 and this is Speedify Live. Specifically it's the 43rd episode of Speedify Live if you can believe it. This is the show about everything live streaming where we talk about the many aspects of live streaming and how you can improve your shows and what kind of gear you should use and what kind of software and how you can get bigger audiences. And so to that end we have a very special guest today, Alec Johnson, entrepreneur, masterclass mentor and the brains behind Take One Tech. Hey Alec, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me Alec, it's a pleasure. It's great to have you. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself to get started? Yeah, sure. So I've got a few different business interests and they're quite diverse as social media marketing being one of them and also algorithmic trading, so too quite kind of polar opposite sort of end of spectrum. Algorithmic trading, that's a little different. Yeah, but one thing that I had with all of these is that as part of my sort of role I provide training and so I wanted to get better at creating videos basically and so that's where I created my channel Take One Tech and in fact the name comes from, I do all of my videos in one take so I'm not a fan of editing so I wanted a way to sort of streamline that and remove the editing process and so that's where the name comes from. Yeah, I hear you a lot of why this is a live show is that you know every time we set out to make videos we'd obsess so badly on the editing that we'd spend 80 hours on a 90 second video and it's finally like you know we have to take that away from ourselves. We're going live and it won't be perfect and we're just gonna have to deal with it. Yeah, I call myself a recovering perfectionist for exactly that reason. I'm trying to get away from the perfectionism. So we are alive and I think some of you have noticed it already, you know, you can post comments underneath and we will see them and we will respond. So ADU. Yep, yeah, so we have all sorts of people to say hi here. Hi to all of you. So how long have you been doing this? How long have you been doing the channel? The channel is only since May of last year actually so yeah still quite new but I've been putting out quite a lot of content to try and get better quicker. Right, right. Awesome. Yeah, it all looks great. Your videos look great. Your set up right there looks great. We both have the LED lights behind us. That's it, yep. It looks great. So we have other people here agreeing how dope your studio looks. Oh thank you very much James. All right. So Zoom, I think one thing to be wanted to talk about. I mean a lot of your videos are around the Ecamm but I think today we want to talk a little bit about Zoom and how to make Zoom work for you, right? That's right, yeah. So one of the questions that I get asked a lot since starting the channel and still since creating or since having it basically improving my own video and audio quality. One thing I noticed was every time I was on a Zoom call everyone would always ask how do you look so good on Zoom? Not personally but image quality and audio quality. And so that was really the point of wanting to help other people get better at that aspect of Zoom really. So I created the Zoom masterclass which I actually supposed to have launched on the 1st of January but I'm a little bit behind with it to be honest. So it is still there though at zoommasterclass.com and people can sign up there without you know just register their interest but it's all about it does teach people how to use all of the Zoom application itself obviously and all of the features and things like that but it also then goes into things like how you can look better and sound better on Zoom. You don't need to build out a full studio to do that. You can you know with just some simple tweaks to your lighting the way that you use things like virtual backgrounds if people use those how people can use those effectively because that's one thing that I see it doesn't look so professional in business meetings when people have got sort of bad keying they've got some sort of video so it's basically addressing like how to just resolve all of those issues and and look better because you do find that people when they look and sound better on Zoom then people do first of all they can understand what they're saying better because they're not distracted by you know funny backgrounds or things like that but also not distracted by you know poor audio quality and it's basically about being a better communicator as well so that's really the sort of underpinnings of the course and so I go over Zoom but then also how to get your setup right and all of that sort of stuff as well but one of the key things is connection and so I'm definitely recommending speedify of course because it's yeah it's really really helped me to not have to take the element of worry out of the meeting like oh is my connection going to drop at the wrong point and that sort of thing right right that's good to hear so any any other so obviously speedify is our app my app you know it runs in the background on your computer and lets it use multiple internet connections at the same time to give you the speed of all from added up so I'm using it right now I'm on wi-fi and I have a tethered cell phone yes so if something happens to the wi-fi which it seemed kind of flaky today right I've got I've got the cell phone to fail over to and hopefully you guys won't notice nothing I do the same I tethered to my phone and then I've got wi-fi but then also LAN as well yeah yeah so we just I know you've got your new studio we just moved into a new office so this is brand new studio here after the ethernet right now you know we have nice ports in the wall but they go to dangling wires in the server closet right right so I'm forced to use wi-fi right now I'm a big believer all right the building sheriffs so how do you use your speedify connection Alex yeah so yeah exactly that I have the wi-fi and then the LAN and then also on mobile but I also use it sorry tethering to my mobile phone but I also use it on on my mobile as well so that one you there is a mobile app for it as well so that you can connect to use your you know 4g connection or whatever it happens to be and then also wi-fi as well so it's awesome why did no one think of it sooner because it's really really hard actually I get that yeah so people ask didn't we have this in the 90s with modems we did but the trick with the modems is they're all exactly the same speed right every phone line this is pretty much exactly the same speed as every other phone line right right you can do really really simple things to just round robin between them and actually get speed them out of the but you know now that we have you know wireless and ethernet