 Ecamm Live version 3.9 is here and it is a game changer. I'm gonna tell you all about it in this video, so sit tight because we've got a lot to get through. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec, a recovering perfectionist, a professional geek, and today I don't mind admitting that I am a bit of a fanboy when it comes to Ecamm Live. I use it every day, not just for creating content for this channel, but also in various business endeavors that I'm involved in, so I use it on Teams meetings, Zoom calls, but also to create course content and just give presentations and things like that as well. So I do use it very heavily day in, day out, and it's one of these applications that I just find delights me. It's very Mac-like in that sense that there's always new little things that I'm discovering about it that just make it really a delight to use. So there have been some massive updates that have been introduced with this new release, and so I want to share those with you today so that you can be similarly delighted with them all. Now, I'm going to start with probably the least most effective one of them, but it's something that I do think looks great, and that is the new icon that we've got in version 3.9. It's a little bit of a change, but I do actually like it a lot. This is version 3.9 that we're talking about, but in my mind it could easily be, I've been a 4.0 release because they have packed in so many great new features and it really has made it a game changer. So much so that I've created a silly little graphic just to prove the point. It is a game changer for a number of reasons, and the primary reason for my mind is that it means that with these new features that have been added, people can do so much more actually within the app itself rather than having to use third-party software to achieve certain things. For example, graphical overlays, something that lots of people used to create in things like Keynote or other graphics programs to create things like I've got around me here, like this little border going around me. So previously we would have done that in a graphics program, made the center transparent and then sort of lay it up over the top of the camera. Well, now you don't need to do that in a third-party program. We can create these scenes directly in Ecamm Live itself. Another great example would be screen sharing, something that I do a lot of in tutorials and things like that that I make obviously for this channel and also some of the training materials that I create as well. And the built-in screen sharing functionality of Ecamm always had a few little gaps in it to my mind. And so I was constantly using third-party software or finding little workarounds to it, so things like NDI scan converter and so on. Well, now they've completely updated the way that screen sharing works in actual fact. And now it does a whole lot that it couldn't do before and loads of stuff that probably people might not have even realized that they wanted until they see it. So I'm gonna show you some of those great features a little bit later as well. But I'm gonna start with one really massive one. And this is a great feature for me personally who, as I say, uses Ecamm Live for lots of different use cases. But I know that I'm not alone and there are lots of other people who use Ecamm Live for different use cases as well. And so what they've introduced in this version is something people have been wanting, profiles. So now basically you can have a different profile that has all of your settings and things like that, all of your scenes on a sort of use case by use case basis. So that is what I've done, but I'll just dig straight into my screen sharing now and I'll show you exactly how this works because it's pretty straightforward and logical. Now, I can't actually show you it working as such because you can't switch profiles mid production, which obviously is something that makes a lot of sense. If you think about it, you wouldn't necessarily want it to be able to accidentally do that. But basically what we've got is up in the top corner, if I come into my Ecamm Live, up in the top corner we've got a new menu now. So next to the edit and the scene menu, we've also got a profile menu. And in there, you can see that we've got a few different commands. So I'll just talk you through how this all works. We've basically got down at the very bottom, I'll just show you this, we've got a list of all my profiles. So these are all the different profiles that I've got for all of the different use cases that I have for Ecamm. So here you can see the little tech tick next to this TOT, take one tech. So that is the profile that I am currently in. I've also got one set up for vertical video as well. So that obviously needs different settings and things like that. So I've got that one set up there. And then these others are just other different things that I use Ecamm Live for. Now, if I come up to the menus at the top and we'll start from the top, so create a new blank profile. That is basically going to give you a fresh slate to start from, almost as if you just freshly installed Ecamm Live. So you'll have a completely blank scenes menu, scenes window rather, blank overlays, just the stock audio that's preloaded into Ecamm. But everything else will just be kind of factory settings if you like of Ecamm Live. So that is where you want to go if you want to build out a completely new profile. But what you might find is if you do use Ecamm Live for multiple different use cases, what you may find is there are certain scenes or layouts or things like that that you want to repeat and use over and over again in different use cases. And so what you can do for that is actually create a sort of base if you like a template where it's got all of your scenes and any sound effects or things like that that you're going to want to use across all of them. And so that is exactly what I've done in this profile here. I've got one here, Ecamm Scenes Template. And so if I basically go into that template, then I can come to this second option here, Duplicate Current Profile. It will duplicate it, I can give it a rename it. And then it's just a case of going and sort of adding all the branding and things like that that I need to add into that specific profile. So it's just a way to sort of get a head start and rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Next option we've got down here is Export Current Profile. This is great for three reasons. First of all, it creates a backup of the profile in a single file, but that actually contains all of your scenes, all of your overlays, all of the camera settings and things like that, all of the stream settings, all of the aspect ratio, the thing like that that you've got the stream size, interview settings, interview mode, we'll come on to that a little bit later, but it saves all of those settings as well. And it's basically just the whole thing all ready to go and saved into one single file. So it's a great way for creating backups. So once you've got everything set up, definitely go and export the current profile, save it somewhere off your computer as well, offsite backup or you know, into Dropbox or wherever it happens to be. And then you've always got that backup for security if you need to reboot your computer or reformat, restart whatever your computer or if you just need to actually back it up and then copy over onto one of your other computers. The second use case for this is if you are working in Teams or with other people, then it means that you can sort of share your setups that you've got and one person can maybe design the show and then maybe someone else is gonna run it on their computer or maybe you want to sort of back and forth, share the file and somebody make changes, send it back and somebody else make changes. It means that you can do things that way as well because you've got this easy way to share all of the settings in one single file package. The third reason why this is great is if you are someone who had previously been selling digital products, digital downloads of say, things like overlays and so on, well now you can actually sell basically a digital product which would be an entire e-cam setup complete with sound effects, graphical overlays, video overlays and all of these sorts of things. You could do something similar a little bit before by exporting scenes but it wasn't quite as all-encompassing as this where it's literally the whole setup is saved into one file. One thing to bear in mind is because it literally is sharing, saving everything into one file, any videos and things like that will be actually embedded within that file. So if you've got large videos or things like that that are part of your scenes or part