 Ecam Live version 4.2 has just been released, and as always, it is a great update with some excellent new features, and in this video, I'm going to be running through all of those features for you. In case you are completely new to Ecam, Ecam Live is the live production software for the Mac. It is the software that I use to make all of the videos for my channel in one take with no edits, hence the name Tape One Tech, by the way. And it's also the software that I use for live streaming and also live production in my Zoom meetings, webinars and workshops as well. Honestly, it's been a complete game changer for me, say no more, but let's dive straight into the features, shall we, the new updates. So the first thing and the first lot of updates, I guess, are related to live video and live streaming. Obviously, we've had live video in Ecam. You can go into your options menu and change the stream shape if you want to just record vertical video. But how about if you want to maybe record or stream in 16 by 9, you know, horizontal format, but you intend to repurpose the video later and maybe chop out the center section to use in a vertical video as well. Or maybe you want to do multi-streaming, which we can do in Ecam, obviously, to stream to a horizontal platform, but also a vertical platform as well. Wouldn't it be nice to know where the kind of safe zone is on the screen for that vertical content? Well, enter their first new feature, which is the vertical video safe guide. This is something which you can activate by pressing option command V or alternative go into the options menu and you'll see it in that dropdown there. But what this is going to do is put something like this on your screen. Now, the people viewing are not going to see this, but if you were looking at my Ecam screen right now, then you would see something like this. As I say, it doesn't go out in the broadcast or the recording at all, but it is just intended to be there on your screen for you to be able to see where that safe zone is. So if you are recording anything, keep it in these bounds and you'll know that when you just crop out that middle section, then it's all going to be nicely centered or whatever on the screen. If you are doing multi-streaming to both a horizontal and a vertical platform at the same time, then you would just need to be conscious of where those comments were going. So that the comments were going to be positioned right for both the vertical viewers in this narrow frame and also in the horizontal as well. So that is the first thing, the vertical safe zone guide. The next thing then is related to the destinations and specifically Instagram. This is something that's not new. We've had this for a while now. But in case you are new to Instagram, then I will just quickly run through some minor changes that have been made to this. So first of all, if you open up your e-cam live preferences, go to your destinations and here you can click on add destination. When you do that, you'll see the option to be able to select your Instagram. And when you do that, then you're going to see a window that looks like this. Now there has been a minor change in here in 4.2. And that is previously as well as having the RTMP key and stream key. Sorry, I should say I'm stream URL. Now we've just got the server URL in there and then you can give it a nickname. You can also add in your Instagram account from here. Note that this does need to be an account on Instagram that is linked to a Facebook account. But assuming that it is linked to a Facebook page, then if I press the right button on my stream deck, there we go. Assuming it is linked, then you will see this little pop up here. You can drop down and select the particular account that you want. But for the server URL that you can see there, you're going to need to get that from Instagram. Ecam have defaulted to a particular URL here, but it may well be different from you. And the way that you find this is if you go over to your web browser and type in Instagram.com, log into your Instagram account from here and then click on this little create button down here. For the longest time, all you could do here was basically post images. But recently they opened up this live streaming capability to the majority of people now I believe. So when you click on live video, it is then going to pop up this window here. Now, I don't believe that you can schedule out your live streams to Instagram at the moment. And there isn't just sort of one stream key that you're going to have every time. So you will need to just do this on a stream by stream basis. But once you come in here, though, then you can type in a title. You can also type in the or select the audience type, I should say. So whether it's public public or practice, just note that. And here is another new feature in Ecam in 4.2 is that we now have comments coming in from Instagram directly into into Ecam in the same way that Facebook or YouTube comments do. But note that that is only available when you are selecting public. So if you want to do a practice and practice with the comments, the comments won't come through on that practice. But assuming that you select public, then from there, it's going to open up this window. Now, this is something you might want to just go through, even if you're not going to be streaming, because what you're going to want to grab from here is the stream URL. This actually will be the same every time, but the stream key will be different for each individual stream. So you want to come in here and grab the stream URL. And then you will come back over to your setup in Ecam and just drop that into where it says server URL. And that will be added in there. And then once you've finished, click on the little add button. And then that's it. You will have connected your Instagram account in Ecam. Coming back then over to here, the next thing to take a look at is, as I say, the stream key. So this is going to be specific for that particular