and some connections are a gigabit and some are two megabits yes one of them has gotten much much harder than it used to be that's why we don't have it anymore but we did back then right so yeah cool so do you want to talk something about your studio yeah I can do yeah I previously it's still in my home but we just had this this this basically this space that wasn't being used or rather it was just used full of full of rubbish it was like a storage storage space that was full of boxes suitcases that we weren't using things like that so I just sort of cleared it out previous to that I was in my my basement and everything I did was green screen so it was just you know not not exactly the tidiest of spaces but I did all of my videos up until really the end of last year was was from there so this space is just a lot more conducive to work I should have to say as well I can zoom out a little bit just to sort of show you I basically I've cropped out the dangling wires normally but I put acoustic panels so the room is empty but I made acoustic panels with sort of acoustic insulation wooden frames and then just some material stretched over the top of them and it's amazing what a difference it did make to the the acoustics in the room it has really sort of transformed it to be honest with you because it was quite echoey before I've also got one of those above my head which has made a difference as well and then if I just pop over to this shot so this is basically my setup I don't normally have a macbook on the the desk so that's my my old macbook I run everything from a mac mini but this is a 43 inch monitor I've got two lights over here this is a top-down shot I don't normally do sort of product reviews and things like that but if I do I use a product a top-down shot that's actually using camo which I notice you're using as well so that's just yeah yeah I mean that's that's a great way by the way for zoom if you're if you've only got your built-in camera on your laptop then using camo just instantly levels up the the picture quality and then on the top here I'm actually we were switching around phones I think I may have even though I've paid for it I think I may have accidentally gone back to the free version of camo it might it might be just the toggle there is a little toggle so even on the the paid version there's a little toggle that you can toggle the logo on and off might be that could be it I'm not gonna risk it now we're live so I'm living with the camo logos yeah it's great software by the way I have no connection them at all just they and I spoke at the e-cam conference together ah right right it's so it is so nice right I mean you it lets you use the iPhone as a webcam again on your Mac yes yep and all those features of the iPhone camera I know control on your Mac yeah it's awesome that that's actually somebody else who's sponsoring the the zoom masterclass as well there because I wanted to recommend their software as well because like I say for for zoom it's just it just takes your whole video quality to another level with and everyone's got the phone haven't they so it's it's a sort of no-brainer really you don't need to invest in the studio setup um Elaine says that your space looks great you sound awesome smart move with the acoustic panels thank you very much thank you very much Elaine am I echoing a little bit I think I kind of am okay it's my audio okay uh yeah yeah maybe a bit of a bit of room echo but not not echo in terms of the uh yeah not over the audio itself I have a a big pile of a sound absorbing phone that is not right walls yet right and I think I might do that uh the other thing by the way I just mentioned that I've also used which is a uh I'll just see if I can zoom into it so on the top of my monitor my monitor is a um it's probably a bit big really it's 43 inch but then on the top just appear I've got a teleprompter that's going in over the front of my camera so I don't actually use it for teleprompting in terms of scripts and things like that but it just means that I've got my uh like I can see you now in that so I've got the eye contact with you so in zoom that's another thing that's really uh helpful is if you are kind of looking at the person when like in meetings and things like that so uh and that was um there's all sorts of different versions of these you can get but this was quite a relatively low cost but I felt like it's quite uh quite good quality so it's a Desview T3 it's the teleprompter and then I'm using a lilyput which is a sort of lilyput seven inch video monitor so it's intended for you know actually a monitor on your camera or something like that uh but it's just that's what I've got my my output going into that um so it's not not very big so it's not you wouldn't use it for you know reading scripts and things like that uh but for just being able to look at the person that you're talking to it's uh it's a really great little addition yeah yeah I keep I keep looking at where you are your edits on screen yeah well that's that's that's what everyone does yeah so I'm dragging you over so now you're directly underneath the camera hopefully that nice um so your channel like yeah is it is it just you or are you doing it by yourself is anybody helping you no it is just me actually yeah so um my my channel is definitely a secondary thing to my you know regular work that I do um and so I'm in I'm in Thailand so it's 5 a.m. here but I get up at 3 o'clock and in the morning and so my sort of 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. is my sort of youtube time uh and the videos as I say I make them all in one take I don't really do a lot of planning um I've got a list of of things that I want to make videos about they're all Mac tutorials lots of them related to Ecamm live stream deck and you know the different sort of tools that I use so I've made videos about speedify and the way that I would make a video my sort of workflow is I'll come down I'll just pick a video that I'm going to make out of my list ever growing list and then it takes a little while just to sort of set up so I'd like open the speedify website open the app in that case I'd open the system preferences to show you know how you enable you know give it the right access that it needs to the system preferences things like that get those set up on screen but then basically just sit down and record the video as if I was telling a friend how to do it basically um and so that's my my my workflow is is basically that once I finish the video I just make a quick thumbnail I yeah I've let my perfectionist tendencies go there as well I've got a template just change the title and so on so within you know two hours I can easily have come down made a half hour video uploaded it and done a bit more sort of YouTube maintenance and