of your profile, then just bear in mind that those will also be included and so the file size could get quite big if you had a lot of 4K video content for example as part of the setup that you'd got. So just bear that in mind. But it is a really great feature. The other two things here we've got are to delete the current profile and then rename the current profile as well. So hopefully that should be a little bit self-explanatory. Now what I've also done here is this is not part of e-cam but I've assigned keyboard shortcuts to some of these and what I have then done is I've programmed my stream deck in conjunction with keyboard maestro so that basically with one button it will switch to the correct profile in the e-cam office, will open e-cam live, then switch to the correct profile then it will also open all the different windows that I want within e-cam, you know the different scene tabs, the overlay tab, maybe the interview tab or whatever it happens to be window rather not tabs and opens all of those up. Also opens any other applications that I want up and then rearranges all of the windows and puts them exactly where they need to be for that particular use case and I do all of that with the press of one button. I'm gonna be making a video about that because that is not just an e-cam thing that is also in conjunction as I say with keyboard maestro and stream deck as well but I will be making a video about that because a few people have specifically asked about my workflow and how I use those together. So as soon as I've made that video in the next couple of days I'll leave a link to it up in the top corner and I'll also obviously leave a link down in the description below as well. So that is a little point about profiles. Now, one thing to bear in mind as well is as I say this creating a new blank profile it will reset everything to the sort of for that particular profile to the defaults. So if you've gone in and changed things like the stream size to 4K maybe it might be defaulted to 1080p anything that you've got in the preferences in e-cam live as well those also will be back to their defaults. So just bear that in mind when you are doing that that you have to go in and make sure that you've got all those settings that you may have tweaked make sure that they are all there on a profile by profile basis. So that is profiles and that is a pretty awesome addition in my book and I know it will come as a welcome addition to a lot of other people as well. So next up we are going to look at interview mode because interview mode has had a big change as well and so let's just have a little look at that. I mean it's been around for a while but what they've done now is they've just added some extra functionality to it. So I'll just show you that now if I come into my interview mode I'm not on my interview mode my demo mode, too many modes. And now what I'm going to do is first of all I'll just come into the preferences. So if I click on the little button here you can see that we've got the preferences and we've got interview mode which we always did have in the preferences but you might notice that there are slightly fewer than before in this preferences and that is because some of these have now been moved over to the interview mode window itself. So I'm going to click on the interview window here to show and hide that particular panel. One thing to note is that interview mode is a pro feature. So if you are on the basic level then you won't have access to interview mode but it is part of the pro package. So now that I'm in the interview mode this looks pretty much as it did before. The only difference is that we've now got a little cogwheel here so we've got some specific preferences. So if I click on this one this will bring up a window and now what we can do here is a few things. Basically this top section is all about the white labeling of interview mode and being able to brand it in your own style basically. So previously when somebody clicked on your interview link it would take them through to a web browser which would say Ecamm Live at the top and then it would have some Ecamm Live logos and branding and stuff like that on it. Whereas now you can basically brand this to look like your own style basically. So the first thing that we can do to achieve this is in the top corner or in the top here you can add a page title. So this is where you can add whatever you want that will then appear in the browser bar when somebody clicks on your link. Next up you can add a logo and the guest has the option of either light or dark mode in their browser. So you can basically choose the logo that you want in each of those instances for light mode and dark mode. You could have a different logo for each. And then also you've also got the space here to add in an image. And this is basically a little bit like a thumbnail I guess. So when you send out your link to people if you send it out in messages or things like that you can attach a small image that will appear in place of the link or in addition to the link I should say. So when you send your link out to somebody this is the image that will then appear in their messages or wherever you happen to have sent them the link. So that just is another way that you can add branding to it. Next down here we've also got this guest link domain. Now previously we always used guest.ecam.live and then slash and then it would have your little unique code after it. Whereas now basically you can choose from a number of other domains. So if you don't want to have any ecam live in the branding you can give them one of these other ones. So call me now dot TV or call my dot show and then it would still have the slash and then your unique code after it. But it just means that you've got a few different options for how you can send the link out. Incidentally it doesn't actually matter which one you select in here. All of them do work at all times. So even if you have it selected here this is just gonna change the link when you actually go to the sharing to be able to share it with people. But you can always use any of these at any time. And you can always still do domain forwarding. So for example, I use takeonetech.io slash join and I just have that forwarding to one of these links here. Next up we've got some other settings which were previously in the main preferences window and that is this one default to dark mode. So the reason why you might want to have somebody's browser default to dark mode when they are logging in is just so that you don't get too much glare if they've got it on light mode then there might be a big white browser window. So from a lighting point of view maybe dark mode might be better. Next one is show view account and show viewer comments whether or not you want those to go through to your guest or not is up to you. And then we've also got turn off audio processing for guests, musician mode. So this one is if you toggle it on it turns off the audio processing. So it's basically activating what they call musician mode. And this is basically so that you get a clean unadjusted signal through from your guests. But in most cases it's best to leave that off just so that it does noise cancellation and stuff like that on your guests. But there's one extra feature which is a new feature here and that is this one allow private chat because we do now have a chat window with your guests. So this allows communication just between you and your guests before it was always a case of having to have some extra software you know whether you're using messenger, WhatsApp whatever the chat software that you were using to be able to communicate between the guest and the host during the show. Well, now we've got this little chat window down here. So if I click on that, it will pop up the interview chat. So now this is just another chat window and you can just use it as you would have before with the main chat and comments so that this is just a way to communicate with your guests. But what you can also do is obviously because now I've given this all nice branding for one particular show, that's great. But what about if I want to run a different show? Well, you can easily just come down here and click on new interview settings. So we've just clicked on the little down arrow next to the name of the show, click on new interview settings. And look, we've got a whole new setup so we could give this show a different name, a different logo and all of these sorts of things create that. And then basically it's just a case of choosing from the dropdown, which one you want to be using. Now, these are remembered. So whatever settings you set up in these are remembered on a profile by profile basis as well. So you will be able to just sort of hop into a profile