live stream. So you'll only come and grab this when you're actually ready to go live. So then where do you put this? Well, this is what's now moved in 4.2. And where it's moved to is if I just pull up my little interface here. If you click on the new, if you first of all make sure you've got stream selected, then click on the little new button down there. And that's going to then give you this little pop up. And here you can select your destination. So if it isn't already just click the little add button, select Instagram. And then you'll see down there, this is the new feature in 4.2 is we've got this place for the stream key there. So you'll basically just come and grab the stream key from over this side. Come back over to Ecam, drop it in there. If I can point into the right place and then add it in. Now, once you actually hit the go live, once you're ready to go live, you can see the go live button down at the bottom here somewhere. Once you hit that button, what's going to happen is when you come back over here, it's not actually going to go live to Instagram as in on your feed directly. But what you'll see is over on the little preview window, if I point the right way, you can see that preview over on the left there. That's where you'll see the stream then coming into here. So you wouldn't need to have this browser window open when you are going live to Instagram. You'll see the little preview come on there. And then what you'll do is you will just tap on this one up at the top here to select go live. And so that's where you're going to actually initiate the physical stream out onto your public profile. Similarly, when you are ready to stop streaming, then you'll also then see a little end stream button there. And you'll need to end it there and then also end it in Ecamm as well. So yeah, that's just a few little points about streaming to Instagram. Whilst we're talking about comments, incidentally, there is also a new commenting support for Twitter as well. So if you are on Twitter or X, I still call it Twitter, then comments will also now come in from that whether vertical or horizontal, but comments will come through as we'll also join messages. Now the next thing is related to recording and what we've got is in your Ecamm live preferences now in the recording menu. Then you can see that we've got this option for record only prompt for file name. Now this is going to be off by default, but you can go in and change this to either give you a pop-up when you press record. So at the beginning or at the end of the recording. So when you end recording, you'll be familiar with the box that pops up to say, you know, show file, send to YouTube, send to Descript or whatever. Well now you'll see an extra pop-up over the top of that that allows you to rename that file. So that rather than having just whatever Ecamm's default naming is, you can actually name the file at that point. So once you do that then you then pop out into the regular end screen there. And this is where we've got another new feature, which is the ability to do quick edits with the service called scenery. Now here you can see the three new options we've got there apart from show file, send to YouTube and send to Descript is edit with AI, audio subtitles or custom edit. Now these are three of the features that are available in scenery. This is the scenery video editor. So if you are looking for a editing solution with some of those features like transcripts, AI and also collaboration. So this is a collaborative editor. Then you can check out scenery. I'll leave a link to it in the description. I personally am not a fan of editing at all. Hence the name of the channel take one tech made in one take with no edits. However, I do understand that this is quite an interesting platform that lots of people have been taking a look at and using. So obviously recommend if you are looking for editing or AI editing and transcripts and things like that, then it could be worth taking a look at. And basically now the integration that Ecamm has with this is that from the end screen that we've just seen, obviously it's just going to be able to send things straight through to this, to some of those initial presets that you've got in here. Next up then is the virtual camera. And as I mentioned at the beginning, there is no real difference in terms of the functionality of the camera as such. It's basically still just going to mean that your Ecamm live production, whatever you're outputting, all of your scenes, all of your Ecamm creation, is going to then show up on your computer as a camera that you can then use in things like zoom. What's changed though is, as I mentioned, the way that this has been implemented is now a system extension level integration, which means that it's going to be available in far more places. So if previously you had been using Ecamm live virtual camera into Discord, for example, you'll know that we had to go into the Mac terminal, type in a little bit of code to get it to show up. Same if you're using Vivo meetings or other platforms, then there was this little thing that we had to do to get it to show up in those platforms using the virtual camera. Sorry, using terminal, I should say. There is also this issue of it just simply not showing up in all of Apple's apps. So Keynote, QuickTime and FaceTime and things like that. Well, basically the new integration and the new implementation solves all of that. So now you won't need to go into your terminal to type in any code, and it will show up in all of those Apple apps and in a load of other places where previously maybe it wouldn't have. So what you're going to see though in terms of the actual process for upgrading, when you start up Ecamm or download the update, I should say, then you're going to notice this little pop-up that says update your virtual camera. Click on update now. You'll get a little warning that pops up on screen saying that it's trying to update a system extension. That is exactly