management as well right that's cool all right so question from Tommy I guess for me by design a VPN reduces your internet speed isn't it counterproductive to add a VPN speedify just in case versus using your Wi-Fi connection without a VPN full speed no encryption no log uh we are we are far and away the fastest VPN in the universe um in a lot of cases we are faster than not having a VPN but not all cases um so a normal VPN sorry to get a little technical here you know creates one socket back to your to the VPN server and jams all of the sockets everything you're doing back over that one connection uh to the VPN server but we're totally obsessive we make like eight connections back to the VPN server on every internet connection you have uh so where other VPNs can't max out a fast internet connection because there's a speed limit to how fast you know one TCP connection can go we'll have eight of them so we we can max out a 500 you know mega bit internet connection we have all kinds of smart error correction stuff so one thing that happens if you're at the edge range on Wi-Fi or cellular you start dropping packets and your internet speed slows way down we detect that kind of stuff and we'll resend the packets before your apps even notice it so in a lot of those cases we actually give you speed boost even with just one internet connection and you can end out um quite frankly faster than you are without speedifying um it's not true in every case but you know when you're streaming you're not actually going for maximum speed right you want like 25 or 50 megabits so you can do high definition video in both directions and that's good enough right having 800 megabit internet actually isn't any better than 100 megabit for one of these one of these calls you're just trying to get good enough and speedify does a ton to make sure you get good enough sorry i hope that answers i've found that myself because i was using another vpm before and i definitely had sort of speed issues there sometimes and i couldn't believe it that i was i can't remember exactly how much i was paying for my vpm but it was pretty much similar to what speedify costs with all the added benefits that that gives as well so yeah yeah we we picked the middle of the pack pricing yeah uh so higher edu tech says you can use a teleprompter like alec for both scripts and zoom and switch between them instantly yeah so so the the teleprompter is really just another monitor on your computer then correct yes yeah yeah it just shows up as a monitor and the thing about the you can do this with some people use ipads and things like that the reason why it's good to have a dedicated monitor first of all you're not taking up your ipad but secondly the lily put can do flipping in both directions so you can flip it vertically and horizontally like so you get the mirror image so that basically it's all looking exactly correct on the on the teleprompter but yeah it's just just an hdmi out from the computer all right mr urban worlds has a family friend of paying close to 60 dollars a month for five megabit internet and it's driving me insane thinking of gifting him speedify you shouldn't sounds like a great idea to me all right and higher edu tech i video on how to do that that's back to the teleprompter switching switching between zoom and yeah yeah yeah the teleprompter that's a good idea right it's great yeah yeah yeah i used to have one i mean it's still here somewhere where you could yeah connect enough connect a phone and whatever was on the phone was reflected off right and it worked pretty well yeah script you know we so there was some app that had led a script just scrolled by at a regular speed yes yeah yeah reading things it worked fine uh huh yeah i mean this actual the teleprompter itself so there's there's two parts there's the actual teleprompter sort of hardware with the reflector in the place to put your camera and then there's also excuse me the lily put monitor well the the teleprompter itself comes with an attachment so you can just attach a mobile phone or a iPad or something like that if you want i've just uh added this other one so you could just use one of those sort of phone apps for the the scrolling script and things like that right right so again i think a lot of you're figuring out i see the audience is swelling uh it's like 150 people are watching now uh we are live so if you have questions for me alex from speedify or alex from take one tech uh we are here just post them in the comments and we are answering them as they show up all right scottie is asking alex can we see that overhead view of your setup again there we go oh just need to zoom out a little bit there we go so yeah it's um that's really algato wave uh mic boom really good bit of hardware so it's not uh a lot of the the traditional style mic booms are kind of like over the head whereas this is a sort of low profile one that sort of sweeps across the the desk um the uh uh and there's the monitor the teleprompter and then this is just a iphone i think it's a five sx actually it's a pretty old phone but the camera's still pretty decent for just general sort of top down shots and things like that uh then i use a stream deck as well uh i bought the stream deck for video production but i've found that it has become a totally invaluable tool for just mac productivity so my heavy keyboard maestro user uh and the the stream deck has got good integration with keyboard maestro so i can create all the macros i want in there but then just basically trigger them with a touch of a button with stream day so nice so so what are what are some of the macros that you frequently use it's all uh related to sort of setups of my systems is the ones that i primarily use so for example i use um moon which is a window management tool uh that you can create custom layouts of windows on the screen and then assign shortcuts to those um and then and i you can do this in keyboard maestro as well but i just find it's easier to to do it in moon because you can just put things where you want it and then just save it as a sort of snapshot and say that's where i want all of the apps so i have basically sort of start up and shut down procedures for different workflows that i've got so when i'm recording it will you know press a button and it will open all the apps that i need to be open shut down the ones that i don't and position everything on screen just sort of ready to go so with basically like a touch of a button i can just be ready to record a video and then the same sorts of things for my other work stuff you know getting different documents placed things like that um and all that sort of stuff i also have macros for so i use uh foot pedals as well for um controlling certain things when i'm doing like live streams and stuff like