and have everything set up and ready to go. So that is a summary basically of what has been added into interview mode. And I think that that is a great new features. It means you can basically brand this and use it a lot more as a business tool. I think that it just looks a little bit more professional with your own branding. And certainly the guest chat is a great new feature as well. So that was interview mode. And next up, we're gonna talk about, I was gonna say one of my favorites, but to be honest with you, these are all my favorites. There are so many great new features that have been added and it is really difficult to pick a favorite out of all of them. There is one that comes as part of screen sharing which you'll get to, which might just have pipped the others at the post to be my favorite. So with screen sharing before, let's just talk about how this was done in the past. So back into demo mode, I'll be in and out of demo mode all of today. I'm just gonna shut down the interview mode windows. Previously, if we wanted to do screen sharing, then what we would do is we would come up to the top here and then we would change the source of the scene. You can either have it as blank, a camera, screen share or video. So we'd select screen sharing and then we'd be screen sharing the screen that would take up the whole of the window. But then if we wanted to do things like have it over to one side or something like that and maybe a camera picture separately, like I did with my videos on this channel, then there's a few little workarounds really, to be honest, that you had to do with that. You could always share the whole screen or you could share an app. The problem with sharing an app is I use ProMouse, which is this little pointer tool. If I shared just a specific app, then Ecum Live is basically showing only the app to the exclusion of all other apps. And that meant that because ProMouse itself is an app, ProMouse itself wouldn't show up on the screen. So I could only really use ProMouse or one of these pointing devices if I was sharing the whole screen, which becomes a little bit complicated if you've got a big 4K display or something like that. So I got around this by having a secondary monitor and then it set the resolution much smaller so I could share the whole app, but it just didn't take up as much space on the screen or took up the full screen, but it was a smaller resolution, if that makes sense. But anyway, all of these issues have been solved. I don't need to use things like NDI ScanConverter, which was another way of sharing a particular app anymore because it's all just built in because what they have added is if I bring up my overlays panel, which is hidden away, one second, there we go. If I bring up my overlays panel down at the bottom where you can add overlays. So we've still got the picture, the animated overlay, the countdown timer, the widgets, the camera overlays and folders to organize your overlays and then also text overlays. But look here, we've got this new one, screen sharing overlay. So if I click on screen sharing overlay and that is going to share a screen and look at this, it's just giving away some of the other features. So let me just get rid of these for a moment and we'll come to those later rather than confusing the issue. So there I've got now a screen sharing overlay and that is as simple as that. And the other great thing about this is that we're not just limited to one, which we were before, I could easily just add on another one. Now, why would you want to screen sharing? Well, I'm not suggesting you'd want to share exactly the same thing in two places on the screen, but you could have one sharing one app and one sharing another app or a different part of the screen or something like that. But the other great feature that they've added, which actually solves my little pro mouse issue that I mentioned was if I come to my safari and open up safari, what you can now do is you can also crop in on them. So I'm just gonna get rid of one of these overlays because what you can do is if you hold down the option key, so I'm gonna come into Ecamm, I'm gonna hold down the option key and I'm going to crop in on this app. In fact, let me just put this up here because sometimes you want to show the menu bar as well, don't you? So let me just move this out of the way. What I'm gonna show you is I can crop in to this particular window like this, crop into there. So now we've just got just that window and now I'm gonna drag that over. And so now there we go. I've dragged into just the safari window. I'm also showing the menu bar up at the top and look at that, my pro mouse also still works on it. So if I just come out of demo mode, you can see that you can see my pro mouse, you can see the menus at the top and everything as well. So that is a great new little feature that they've added in and that ability to crop in really makes all the difference. Now, one thing just to bear in mind with the cropping which I just want to mention because I'm sure there'll be some people who actually think that this is a bug whereas in fact it is not a bug with Ecamm, it is a feature of Mac OS. And so let me just demonstrate this. I'll just actually toggle this one off for a moment. Okay, so there is a feature in Mac OS, which is if you are switching between different apps, so let me get up another app. I will just open up YouTube or Chrome rather. There is a feature in Mac OS which is this, if you are in one particular app and then you move over to another app, if you hold down option when you activate that second app, the first app disappears like that. So I'm now holding down option and look that one's disappeared. If I come back to YouTube, so I'll click in Safari and if I hold down option and click into YouTube, then Safari will disappear. Now the reason why they have that is because it might be the case that you maybe are limited on screen real estate or something like that or you just want something to close down when you're switching to another app and so you just want to be able to come over here and clear that one off the screen at the same time. And so option click is a thing in Mac that is a feature of the Mac. So how does this affect screen sharing and overlays? Well, the reason where it may occur because I'm sure that this will happen to some people if I don't mention it now is that if you have got a screen sharing overlay on, let's say this one, and let's say I want to crop into this window like this. And so I think, okay, then now I've, I'm in Safari, I've moved Safari where I want it. And now I want to adjust my window. So I'm gonna come over here and as you can see as I hover over Ecum Live, the Ecum Live interface brings to life and as I hover over this overlay, the board appears. So you may think that if I press option and drag this edge, this is going to allow me to resize this window. But actually what happens is as I press the option and start dragging, it's just hidden Safari because of that feature of Mac OS. So what you just need to make sure that you do in this case, so that this doesn't happen is I've been in Safari. And what you need to do is just make sure that as you come over to Ecum Live, just click into Ecum Live. So that becomes the active application and then do your cropping and then this will remove that issue from occurring. So it's just a case of making sure that you make Ecum Live the active application first. So again, I'll come into Safari if I click option to try and drag without making Ecum the active application, it'll disappear and I'm sure there'll be people wondering why on earth that is happening. But that is it, it's because a built-in feature of Mac OS rather than Ecum. So that is that, let me just move this out of the way. There is another amazing feature of screen sharing and it's one that I've actually been using all of this time that I've been talking and that is they have built in a green screen feature or rather added green screen to the screen sharing overlays. A feature that I requested and I'm really pleased to see that it was added in, not necessarily on my request but I hope that it had a little bit of help along with that. So let me just come and show you exactly how this works because as you can see, I've got some writing just down below me that says screen sharing and as you can see, it's also a hollow as well and that is a little trick that I've done basically using a keynote slide which looks something like this. If I just drag it down onto this other window, just drag it down here. You can see what is going on here actually. I've just simply got a slide and you can also see my mouse. Now that I move my mouse over that slide, it has been moved over the top of my e-cam screen as well. And