correct. It's trying to install this thing at a system level. So you want to just click on OK there. That will take you through to your Apple preferences window or settings window. And you're going to go to your privacy and security settings. And down at the bottom you're going to see system software from application Ecamm Live Virtual Camera was blocked from loading. And so just click on allow to then allow the new system level extension. So once you do that though, your Ecamm Live Virtual Camera will be running. What you'll also notice though is when you are in your main window, now there is a slight change in that previously where you would have seen a little toggle for the virtual camera to be either on or off. Now that is no longer there. It's basically once you've installed it, it's just always there and always ready to go. So apart from that, there is another neat new little feature that's been added. And this is related to overlays. And what it allows us to do is quite cool things like this. So you can see how there's a perspective effect going on here. And this is just a new little slider that we've got in Ecamm. And in fact, if I just go into my live demo mode. So basically just got a simple scene here that's got a couple of overlays. So I've got an overlay there with a screen share and I've got an overlay there of a camera. Well, what we've got is if you click on the little pencil icon, we've got all the same things as we've had. Love the new layouts, by the way, of overlays since Ecamm 4.1 or 4.0, whatever it was. So yeah, nice to have this sort of central place to change all of these things in a consistent look across the different style of overlay. So nothing new here, but what is new is this little slider here. And this is the perspective slider. So it's going to start off in the middle like that. But then you can tweak it to basically just adjust the perspective. You want to be careful obviously on how much you adjust it. Not sure how practical that is, but certainly to just give a slight little tilt to things on the screen. You know, if you've got two people on screen maybe or as I'm doing here just with a little screen share. And as I say, it does apply to all overlays. So you can also click on this one and give a little perspective to that as well. So a really seemingly minor little addition, but actually it gives you a lot of versatility in terms of different layouts that you can have on your scenes and just gives them nice little adjustments to the overall style of it. So I'll certainly be playing around with this in some of my designs that I'm working on. So that is the main key features, I would say. By the way, I should just go back and say the virtual camera integration that is for macOS 13 or higher. So the previous macOS, we're on 14 now. So just note that if you are on the anything OS 12 or before then, then it's still going to be just the regular virtual camera. So I forgot to mention that before. One thing that you've also got in one of some of the later versions. So I think since this version of macOS is these reactions. Now I've actually turned them off on my computer, but it's these things where you put your thumbs up and you get the little thumb bubble come up or, you know, do other signs and you get fireworks going off behind you. For me, it caused me more problems than use because I used to be triggering them by mistake. So I've actually gone ahead and turned them off. But if you do still want to be able to trigger those, but maybe don't want them triggered by the thumbs up and things like that, then you can go and just use the new stream deck plugin. So there is one new button for ecam on their stream deck plugin now, which is if I come over to here, we've got this one here for reaction effect. And now you can just drag on reaction effect here. And you've got all of those different options for balloons, fireworks, thumbs up, thumbs down, rain, lasers, confetti and hearts. So basically you can create an individual button for each of those. And they have got corresponding little icons on here as well. So if you just want to be able to trigger those manually without them being triggered by, you know, when you flail your hands around if you do what I do, then you can now trigger those from in here. There's one more thing that's been added in is you can now include the Mac OS Sonoma wallpaper. So the Sonoma horizon, I believe it's called the wallpaper that is kind of like a moving scene. If you want, you can use that as your green screen background. Personally, I always advocate the use of actual real backgrounds as green screen backgrounds rather than make it look like you're flying over the countryside. Whatever it takes, you can now use that. It's just basically in the list, in the drop down list for your green screen backgrounds. One final thing that is actually really useful is where you've got anything where you want to go to the next scene. So let's say when a video plays and you have it go to the next scene when that finishes, or maybe a countdown timer where when the countdown finishes, it goes to the next scene. Well, previously that could only actually go to an actual scene. Whereas now that can go to an automatic scene group. So that would mean that if you want something to go into one of those automatic scene groups that's going to cycle between different things, you can have it actually go to that rather than just an individual scene. So that's kind of useful as well. So that's about a summary of all of the features that have been added in. There are a few bug fixes as always as well. So a few improvements made under the hood as well. That's all for this update, though. I will leave a link to some of my other Ecamm stuff over there on the right-hand side. Thanks for watching. I hope you found this useful. Hope you are loving Ecamm as much as I am too. Thanks also as always to my channel members. I really appreciate your support. Have a wonderful time everyone and I'll see you next time.