that um it's just means that i've got two two hands free but can still control stuff with that so i program those with uh with keyboard maestro as well for different use cases so depending on what i'm doing i can flick them around to be have different actions basically uh so yeah a bit a bit of a live show geek so so scottie two cats is asking are you using an a10 mini to i guess to switch between the cameras no i'm i'm using ecamm live so that's that's a virtual um i suppose a virtual switcher really it's that kind of like a live production environment so they all just come into the computer yeah that's it yeah a bit like so there's there's also obs open broadcast software which is mac and pc i did actually start to use that to begin with but i i say that i lost all of my hair trying to use obs so i eventually moved over to ecamm and they've never looked back yeah i think ecamm well i know ecamm is the best software for working on a mac making videos right yes yeah um the the stuff for interviewing remote people it's probably not not quite as good as these cloud first you know yes yeah restream and and uh you know stream yard but you know yeah the the thing that's good that's good about ecamm from this point of view though is that you do you're basically bringing in the feeds of the people but you can still make i think a little bit more of a sort of production of it so you have more uh you know choice over where you're putting things and things like that and effects that you want to add over the top so uh but yeah it's uh it's it's everywhere so we're using restream studio right now and it's something super nice and that there are like six layouts and i can just you know yeah yeah click a button then change layouts um but there's only six layouts right i mean yeah yeah with something like obs or ecamm i can design my own including overlapping you know overlapping windows and transparency and you know all this magical stuff and the other advantage of restream obviously is it's it's offloading it all from your computer as well so with the with things like obs and ecamm then you're obviously uh you're having to do all of this on your own uh it's taking up system resources right all right the paul dunkin says with speedify i have two hardware connections to different ports on my router a wireless connection and sometimes my cell phone is backup i never lose connection when speedify is on went off it drops that's right good to hear paul we're here for you all right gee albert fortunately i use zoom record as a backup to post an edited recording on on youtube i think i may have missed a previous comment but um yeah so should we talk more about uh uh some of your tips on zoom i know that that's what your new masterclass is yeah sure um uh a good a good one to always start i think with any app is go and learn the keyboard shortcuts because that can drastically speed up the way that you know you can navigate around it but also perform actions so one thing i notice on zoom a lot is you know people want to go and share their screen and it can be like a total interruption into the the flow of the meeting because they you know they're looking around fumbling for our where do i click how do i do this where's if you can and they often say it out loud right um where is that screen day i click here exactly yeah so with with anything learning those keyboard shortcuts and then if you if you do use a stream deck i mean it's one of the things that i'll be talking about in the course is how you can use it so you can program that for all of the the zoom shortcuts so i have a a setup on my stream deck when i'm on a meeting that i can just do everything from there basically um so that is always a good one with any app learn the shortcuts because often you will find that there are features that you didn't know about just by going and looking at the keyboard shortcuts list and they're just in the settings of zoom in any case and so a lot of people think oh i didn't even know you could do that like if you're on mute in zoom and just press the space bar it acts like a touch a press to talk button so you don't have to sort of unmute yourself you can just press space bar say what you need to say and mute again yeah that's a really cool feature yeah and that that would be another thing is is encouraging if you're on a big meeting to have everyone on mute for a start and if you are the meeting host then just mute them all by default because there can be a lots of sort of distraction from the chatter the other thing is that um when somebody is detected as the speaker then they will be kind of spotlighted momentarily depending on what view you're in so if people have got their audio not muted then you'll find that sometimes meetings will just occasionally like flick backwards and forwards to different people as they you know bump the mic or do whatever and that's just another thing that adds to the distractions yeah and if someone's in a room where they have like a a bad echo we like yes this morning yeah someone will say something loud and then a moment later the person will echo will echo and it'll switch to them yes yeah yeah but you know the mute to talk solves that a lot and that I suppose leads into as well just sort of investing a little bit in your setup so if you if it's if it's for business and you know you're you know you're hoping to win contracts or if you're an educator and you're hoping to you know educate people effectively then having a good setup is you know is worth spending a little bit on it's it's kind of amazes me after two years of lockdown where everyone's been on zoom all the time that a lot of people still haven't actually put any effort into it and these are the people that you know would have had you know big expensive offices and things like that and yet they've not put a bit of extra thought into the zoom for having meetings so when thinking about the setup I always think that the audio is the most important to get right first of all because if people can't hear you then there's little point but then the next would be rather than camera is look at lighting because that could even make a bad camera look good so you know even if you're just on your little sort of MacBook eyesight camera not eyesight they're not called eyesight for years have a FaceTime camera then then just having some decent lighting so that you are well lit will be will just make all the all the difference as well yeah and that's more complicated for people with glasses right I think for the people without glasses a simple ring light works I actually got new glasses without the purple anti-reflective coating right because it turns out the anti-reflective coating is to make you not see reflections right got you yeah for the person looking at you in the camera