that's because I've got this overlay here which is basically, let me just click in the settings. In fact, let me do it on here so you can see. If I click on the little pencil, you can see that this is a screen sharing overlay. I am sharing a specific application in this case which is keynote which is this slide output at the bottom here. And then I've just toggled on this green screen key. Now, if I toggle that off, what you'll see is we've just got the whole slide over the top. So if I come out of demo mode, you can see now you're seeing the whole of the slide from keynote rather. And if I toggle on green screen, it will just remove the green. So that is how I'm achieving that effect. And what that means is I've then got access to all of the animation and stuff like that that you can do in keynote and other applications. And I can just bring that directly into Ecam. So that is how I've done these little things in terms of the animations and so on and have this text animating in. It's all just done with keynote. And I'm using that as a live overlay over the top of my Ecam live. So that is how I did all of the other animations. And as you'll see, I've done a few other little silly animations a little bit later, but it's the way that I did the initial animation and stuff like that using the keynote animations, but just bringing them all into Ecam live. So that is possibly my favorite feature because I do a lot of course content and meetings and things like that where I do want to be able to give presentations and things like that, but the days of slides were long gone. I mean, really, they should never have been there the way that people used to do slides and presentations before, but being able to have text and points that you want to make coming in more as sort of dynamic parts as part of a more immersive experience, I think is the way forward. And this certainly makes that a lot easier. So there you go. I can see I'm just obviously assigned a stream deck button to do this. I've got a whole series of videos that I've created all about green screen, screen sharing, it's a bit of a mouthful. I'm still not sure that that's the right way around to say it, but anyway, I'll leave a link to those up in the top corner because there is a load that you can do with it and probably too much for me to cover just in this video alone. So let me just get this out of the way. Oopsie-daisy, there we go. So that is green screen, screen sharing. And yeah, the whole screen sharing thing in general is basically one of the reasons why this is a game changer because it just adds so much functionality to ECAM. But at the same time, it doesn't like bloat the ECAM program itself. It's a really great little feature that is. So that was screen sharing. Next, we're going to come on to cameras because there's been a few changes there as well. So the first thing is that they have added network cameras into the capabilities of it. So I don't personally use network cameras, but they have added sort of remote network cameras. So I know that this is used a lot in the church world where people are streaming their online services and things like that. And so there are remote cameras used there and it means that people can actually do the production remotely from where the events are happening. So that is another feature, like I say, not one I've experienced or used personally. The other thing that they've added in is support for NDI version five tools. So that was released. NDI five was I think around two or three months ago, something like that. And so that is now just natively supported in ECAM live and also support for M1 with that, which was what the NDI five was also supporting. So also there's a couple of features that have been added actually in the camera overlays itself. So let me just come into demo mode once again, as I say, I'll be back in and out of demo mode and I'll open up my camera window settings or camera effects because what has been added in here is a few things actually. First of all, they have added in down in the camera options down at the bottom. You've got the ability now to rotate a camera. So as you can see, I can rotate it like that. Obviously you might not want to rotate your main camera, but if you are using a top-down camera, then it's good to be able to rotate that sometimes, depending on how it's mounted. You might not be able to mount it in exactly the right orientation. So having this ability to flip things around, just makes a lot of sense like that. The other thing that you can do down here is there is this button here to apply to all scenes. Now this is great if you are making adjustments to your camera settings and then you've got the same camera used in multiple scenes and maybe you've gone in and applied a lot or applied different color corrections in here with the controls that are built in and things like that. Well now basically you can actually just go and apply that to all scenes and it will just apply that to every scene that that camera is used in. So just a great way to sort of speed up that process when you are making tweaks and things like that. The next thing that they added in here was in the zoom and pan as well. So you've always been able to zoom in and you've always been able to pan around by just grabbing the little box here. So I'm just over in this area here and you've always been able to just grab this box and move it around. Well now what they've done is basically if you hold shift when you are panning, it will lock it in either the vertical or the horizontal axis. So if I just hold down shift, then it's not gonna let me move it up and down. It'll only move it left and right. So actually this is quite good if you're trying to get your alignments right and keep things on a level and maybe panning across from one side to the other to get things set up. Another great use case for this would be if you are using one camera but simulating basically three shots. So maybe you've got two people on screen and you want to have that wide shot with both people in but then you want to crop in on one person on one side and one person on another. Well this would be a great way to do that cropping and make sure that you keep that level the same for both participants when you're cropping in on them. So just a small little thing. We've already been able to do that for quite some time now in overlays but now they've just bought it to the actual zoom and pan of the camera itself. The next thing that has been added into the cameras is actually something that a lot of people perhaps didn't realize is that there is support for a number of cameras to work just out of the box over USB with e-cam live even where ordinarily you might need software to do this. So for example, the camera that I'm using at the moment is the Canon EOS 60D, a 10 year old camera I hasten to add. But it just works over USB. Now that is not the case if I just plug it directly into my Mac over USB the computer doesn't recognize it as a camera. You can download the Canon EOS webcam utility which was released last year to allow you to use it as a webcam but that is a bit of software that you need to do that. Well, what I'm saying is that e-cam live has sort of got all of that compatibility built in for a whole range of cameras. So I will leave a link down in the description to the article in the e-cam support pages that tells you all about this and which cameras it is compatible with. So what that means is that when new cameras are bought onto the market, e-cam has to keep up with this and introduce compatibility for those cameras as well. And that is what it is added in this version as well. So we've now got compatibility for new cameras. So we've got the Fuji GFX 100S. So you can tell I'm going a little bit overboard on the animations, but it's just to prove a point as well. We've also got the Sony a7S III. Also the Sony a6600 and finally also the latest ZV-E10 which was recently released as well. So now basically plugging in from USB from any of those cameras will work directly into e-cam. So that is the summary of what's been added in in the camera support. Also, so it's not really cameras, but audio, the audio sample rate you'll be pleased to know is now 48 kilohertz. I'll be honest with you, I don't actually understand the exact significance of that. But for those that do, it will mean something and it's related to the sample rate that is used in editing software as I understand it. And so there's a bit more compatibility there, maybe I'm not entirely sure. But anyway, for those that care about these things or need to know about them, I'm sure that will mean something. But for me, it doesn't. So let me move swiftly on and act like I knew what I was talking about with that last point. And I'll