starting with a completely blank canvas and you can just literally build this up from scratch. So then you would be able to come down to where the camera overlays are down here. Click on new camera overlay and then we can put this where we want it. If I did want to bring a guest in, we can change the size of this perhaps. Let me change this to the shape. This is intended to be a complete tutorial on Ecam by any stretch but it's just the rather the difference between the scene sources. So then we could just duplicate this and we could make this to be guest number two. So the camera there is guest number one, the second person on the call. We can resize this one if we wanted. We could bring this down here. We could resize this one. And then if we wanted, we could also add in a screen share. So we might want to just add in a screen share overlay. Let's say we want to share that Safari window. So I'll come down here, share Safari. Again, I've got plenty of content on exactly how to work with all of these things. In fact, I did want just recently, which I'll leave a link to, which was all about specifically about screen sharing. But you can see that you've got a lot more flexibility then on how things are laid out. And in fact, we can lay things out really quickly this way. And because of this, I actually created an overlay template. So this is something that I have in the background. And by the way, what you can also do then is whoops a daisy. I mean to resize that too much. What you can also do is you can actually just have a background image. So that instantly adds a sort of consistent brand across all of your different scenes. But I also do have this scene layout template, which if I just hide these other overlays for a moment, this is basically just a little guide that helps me when I'm laying out my scenes. And I'll leave a link in the description. I did do a video all about this before, but since we're talking about the scene source, I'll leave a link again and you can get this as a free download. And you can just drop it into Ecamm and just drop it into the background. So show in background. I'll be doing a video about the different ways to organize overlays and things like that. So I'll be covering this off in there. But yeah, if you drop it into the scene, show in background, this scene layout template will then be just there for every scene as you want to lay them out. You'll be able to just go and toggle it on. And then you'll be able to help with your layout. So how exactly does it work? Well, basically these white lines are all spaced at sort of like quarter intervals. So you've got here quarter of the way in halfway and three quarters of the way in, same with the vertical and the horizontal as well. And the red are actually at thirds. So basically if you wanted to split your screen into thirds, you'll notice that they are kind of like parallel lines, like train tracks if you like. That is so that we can add a gap between our different overlay elements if indeed you want to do that. So for example, if I wanted to use this layout template here, what I might do is align this up to here, maybe align this one down to here. Whoops a daisy, get that one out of the way. And here we'll put this one in this corner and we'll drag this down here. So by lining it up with this template, they are by default equally sized. You can also see that they are doing the thing of snapping to each other as well. So we can see it that way. But this is more about the sort of sizing. And then this one is my screen share overlay. Let me just actually change the shape of that. I'll make that custom. And then I'll drag this sizing down here like this. And then I'll make that over here. I just want to make sure the width is correct just like that. And so now we've got this equal gap on either side. So they are all now perfectly, perfectly spaced. And if I was to just toggle that one off now, so the layout template has served its purpose. And let me put my background image back on. And then if I was to come out of this view, you'll be able to see that that looks well proportioned and everything is all sort of matching in terms of sizes and things like that. So back into live demo mode though. That is the reason why I personally prefer to start with a blank scene source. And you'll hear other people talking about always start with a blank scene source. I know that it's something that Doc Rock mentions. If you watch his weekly introduction to ECAM live tutorials, which I watch every week, even though I've been using it for quite a while, it is certainly something that's useful. And you do pick up little things every time with that. But this is what he's referring to when he says, always start with a blank scene source. And the way that you can set that as a default, by the way, is if you come into the show and hide preferences, and then we come into the video tab of the ECAM live preferences, you've got here default source mode, which is blank. And so you can change that from either blank camera or screen share. So just changing it to blank in here will mean that whenever you create a new scene rather by clicking on the little button down here, then it will just start with a completely blank canvas. I say completely blank, it will include anything that is set to show in the background. And this is the great thing about it, because if you do want to have some sort of like branded background or something like that, just like I've got here in all of my scenes, I have this same sort of thing going on in the background, then you can just change that in here. And it also means that if you want to actually change up the look of your show, you can easily just add in a new background and it will be replicated throughout all of your scenes. And then this then is where we've got the scene layout template. So you can just use that as a little guide to help you get things lined up. And by the way, since the latest version of ECAM live, we've now got sort of snapping and alignment tools. So this is great for getting the overall sort of size and proportions right. And then you can use those little snapping tools that we've got for that fine adjustment. So what do I mean by that? Well, if I come back to this one, you can see that now if I just turn off my scene layout template and maybe I'll just turn off actually the, whoopsie daisy, I keep doing that. I keep scrolling after I've selected something. If I turn off the background, you'll see that we get these little alignment lines and everything is all aligned because I've just used that template as well to sort of line it all up. But you can see that these two are lining along the center line and they're also lined up at the edge because they're the same size and they're also lined up with the sort of bounding boxes of ECAM live. So there's this blue square that goes around the perimeter that's basically giving you that sort of offset. And I purposely designed the template so that my bounding box, the white line, is also the same as the bounding box of ECAM. So that is the layout template. As I've said, I'll leave that in the description. There are a couple of other scene sources though and obviously one of those is, if I just come back to my main view for a moment and get rid of these two. Incidentally, by the way, this layout template that I've got, because it is an overlay, I have just assigned that to be a button on my stream deck. So I've got a button that when I am creating new scenes, I can just press my stream deck button and toggle it on and off just like that. So then it's really easy for me to create a new scene layout on the fly. It really comes in handy that way. But there are a couple of other scene sources obviously. There is the screen share one and that's kind of just being covered off because we created this scene here with a screen share in it. Then that sort of for me is far more versatile than the pure screen share option that you've got where it's basically the screen share is taking over the whole screen. You don't have the same level of control over that then. But there is one other which is scene source, which is video file. And this is the one other scene source that I would use. If I have a video file to play or a video to play, this makes total sense for doing that. And also you might be aware or may not be aware I should say that if you are playing video files as overlays rather than as the scene source, then there is an issue where sound doesn't come through on them unless they have been converted to a particular type of video file called WebMFormatFiles. And I've got a link to a video that I did about creating WebM files in the description as well. But that is where you would want to use that. So if I come over to a scene like this one and then I change to a video file, then this is just something that you can just have playing in the background. You've got various different controls over this. I did a video specifically about video controls which I'll leave a link to in the description as well. Now in terms of the actual scene layouts, this is something that I touched on earlier as things can show in the background or they can show in all scenes or you can have things showing in current scene. So there are different ways of actually sort of organizing or thinking about the organization if I can get my words out. There are other ways to think about the organization of your overlays. And this is something that I'm going to be talking about in the next video. So I'll see you in that video.