I was getting these like purple boxes yeah showing up on my glasses so new glasses no coating much less reflection I'm actually really happy yeah with that one then it would be it would be a bit more of a case of sort of light placement as well so thinking about the angles because obviously it's it's reflecting the light so it's just a case of thinking where's the camera and where would the light sort of not reflect into the into the camera so you might need to just have the light slightly higher up then so that the camera is looking straight at you but the the light is sort of reflecting down a little bit all right someone in the next room is suggesting that they come in and tilt the camera down they think I'd look better so I'm sure come on in so I think my camera will move in a minute so another Albert is saying Alec and Alex last weekend I wanted to wrap e-camera around zoom and then pass a value added stream to YouTube but no audio when I had loop back and play after 20 minutes I removed loop back and audio worked so that's a little bit of a technical one because with them with e-cam live going into uh into zoom if you are running interview mode in e-cam live so basically you've got guests on there you can use e-cam live as a virtual camera into zoom but then the the thing with that is that people wouldn't that the the interview people wouldn't hear the people that were on zoom so you'd need to use loop back is it as an app for the mac that allows you to basically root audio in different places so what you basically do is you're rooting the audio from zoom back to the people that are in e-cam interview mode and the and vice versa basically so he was having an issue with but no audio when I had loop back in play and after 20 minutes remove loop back so I'm not I'm not sure really there's some uh some sort of issue I wouldn't be able to know exactly what was what was causing that it may have just been a setting in loop back was not to set up correctly uh I actually I know Albert though so got message me privately and I will get to the bottom of it all right Alec is right get the lights positioned well and you can use your old glasses um well so I mean obviously light positioning makes a difference you know moving them off at a 45 degree angle there's a lot less reflections in the glasses that made a big difference right so I've got a light over here now and not in front of me but still I end out with a monitor in front of me and it was enough that people were seeing inflections in the monitor right and doing the brightness the monitor made a difference too actually that got yes yeah but at some point I realized I was coming up on the end of the year and I was going to lose my health insurance benefit of one new pair of glasses a year right ran out there and made sure I complained about the reflections Elaine says Alex thank you I wondered why my glasses were reflecting when I added that coating good to know yeah that coating is to make you not see reflections but it makes the reflections from people looking in your glasses worse yeah I never knew that now I know that higher edgy tech says a ring light is really bad with glasses though because meant to be positioned straight from yeah the ring glass the ring light is terrible with glasses uh because it's right in front of you goes right with the glasses right to the camera put cameras put you know 30 45 degree angle off to the side if you have glasses and it looks much better cool so yeah zoom I haven't played with yet I mean I see now there's all the stuff about stream your call directly to YouTube yes yeah yeah and you can try that yet or yeah so for for meetings where we want to recording you can obviously in zoom you can have a recording locally or you can have it recorded to the cloud and then that's something that you pay for but if you want to have something that's available like publicly so we have like a weekly call where there's a group of us and it's kind of like a weekly meeting to do with content creation stuff like that but we want to make all of those calls available to the whole group so that if people couldn't make it they could watch the the previous ones so having that streamed from the zoom call directly to YouTube and you can choose whether it's a public or an unlisted video or so on so we have those streaming to YouTube as an unlisted video so then people can go back and watch the replays later those that know where to find them it's a great feature the other good thing about that as well is if you're if you are the host and you drop out although you wouldn't if you were using speedify but if you did then it does actually keep that that stream going even if you've you've dropped out as well so that's quite useful yeah yeah and that's another advantage of any of these cloud based tools whether it's zoom or stream yard or or re-stream is you can do that yes yeah ecam if you're live streaming from that like yeah your your mac is your mac the stream yes yeah but you know that's part of why we now have a mac in the studio and it's not the one i throw in my bag every night it's important um yeah so so what else will people learn in your master class so another thing i mean i mentioned about virtual backgrounds because i do get that people like to have a or use a virtual background one of the reasons why i used to use a green screen even before the the lockdowns the last couple of years um is because i was traveling quite a lot moving around and i wanted to have a consistent look behind me that that you know it wouldn't be a constant question of where am i or what am i doing or things like that or you know if i was in a hotel room perhaps the the background wasn't quite conducive or whatever to whatever we're talking about so i'd always have a sort of pop-up green screen that i could have that would enable me to just have a consistent background but the the virtual backgrounds in zoom are things that people often we've talked about you know get get wrong where you've got you know bits of your face missing depending on how well the keying's going or if the lighting isn't good um so there are a few things that you can do to like help really to make those things look look right because if they're done badly it's actually more of a distraction um so uh the first one is i tend to avoid video backgrounds it is quite a novelty when you see that i can make myself look like i'm on a beach but it is just a distraction for business reasons are fine but i'm never i'm always surprised actually how many people still do this or you know have the northern lights behind them the two built-in ones of the beach in the northern lights and it's it's quite quite amusing um but also if you if you can have a an actual green screen so you can get them relatively you know inexpensive