come to the next point on the list of massive list, I should say, of updates. And that is related to overlays because this is probably the sort of section of this video where I'm gonna cover the things that have actually made this a game changer in terms of the way people use it. And all those things that I was talking about about not needing third-party software and stuff like that, it's all related to this section here that I'm gonna go into. And that is about overlays and the ways that you can basically format your overlays in ways that we just couldn't before. So I think it's easiest if I just go into demo mode and show this. And what I'll do is I'll actually just create an entirely new screen. I'll take off the camera effects and maybe I'll just make this a little bit bigger so that you can see what's going on. In fact, let me see if I can make that bigger still. Nope, we were nearly there. There we go. I'll move my overlays panel over to the other side just because now hopefully you should get full visibility of what's going on. I'm gonna create a new scene. So I'm gonna go into scene and then create a new empty scene. As you can see, I've got a background on. I'll come to that in a moment, but actually for the time being what I'll do is I will just turn that off so that we are completely blank. Now I'll go and I'm not gonna do anything as a scene source. I'm just gonna leave the scene source as blank. And what you might want to do is come into your preferences and then you can come into the general and then you can select whether you want the scenes to be, in fact, where have I got it? I've got it in here. Oh, there we go. It's actually in video, not in general. And the default source mode you can change here and you can either choose a screen share, a camera, or blank. So if you have blank, then every time you create a new scene it will just be blank like this because I don't actually use the scene source any longer. I just do it all with camera overlays and screen share overlays and so on. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come to the camera overlay button and I'm gonna click on that. So now I've got my camera overlay there and then what I want to do is I will leave my camera effect open one time. Hang on, let me get that open because I do want to just add my little green screen effect. So I'll toggle that one on, get rid of the brick wall and there we've got my background on. Okay, so we can obviously move this around and reposition it just like we've always been able to take one mic out of shot a little bit there. And then what we can do now though, that is a new feature is we can basically add some extra formatting that we couldn't have added before. And that is namely, if I come over to this little pencil we can add a corner radius, which you may have seen earlier on one of my scenes. So I can add this corner radius onto the, what's it Daisy? I need to actually just toggle this one on a second. I need to, I can add this corner radius here and you can see what's happening. It's basically adding a radius to the corners. But what I can also do is I can choose specific corners that this is being added to. So if I just want to have it on opposing corners, the top left, a top right and bottom left, then you can see that this is now being added there. So it just means that you can add a little bit of style to things. But also here you can add a border as well. So if I add a border, it will keep the outside edges of the overlay in the same place and just sort of shrink it down to add this border in. So as you can see, as I make the border thicker, the image just shrinks down in the middle of that. Then you've also got access to obviously the full color palette. So if I click on this one, then it should open that up somewhere and it's opened up on a different monitor. I am guessing just one second, I'll grab that. Where has it gone? I'm not finding it to move this one out of the way. Where's my color palette on? Ah, there it is. It is hiding on another monitor. So I'll bring that down and then obviously you can just change this to be whatever color you want and just pick it from the color wheel. So you've got access to all of the colors of the rainbow there. So you can make that whatever color you want. So that is how the borders work. And this applies to not just the camera overlays, excuse me, but it also applies to the text overlays and the screen sharing overlays as well. So you can make some really attractive looking scenes and we'll walk through how to do that in a moment. But what you can also do is if you click on the size here where we've got the widescreen, then you can do what you could do before, change to a square or you can change to a circle. But you've also got this new shape, which is a squircle. And a squircle is basically a cross between, I suppose, a rounded corner rectangle square and also a circle. And how this works is again, I can change the radius. And basically what it is, it's a sort of three radius curve. So you've got a sort of long radius starting curve and then it's got a tight radius in the middle and then another long radius taining out. But it just gives it quite a nice sort of aesthetic look that is not quite a rounded rectangle, but also not quite a circle. So it's just a nice little shape that I think looks quite pleasing on the eye there. So that is what we can add in in terms of the extra shapes, but I'll just come back to the custom one for now because it'll make it easier to demonstrate what I'm gonna talk about now, which is when you are laying out scenes. So if you think back to the olden days, just before this release, what we would have had to have done is we would have had to have thought about where all of our scene elements were going to go. And then we would have created some sort of graphical overlay that would have, that basically created our borders around our images and things like that. Whereas now basically we've got the border and we can just stick it wherever we want. And then what we can do is we can have a graphic in the background. So if I come over to my scenes tabs here, just close up some of these folders. Here we've got what is being shown in the current scene. Don't worry about there being two of me on screen at the moment. In fact, let me just change that right now. Let's change this and say that instead of being my main camera, this is gonna be guest one. So I'm basically building out a scene that is for me and one guest. So as you can see, you can just position these wherever you want. You don't need to bother about the actual borders or creating this in an external program. And then what you can do is just simply come down to the scene tabs and you can add these are in the current scene. Anything up in the top is shown in all scenes. But what you can do is you can come down here and just add a background image. So all I've got is just one image that is basically just showing in the background. But you can also change the look of everything by simply adding a completely different background image. And so that is how you can basically create different looking shows where you've got the same layouts but you're basically just changing the format or the colors or the things like that and just go in and change the border style and so on. So that is how you can easily build out scenes. So let's actually just try and do something a little bit less random than what I've got here because what I created was I created a little template that I've also got in the show in the background. And this is a template that I created that's basically a grid that allows me to lay out my scenes sort of on the fly and quite quickly. So let's say I was actually gonna do a three-person show with this background. I might want to actually just, let me just get rid of this one for now. I'm gonna actually change the border color for this. So I'm gonna change this to maybe more of a blue color. So I'll click on here and in fact, let's just pick a color out. Well, shall I just pick one of these gold colors from here maybe? So that's actually a bit yellow, isn't it? Let's go a little bit more gold with that. There we go. So that is now sort of in line with the background a little bit, the background colors. So we've just picked a color from the background. Let's make the border six on that and the corner radius. Let's make this, let's say 50. And I'm gonna just put this border on all corners for now. So now I've got this one image and let's say I'm gonna have three guests on. Well, what I did with this overlay template is I basically sort of split the screen into four with a gap between the four elements and that's what these white lines are. I've also split it into thirds with these red lines. So that means that if I want three people on this call, on this live stream, for example, then I can come in here, drag this one and maybe line it up like this with these ones. And then the other feature that has been added, which I can show you now, is basically option drag is going to be to duplicate something. So if I click on option and hold this, I can just drag it along and line it up with this one and then click on here. I'm gonna change this to be the guest number one. And then I'm gonna option drag again and then I can make as guest number three or guest number two rather. So change that there. And there we go. I've just created a three person layout. And as you can see, all of the alignment of everything, the gaps and things like that all look consistent. And I can just toggle that background off, that grid background. I've just got that linked to my stream deck. And so that looks all in proportion and aligned. I've also created, in my case, for my particular live stream, I've got a lower third, which I have popping up. And then that leaves space here for comments to pop in. And so that's the way I have my live stream set up. These colors now looking slightly off with this background. But there you go. So that is how quick and easy it is to create scenes. And incidentally, that template that I created, which I shall show you again, this one that just popped up in the background, this grid, you can grab that for free from my website. So I'll leave a link to that down in the description. It's just a PNG file basically. So if you want to modify it or create your own, then you can use obviously the same effect. And you just upload it, sorry, create the PNG file or download the file that I've provided. And then you just add that into your background over here. And so then you just toggle that on and off when you want to see it or not. And that is how you do that. So I'll just toggle off my lower third for now as well. And then I'll show you, shall I, how to build out a couple of other scenes? Because you may want more than just one, obviously. So let's go ahead and create another scene. But they've added a new way to do this. So if I just give this scene a name, I'll call this three up. Three up demo. There we go. Now you can also option drag, not just on the screen like I just did, but you can also option drag either in the overlays menu, but also in the scenes menu as well, in the scenes window rather I should say. So if I just hold down option and drag, you can see that it is just creating a new duplicate. Whereas before we had to go to the duplicate down here. So now we've got a new duplicate of that. So let's call this one screen sharing. And we're gonna create a little screen sharing scene here as well. The other thing that you can now do in the scenes window and also in the overlays window is you can also do copy and paste. So command C, command V to copy and paste. And incidentally, this does work across profiles. So if you've got something that you created in one profile and you think I really wish I'd got that in my other profile, you can just copy it and then change profile and then paste it into the new profile or your other profile as well. So that is a great little tip because often we create new things and then think, oh, I really want that in my other profile as well. So now I've got this duplicate. I've got my three up page here or scene rather. And then I've also got this one which is the one that I'm gonna modify. So actually for this one, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna delete these guests because I don't want those in there. So I'll just delete that, delete that and delete that. So now I've just got my base scene. I need to get my grid back up. So I'm gonna toggle that one on. And now what I'm gonna set up is a little screen sharing window. Now let's just say, let me just make this a little bit smaller. And let's say that I want to do a little demo of my stream deck. So I'm going to bring up my stream deck and I want to screen share to capture that. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come over to my overlays tab and I'm gonna add a screen sharing overlay. And you can see that it's basically defaulted to whatever the setup I had on the last overlay that I changed that becomes the default for the next scene, the next overlay, border and style and things like that. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click in here. I'm going to crop into my stream deck like this, crop into there. And then I'm going to put this up in the top corner. Now, another feature that has been added into this version is previously, if you wanted to scale something, you would always have to drag in the one of the corners and drag. Whereas now you can basically just drag from any side as well. So if I just grab the side, you can see the little arrow has appeared there. And then if I just drag that, it will scale the whole thing. So that's just a nice little feature because to be honest with you, sometimes it was a little bit finicky. And if you had something like this behind these buttons, you wouldn't necessarily be able to get to the corner to drag it. So that just makes it, in my mind, a lot more sort of user-friendly to actually get these things sized correctly. Now that look at that, that's actually almost exactly the right size, but I do just need to crop in the bottom to get it to align up with my little grid. And then I'll turn the grid off. And there we go. Now I've got screen sharing of my stream deck window. And then also I've got obviously my picture in it. And that just took a matter of seconds really, didn't it, to actually get it set up. In fact, if I hadn't been talking, I could have done it a lot quicker. This is what I'm talking about when I say that it is a game changer because you can now just create scenes that look like this in a matter of moments rather than having to go and plan them out, make them in another bit of software, create the transparency, bring in the overlays. You can just create something that looks like this just by having a simple background image. And like I said before, if you want to always change the look and feel of everything, you can always just change the background image. And in fact, if you really wanted to go super funky, what you could do, I mean, there's another look to it, what you could do is you could just add a video to the backdrop as well. So that would be something like this. So that is obviously a little bit over the top for my channel, I think, but there you go. I'm not sure I can carry this one off, but you just simply drag on a video into the background. You can get loads of free looping videos from sites like pexels, P-E-X-E-L-S.com. I'll leave a link to that in the description to just have sort of looping backgrounds. So it's for abstract background loops and you'll find all sorts of things like this that are just sort of continuous loops in the background. But I'll turn that off just for the moment. So we're not distracted. Here's another option and another one. The options are as limitless as the amount of stock footage and videos and graphics that you can download for the background. So another thing that they've added is related to text overlay. So let's just come back into demo mode for a moment. And we'll come back into here. I'll just take my camera off for a moment and I'll come back to my overlays panel. Let's move this over here, shall we? So we can see what we're doing. And I will add in a text overlay. Now this is just gonna add in a random bit of text to begin with. So there we go. I'll just move this over. Whoops, move this over here. So what can you do with text now? Well, there are a few things that have been added. First of all, the actual way that the text editing box appears has changed. So let me just make this a little bit bigger just so that you can see. When you go to edit the text, it used to be that this box here was always right over the top of the window itself. And that meant that when you were trying to edit things, first of all, you couldn't actually see in what you were doing. But it just made it difficult. Like if you wanted to, say, use the color picker, like click on here and actually select a color from the background, it was very difficult to do that because obviously you can't get access to the background to do it. Well, now what they've done is they've changed the way that this works. And there is a technical term for it, but I won't bother with that. It's now a modal sheet is the word for it. So that means basically that now with this change, this isn't actually over the top and you can actually move that out of the way. It seems a small little change really, but I'm sure that there were other people who found this a little bit frustrating