for either a pop-up one that's a bit like those stands that you see at exhibitions with the sort of roller stands so but you can get those in plain green so you can use that as a green screen zoom will do a lot better job of keying out the background if you have got a plain green screen behind you so that would be one thing is if you can you can get one of those set up if you've got something that's a bit more permanent i mean for my youtube channel and my business calls then i've got this space with just a very large green screen behind me so i didn't have to crop in the edges or anything like that um then also if you're using green screen make sure that that's well lit and if if you're using just green screen material make sure that it's pulled like tight so that it's good basically so that you've got a nice flat surface that you that the uh zoom is trying to key out and that it hasn't got any shadows or things like that on it so getting a bit of lighting on the actual green screen itself can help because what you often find is there might be some shadows that are being cast on it by you if you've got the lights in front of you then your shadows getting cast on the back and that's often where you get a bit of uh sort of bad effect on it so if you can have a light that's directly onto the green screen itself um that'll help making sure that the actual image that you're using on the the background looks correct for the the position of your real camera so that you know it's not like a picture of uh you but then behind you is like a really close up picture of the corner of a sofa looking back across a room or something like that where you just look like a you know a little tiny person is getting all the perspective right is is is a key on there as well and then similar to that just making sure that the lighting tone is correct as well so if you've got like quite a warm light and warm skin tone because the color of the light that you're using um then just make sure that that's matching the back and it's not like a bright daylight scene in the in the back so just having it all looking a bit more sort of cohesive and congruent really right right so Catherine W says hey everyone hey Catherine uh we are alive I see our audience keeps growing so if you you have questions either for me Alex or Speedify or Alec take one take you know post them underneath we're talking you know ecam and zoom and you know streaming in general and studio setups um also if you're interested in this kind of thing you should you know follow or subscribe I mean this Speedify Live is totally free just whichever you're watching us on you should click to get notifications next time we're doing this um Albert has another question nice thing with routing your zoom session to youtube is that you can edit your youtube description to add value like timestamp chapters after the show yeah that's a very good point actually yeah so the people are not watching a whole meeting just to get to the one little point that they wanted yeah very good point yeah youtube you would think that transcription would be a value add but oh yeah sure it's it's pretty poor right um it's it's better than better than nothing although zoom has actually added in transcriptions themselves now so you can actually get that out from from zoom as well right and so are they a lot better than youtube's uh they're they're I've I haven't done a direct comparison they're they're good though but they're yeah I've not done a direct sort of uh I should go and do that really actually compare one to the other and see the best thing I've ever seen is descripts oh yes yes I mean they they properly you know they capitalize names and they put in commas right yes like grammar and stuff yeah it's yeah that's a really a really powerful tool descript for you know and it's the editing feature that's amazing and and the overdub as well where you can it can learn your voice record your voice it can learn that and so if you if you're doing something which is your own recording and you miss the word out or misspoke something then you can go and correct it and it actually it's amazing the the the accuracy of recreating your voice to say a sentence it's a bit scary really but it's it's also great yeah yeah that that stuff is is amazing can't we yeah you type in it adds it adds yeah talking and so all right Tommy is asking can you talk a bit about privacy and logging when we use speedify also do you have servers in Canada or they own the US this one's for me um yeah so I mean our privacy policy is online we do not do any logging of what IP addresses you visit you know what DNS names or sites you visit what apps you use um we're gathering a few statistics about how fast your internet connections are that that's the nutshell for this because we are obsessing about giving you faster internet we don't care what you're doing uh but we want to make sure it's fast for you so that's that's a nutshell but the whole privacy policy is online and you can check it out zoom you to his to his other point you have got servers everywhere I know that I'm yeah sorry I missed that yeah we we have servers in 100 locations now so yeah we have servers in a couple spots in Canada all over the US all over Europe um you know South Africa I believe uh bunch of spots in Europe in Asia uh so yeah we're pretty well distributed all around the world it should work for you pretty much anywhere uh higher education tech says zoom transcriptions use otter.ai on the back end okay not familiar with otter no I'm I'm making a note to go and look it up though yeah no I think we just posted a link with the locations of all the speed servers trying it's entrusted it's in the comments we won't go over it here yeah there's there's a lot of servers these days um and in major locations like New York and London we'll use different providers so we have servers and different data centers all over the city so right things should be rock solid um all right so how much does your master class cost? it's uh 497 launch but actually I'm doing an early bird offer so people who register their interest uh early will basically get 50% off at launch as I say it was supposed to have launched on the 1st of January but I'm a little bit late so that means the early bird offer is still open right right awesome uh so the url for it again I just want to make sure that everyone gets this because it's at zoom masterclass.com all right zoom masterclass.com all right and oh there's another one from Albert zoom also offers a robust set of security functionality I'm sure that elix will cover the masterclass for users for devices for audio for video we'll talk about zoom security a little bit or yeah well I mean they've they've done quite a lot of things with security I think when the pandemic hit there was lots of cases of zoom bombing and things like that and it was perhaps really highlighted some of the insecurities in terms of you know access to meetings and things like that so yeah now having you know meeting passwords compulsory and all that for for all meetings and there's lots of things in the settings that you can do to just make sure that you know you you have a waiting room if you're having a meeting where you're not quite sure who's going to be attending so that you can decide who to let in another one with just running meetings from a security point of view is if you are running larger meetings then assigning people as co-hosts so that they have the uh a bit like sort of moderators in a live stream chat really you've got people that are there that can uh take control if things go uh go wrong as well and also yeah if you're talking they can keep letting people into the meeting right that's it yes yeah that definitely gets annoying right yes especially if there's some of the bad internet connection who keeps leaving and coming back and yes yeah not to admit them yeah um and people who will unmute to talk and then they'll forget to mute again and so just being able to uh yeah have people that are controlling that for you is uh is a good move yeah so there's the URL for this you oh thank you all right all right peter says hello i saw you stream on the speedify website i have one question is it possible to use speedify an open wrt or only on raspberry we do not support open wrt yet um it is too stripped down i think uh so we support all the debian based on x's so anything that supports debian or ubuntu or raspberry pi os or mint uh any of those we support it's definitely on what to do to get to open wrt but at this point um yeah just some of the things we expect Linux to do from us the open wrt people decided routers didn't need and they stripped out and it's a you know a painful chord all right albert says also love love love the polling function yeah so that's in that's in zoom they um they actually upgraded that in the update in i think october it was so previously you had basically limited sort of multi-choice polls whereas now there's you can do all sorts of questions and things like that so there's different types of questions that they've they've added in uh so yeah it's useful in there a zoom call or a conference to have that function oh my god doc rock from ecamm is watching whoo he's the reason why i'm using speedify because i saw you on his show okay all right so you got it celebrities here this is awesome fun fact speedify saved my life yesterday discovery plus for some reason it hates hawaii speedify the los angeles to hawaii boom it works oh that's good yes they're trying to make sure only people in the us use it and they messed it up that would be my guess you know right forgot that hawaii was in the country uh i think things like that happen with software way more often than anyone would like to admit so that's that's good doc i'm glad we were able to help you i love that little thing in speedify by the way where you know when you click on the little menu bar icon and it tells you you know how many times the connection's been saved yeah and uh sometimes it's a lot it is a lot yes yeah a couple times people have said you must have a bug those numbers are too high we go off and investigate every time and it turns out like no no it's right yeah always says and the back room function what is the back room function so i think he means maybe the waiting room for people coming in or uh obviously if you've got the the breakout rooms and things like that so that you can split people off into different rooms in the yeah i've never i've it's offered before and i've never actually used the breakout rooms right it's i mean it's a bit niche really it depends what you're doing if you're doing things with big meetings big groups and you need to sort of separate people off to go and work in uh smaller little groups for something like that then uh yeah that's right doc Hawaii is in the US i'll interpret it that way uh we got doc in the audience this is awesome um all right barpill martin says nice thanks barb um nice so what's next so you've got your master class out is there another master class you're gearing up to do now or i am planning on doing so yeah a lot of my my channel is to do with mac productivity so i've done different videos on different aspects of that using things like keyboard my throw so i will be doing a mac productivity master class at some point in the near future as well but i'm also just still got to keep my my channel video count up because when i started i set out originally it was in fact it was because doc had said you can't really judge your stats until you've done at least a hundred videos so i decided to do a hundred videos in my first hundred days on youtube so i did do that and then i thought well i might as well just keep going so then i made it 365 videos in a year so i basically i'm a little bit behind on it to be honest so i've got a little bit of catching up to do uh but that that is basically from sort of 15th of may last year until 15th of may this year so uh i'm still busy just cranking out the videos till then i'll probably drop down do you have no days off or are there days you crank out three videos exactly that yeah so it was it was a case of averaging a video a day you know and that was the the target to get them all out so uh yeah there's there's basically a few days this week where i've got to put out two or three uh this this quarter i should say to get out two or three but yeah it's uh it's just to help with the uh because i was saying the the reason for the channel was to help me just get better at being able to make these sort of tutorial style videos so um hopefully by the end i'll be a little bit better than when i started you're pretty you're pretty good i've been watching them oh he says wow you're prolific which is the correct word man oh man all right so you just keep cranking that's good so yeah till may so what what happens when you hit the end of the year and you have your i'll probably just drop down to not committing to a video a day because it it's um it's a challenge to do it if uh if there's anything that comes up then get that that gets in the way because like i say i've really i can only sort of allocate a couple of hours a day to it so um you know if i if i have a few days as i did at the end of last year where i was just too busy with other you know higher priority work stuff then uh then the youtube always has to give way to it so it's i don't find it difficult making the videos as such i find it difficult sometimes making the time to make the videos so i'll probably drop down to uh maybe three videos a week or something like that in me but we'll