before as well. So it's great to see that they have changed this. But now we've also got the corner raguses that we had in the screen sharing overlays and camera overlays. Well, now you can also add those effects to the corners of the text overlays as well. And then you've still got obviously margin and border which we had before. The other thing that they've added in here as well is also the animation. So you can have text fly in. So previously we could always have it fly in from the left and the right and we could also have sticker. Well, now they've added from the top and the bottom as well. So I just click from the right. And then basically the way that works is when you show the text or hide the text rather, let me show you, there you go, it flies out. And when I press it again, it will fly back in again. So another thing that they've added here as well is if I get some text boxes. So obviously we can actually make this look quite nice and add some style to it. So in terms of the, let me just make this a little bit smaller. You can obviously add these rounded corners. You might want to have bullet points that are coming in. And let me just make that a little bit smaller. I'll drag that one down and let's say I'll edit this one. Let's make the border a little bit, the edge a little bit narrower like this. And then I'll make this one. I'm obviously making this a bit of a hash of this and making it look ridiculous. I'm trying to make something that looks a little bit more stylish, but I'm actually making a mess of it. Let me align this one up like that. And then we could add another one in just directly above that and I'll take the border off that. There we go. Not the best of demos is it? I'll tell you what I'll do. I will direct you to building blocks with Ana Repulgence because they are far better at this sort of stuff. In fact, you've got them to thank for a lot of these features that have been added in, but that is how basically you can add some styling to your text. That looks a little bit ridiculous, doesn't it? Never mind. I think it's proved the point. But the other thing that you can do is now you can actually group your overlays. You could always add them into folders before, but let me show you how this works. So down in the overlays window, like this. So I've got these three text boxes. Well, now I can add a folder just like I could before and let's call this a text, grouped text. And then I can add these three overlays to that. So now they're in that group. Well, if I come and hover over this particular group and then I can come in here, there's a little lock symbol there. So if I click on that, it shows it or hides it as I hover over it. And now these items of text are now basically all grouped together and locked. So it means that if you are creating things where you're using text or you're using a combination of images and text and things like that, you can basically group these all together. It also works with other things like widgets and so on. So I've got a widget that I've got an overlay that is basically like a lower third and then a widget and some other widgets. And they're all just linked together and grouped. So it means that they're not going to go anywhere. And you can also obviously lock all of your different elements of that within that as well. So that is grouping of overlays. So what else has been added into the overlays? Let me think. Well, there is also speaking of widgets, there's a couple of things. So first of all, you could always use web widgets and these are basically just little HTML code snippets that you link to the code remotely. Well, now you can actually just add widgets natively on your computer, not natively, that's not the right word, but you can actually create the HTML widgets and just load them directly into Ecam Live that way as well. So that's another feature that has been added. But coming back to the web widgets, one issue that people sometimes had is they would take, if you activated an overlay, which was a widget, it would take some time for the overlay to actually trigger. So it'd actually be going out to the internet obviously and then have to load the widget up. So what they've added is a little feature, and if I just open up this panel, so I'm in my overlays, you can see here, this is my Buy Me a Coffee link and if I click on this little cogwheel here, what they've done is they've added this little option here to keep it running. So basically you can keep the web widget running in the background at all times. So even if it's not technically visible on the scene, you can actually still keep it persistent in the background so that you know that when you do activate it, it will be there and ready to go. So that is a nice little feature that they've added in there. Next, the other thing that they've added as well, speaking of overlays is contextual menus. So now if you right click on a particular object, you've got a contextual memory menu that allows you to lock, unlock, and so on. But also these things, it's the center back, center bring to front and duplicate. So you can also, as well as doing option drag or command C, command V, you can also duplicate text and things like that directly from there. And then also you can center back, spring to front and so on. And so that will just order things around. So you can obviously do that within the stack, as it were, in the overlays window. So you can just simply drag things up and that will adjust the order of where it appears. But yes, you can now just do that in here, bring something to the front just by clicking on the contextual menu. So it just sort of speeds up workflow when you're actually working directly in a scene and want to just edit things that way. So let me come back to my main scene for a moment. That is a summary of what has been added in overlays. And I think that I haven't forgotten anything in there, but as you can see, there is a whole load of new functionality that have been added. And it does make making scenes and getting your scene set up a hell of a lot easier. I suppose one thing that's sort of linked to overlays, it isn't really overlays. But I haven't got a whole section on scenes because it was all covered in overlays. But let me just come back. There is one other thing that has been added, which is the transition when you are moving from one scene to another. So we always did have this cross dissolve. We also had some silly ones like a copy machine. Let's not use that one. So if I turn on copy machine and then I go to one of my other scenes, for example, this one, it uses this little silly copy effect on it. So I'm not necessarily suggesting that you use that. But what you might want to do is use the other transitions which have been added, which is a slow cross dissolve and a slower cross dissolve. So if I activate this one and then switch between them, it just does a bit of a slower transition between the two. So if I come out of demo mode and then come back and go back into that, you'll see that that is just a much slower transition that has been added. So there are use cases where you may want to use that transition as well. So yeah, like I say, not strictly overlays is it, but it sort of feels a little bit linked. So I'm going to change that one back to cross dissolve. So that is basically where we are with overlays. So next up is streaming. And they've added a couple of things in here as well. First of all, you can now stream to Twitter. Now the way that this works is down in the bottom corner, you're not going to be able to see it now because I'm recording, but normally where down in the bottom right-hand corner, you can select the destination. So I'm currently recording, but you can also select that to stream, obviously to YouTube, to Facebook, to LinkedIn, to restream or to wherever. Well, now basically Twitter has been added as a destination to there as well. So you can just simply go there to stream to directly to Twitter, which is a nice little feature. And also if I come into the preferences related to streaming, obviously now along the top, you've got the other location of Twitter has been added in. And then you can toggle on here if you want low latency mode. So if your system can handle it and if you're really bothered about that sort of thing, then you can toggle this one on. It is off by default. And that just means basically the speed with which people are going to see what you're putting out. And it's just a matter of seconds difference between the two. But then also what they've added in is a Twitch ingestion location. And that is basically where the server is. So they had this before in LinkedIn, for example, you select what the server is closest to you. Well, now you can also do this with Twitch as well. So