we'll see yeah yeah that's cool so do you reuse any of the content like i don't and that's the blog or turn this into a book yeah i i don't um i don't do any repurposing where you'll get people or have a video and they'll take like little snippets and turn them into instagram posts and things like that and it just comes back to this editing issue for me but anything where i think i've got to go and dig back into something and repurpose it then that no i haven't i haven't done that um i do want to get a bit better at just think it being more intentional when i start a video to know that there's like some little bit that i could clip out but i've not worked that into my workflow i've also been doing some like shorts youtube shorts which i don't count in my video counts but those then i can post to tiktok and also instagram reels as well so i want to get a little bit more consistent as that that because being only a minute long it's quite easy for me to sort of sit down and just make a bunch of them um but i haven't really done that very often so i need to be a bit more intentional about saying right okay then maybe a saturday afternoon i'm going to make 31 minute videos and then i've got a month's worth then so yeah yeah because at that point setting up um takes 10 you know 10 or 20 times longer than the video so you you are yeah ranking through them that's it yes yeah cool all right well all right we're at 552 so we're coming to the end any parting thoughts uh you know what should what should we come away you know remembering from this conversation well obviously zoommasterclass.com but aside from that it's um just seriously on the zoom thing is it is what a big difference it can make if you do look and sound good on zoom and i can't emphasize that enough really because it's almost like everybody's on a level playing field since the the lockdown where you know we're not you know hosting people for meetings in our offices and places like that everyone's just sort of in this same little box space that we've got to communicate with one another and so that is then becomes the reflection of you and your company and how how you are perceived and if somebody is um instantly sort of looking and sounding better than everyone else it's almost as if it affords them a certain level of credibility that the others don't even if the others may well be far more experienced than and and so on you know so having a spending spending it's like wearing a suit right it's like wearing a suit was maybe 10 years ago right because wearing a suit is not impressive anymore right and the funny thing about that is the same people that would have worn a five thousand dollar suit won't spend a thousand dollars on a decent you know camera and some lights or something like that it's uh it's it's quite funny that the people don't sort of look at it in the same way as that but yeah that would be my the 80s the 90s you'd see someone in a suit and say oh he must be important right yes yeah now I see someone in a suit and I say salesperson yeah yes yeah important people aren't wearing suits anymore right yeah they're in pajama bottoms and fries so nice all right higher edu tech my last video is inspired by alex basically done one take well one plus oh thank you yeah so it's the way forward yeah I'm telling you we used to be really bad here before we started live streaming like you really would spend 80 hours editing the 60 second video well that's exactly why I started the channel I did I made some course material for one of the the company so we were teaching basically people how to do their social media marketing using the same system that we use as an agency but so that they could do it themselves and creating that course it was you know for every 30 minutes of recorded video it was for me like a day of trying to tweak it and finesse it and it was just a I thought I'm never going to put myself through that again and that's when I decided that the one take thing was the way forward so doc rock says imagining being able to look like a smash and pumpkin is he comparing you to Billy Corgan is that is that what he's doing or he is a little bit yeah I'm a bit of a a larger scale Billy Corgan at the moment but yeah it's his thing nice looking good on zoom it's like wearing a suit that's that's free doc you can use that where's my homie Ryan Ryan is in the next room he is the person who snuck in and adjusted the camera so Ryan is here so he's definitely watching Ryan doc says hi hi club says now he partners you have to what no that can't be the first time that sentence has been said right yeah well doc's been on me about this for quite some time now in fact it was after my first couple of weeks I think he was on the the smashing pumpkin all right a little hot Ryan all right good job Ryan that's my password it would be funnier if I wasn't kidding all right so I mean we are we're basically right here at six o'clock so thank you everyone uh thank you Alec uh thank you for helping me check out that zoom class uh the zoom masterclass.com and I have to go master the the keyboard shortcut for shortcuts I have not done that yeah yeah it was me earlier today on the call saying oh yeah let me share this where do I click down you like right I'm the one who dragged the whole whole whole call to stop keyboard shortcuts so uh yeah thank thank you very much and Elaine is thanking us for the session so you know uh you guys should uh you know he he's on YouTube easy to find take one tech uh you've already found me so follow follow or like me uh below and you can uh find out about our upcoming shows what are my upcoming shows all right so Thursday uh I'm I'm gonna really show this my new studio here I think there'll be a few more adjustments after this but uh we'll give it we'll give the tour so you can see what I did similar to how Alec uh showed off his studio I'll do that here too because I'm pretty happy to the lights behind me and everything just like you yeah that's where feedback from doc before the the old setup in my house he said you you need you need leds behind you changing colors right so thank you doc well almost everything I almost everything I learned about this sort of stuff that's come from him as well so I've got to give him credit so awesome all right um right oh so the expand your reach party uh yeah so the expand your reach show is starting tonight and I guess I am speaking for five minutes at eight o'clock so I guess I guess I'd better go and start doing that that's all I'm streaming so I'm going to get up from the desk and walk around and give a tour of the audience of the office of all great so be a little different uh so awesome so hopefully see some of you there uh good night thank you alec thank you thank you very much all right good night everyone good night