that's just another minor little thing that's been added, but may make a difference to some people. Next up after streaming is, well, it's gonna be one of my favorites because you know what a bit of a fanboy I am about this device as well, the Stream Deck. They've now added in four new actions into e-cam live, into the stream e-cam live Stream Deck plugin, I should say. So let's have a little look at those, shall we, as well. So I'll come over to my Stream Deck and come out of demo mode. That would help. So now you can see my Stream Deck. And first of all, I've got to say, I've got to give props to e-cam live because I think that they have got the most complete set of actions built into Stream Deck more than any other developer actually. I mean, I've looked through pretty much all of the other plugins that you can get for Stream Deck, but yeah, they've just got such a comprehensive list of actions and you can do almost, not quite everything, but almost everything can be programmed into Stream Deck, which is just fantastic. It just makes doing these sorts of videos and all the other things I do with e-cam so much easier that it's got this sort of deep integration into Stream Deck. So they have added a couple of things here. So let's go down the list and I'll show you which ones they are hard to find because as I say, there are so many different things in here. The first one though is show and hide overlays. Now there was always a little bit of an issue with show and hide overlays, which was when you were trying to show an animated overlay where it would maybe animate into the screen and then animate out of the screen. So an example of that would be my Buy Me a Coffee links. If I toggle this one on, you'll see that it pops out, it animates in and I can say if you're enjoying this video, don't forget to like and subscribe. No, seriously, do. And if you really enjoy my content, you can always head over to my Buy Me a Coffee page at buymeacoffee.com slash take one tech to support the channel. And as you saw, that has just popped into the scene and it has popped out again. Technically, it's not visible, is it? You can't see it. However, in reality, or in reality, it's not visible, you can't see it, but technically, it is still visible as an overlay because the animation has animated out but e-cam live is still seen as an overlay that is visible. So if I just come into my demo mode again, I'll show you what I'm talking about there, in our overlays panel, you can see these little sort of eye symbols. And if it's an eye with a cross through it, it means that you can't see it, it's not a visible overlay. But if it's an eye like that, then it is visible. So you can be in a situation where you've got something that you can't physically see on the screen but it is still actually technically visible as an overlay. And so what that meant was if you were trying to show and hide that previously with the stream deck and using the stream deck show hide overlay button, you would show the overlay, it would animate in and animate out. And then if you wanted to activate it again, you'd have to actually double press the button because you want to hide the overlay first and then press it to activate it again. And that issue has been solved because now they've basically added this button, play animation. And this allows you to just trigger any animated overlay regardless of if it's visible or not. So even if your overlay is still technically visible, pressing this will just actually make it play all over again and you don't have to worry about that. So that has sort of solved that problem. The next thing that they've added in is live demo mode. And so that was obviously always in here but now we've just got it as a button in itself. So when I'm toggling in and out of live demo mode, I'm just pressing the button on my stream deck and it's just toggling on and off like that and it's just built in so that is great. The, another button that they've added in, which is actually another overlay feature which I probably should have mentioned in overlays but let's mention it now, shall we? Let me just see if I've got some comments up. I haven't actually got any comments to show but basically there is now a button to show and hide, or sorry, to show the last comment. So if I come up here, previously we did have a button to hide the comment. So whenever you put a comment onto your screen, if you're watching a live, if you're running a live stream or something like that, you'll see comments coming in, you can obviously add those to your scenes. That's nothing new. And there was always a button to hide the comment as well. Well, now basically they've added a button to add the last comment as an overlay. And that's basically if you look at your comments window and you've got comments coming in, then the most recent comment, you can now just click a button quickly to add that onto your stream and then obviously hide it in the same way as you could before. There is a keyboard shortcut for that as well. So that is Command K. So the same, we had before Command J to hide the comment. Well, now you've got Command K which can add the most recent comment in. So that is something else that has been added. And the last thing that has been added is a sort of an addition really to an existing button, which was the mute button, which is somewhere, let me find it now, down here, the mute button. And I've actually already added it onto my stream deck here. So if I click on that, what you can do is you can actually select what it is that is being muted. So we've got my primary mic, but you can also choose between any of the guests, sound effects, Skype, system audio and things like that. So what that means is you could in theory, if you had regular shows with multiple guests, you could actually just create buttons for each of your guests and so that you've got mute for guest one, guest two, guest three, so that at any time you would be able to mute them if you've got the sort of shows where you have rowdy guests. One noisy backgrounds, then you could always add those in, but it's just a nice little additional functionality that's been added that you can actually select the specific audio source that is being muted. Now, I think that with that, I've almost covered everything, but don't you agree that that is a pretty, pretty packed out set of updates that have come in. And it really is a massive game changer. I did a video a few months ago back now that was called the zero to hero tutorial for Ecom Live. And it was basically showing how you would go from a complete blank set up of Ecom Live, create all of your scenes, create all of the graphical overlays to make the borders and things like that in keynote and then add the transparency, import them all into Ecom Live, then went through and created the stream deck icons in keynote as well and added all those to stream deck. And basically it got everything set up from start to finish basically how to create your production environment ready to go live or ready to click that record button. It was a four and a half hour video. And yes, some people did watch it and I appreciate that and that they appreciated it as well in some cases. Well, basically with what has been added into this new update, I'm gonna redo that video and I can tell you now it will be less than half the time because the features that have been added really are game changing in terms of the accessibility and the ease of which you can now do this because people are gonna be learning basically one program instead of having to think about learning keynote or maybe look outside for downloadable overlays and all those sorts of things. So it really is a great game changer. I have a lot of admiration and respect for the developers and all the hard work and effort they've put into getting this product to where it is now. And as I say, this is a 3.9 release. I can't wait to see what's coming in 4.0. I hope you have found this useful though. And if there's any features that I've missed, do let me know because I did rattle through them. I don't really use scripts or anything like that in these. So I'm thinking that I've got pretty much all of them but we'll see. As I say, I've been using this day in, day out throughout all of the betas. And I always kept thinking that like with every beta release, this is the final version but they kept piling in more and more features. So I'm just really pleased that it's finally made out to the masses and everyone can get producing their content. So that's all for this video but I will leave a link to some other great e-cam live videos over on the right hand side. And so stick around because there's some more great content coming up next but until I see you again, have a wonderful day.