 If you want to be able to draw on your screen during Zoom or Teams meetings much like this to add annotations, diagrams or whatever it might be then there is a great app for the iPad called Video Pencil which I highly recommend. Now I'm using this with Ecamm Live and so in this video I'm going to talk through some of the features of this Video Pencil app and also how to set it up specifically for Ecamm. But just know that it can also be used as a completely standalone app if you are literally just wanting to use it to draw over the top of your camera again in Zoom or Teams because there is a Mac app that goes with it and if you need it that can then basically feed in any camera into this allow you to draw on the screen and then have that feed into Zoom or Teams. I'll talk about that a little bit later on as well. There won't be a full tutorial on that but I will talk about how you can do that. But one of the things that I love about this app over other methods that I've done previously for on-screen Telestration writing on the screen is the fact that you do actually see the output from the camera or in this case from Ecamm on the iPad itself. So what it means is that I can see exactly where I'm drawing. So I don't need to guess if I want to just draw around my microphone windshield there. I can just get that pretty much exactly and then if I wanted to highlight the logo I can draw on that as well. So it's just that's the thing that really sets it apart from those other methods is this sort of accuracy you've got in terms of where you are drawing where you are writing. Another thing that's great about it is it is completely wireless if you're using it over NDI. I've got it plugged in at the moment just because a bit later I'm going to be sharing my whole iPad screen to show you how it works but normally in day-to-day use I don't have this plugged in to the computer. It's just completely wireless and then occasionally plugged into a charger or whatever. But yeah lots of great things to say about it so I'll be talking through that specific setup process for my use case on Ecamm and some things to watch out for in terms of things that might catch you out in the setup because there are a couple of little things that might catch you out there. So let's go through the setup process. Now I've talked about using it completely wirelessly and mentioned NDI. Well NDI is a transfer protocol for transferring video over a network. So first thing you do need to make sure is it is on the same network and obviously you've downloaded the app itself but then assuming you have done that I'm going to walk you through basically three or four different steps to actually set this up to be able to work with it exactly the way that I'm working with it right now. So step one is to actually make sure that Ecamm is broadcasting the output from Ecamm over NDI. So that would be by coming into the output menu just up in the top here and then you want to make sure you have got the NDI output as switched on so the default will be off but just make sure it's on. Now because all I'm using this for is to basically just see an overview of my Ecamm output I'm not actually bothered about the quality that's received by the iPad so I've just set that to the lowest so there's less bandwidth being taken up technically so it's not really important to me the resolution that's coming into the iPad. Once you have turned on the NDI then the next thing you want to do is just come over to the iPad app and I'm just going to switch off some of these things for a moment on the iPad but when you look at the app in the top corner there you can see where it says media you can actually bring in photos, videos and things like that into the app I don't use any of that functionality because all I'm using this for is just being able to write on top of my screen I don't want to use this for any video or image production or anything like that although it does have those capabilities. So I'm just using this camera setting here so if you look at the where it says cameras when you first switch it on you'll likely just see the back camera, the front camera, front ultra-wide so this does give you access to the cameras on your iPad once again a functionality that I'm not using but you could technically be using this as your camera to go into zoom this is kind of an evolution, this whole app is a bit of an evolution of another app by the same developer Michael Forrest another app called Shoot which enables you to use your phone or iPad as a camera so you can actually apply these effects that I'm doing with drawing on the screen have it so that you are using it as your actual camera and also drawing over the top of it and illustrating directly onto it that would seem a bit weird to me to be using it as my camera and reaching out to draw on the screen but nevertheless it is there as a function I'll come back to the camera setting in a moment first of all I do want to go into the actual settings which is also in that top left corner there and when you go into the settings first of all you'll come into this screen where it links to the help and support user guide all of that kind of stuff and a lot of people get here and they see this one which is get the video pencil camera for Mac thinking that they actually need that to work with Ecamp this adds some functionality which I'll talk about a little bit later but I personally haven't used that I don't use that app, I just use it completely wirelessly I know that some people that I've had their coaching calls with and certainly in the Take One Tech Academy as well we had a whole session where we went through trying to troubleshoot some issues that people were having I've found that just using it completely wirelessly without the app is actually the best approach to take and certainly less less little stumbling blocks in there so I've kind of skipped all the way past this and then down at the bottom you'll see where it says NDI that's the one that I would say you want to go if you want to use it the same way I'm doing and here you've got a few options so first of all NDI bandwidth I've set that to high quality so I've got the high quality feed coming from here back into the Ecamp NDI output again toggled that one on so that is basically sending the we've now turned on NDI in the Ecamp itself to send the incoming stream into the iPad and now we want to send the NDI output also over what we're creating in the what we're drawing on the iPad send that back into the Mac as well so we turn that one on I've got 1080p there I mentioned before with Ecamp I'm not bothered about the resolution but what this resolution is is for the return feed so this is the actual resolution of the drawings or the writing that we're doing on the screen so for that I do want that to be the highest resolution possible so that's why I've selected NDI output on and 1080p the next one down here NDI transparency that is because we only want to really send the drawing part back to Ecamp so whilst we've got the input coming from Ecamp we don't want to be sending that back to it again so turn on the transparency so that all that is being sent over NDI is basically whatever we draw on the screen so these are the settings that I would recommend to be doing what I'm doing basically everything on and highest quality possible in short now when you have turned on NDI what you'll notice is if you come back to this camera selector you'll see that in the camera options as well as the cameras that are built into the iPad you'll also see that you do have this Ecamp Live and then it'll have the name of your your Mac you've got Ecamp on now you can just tap on that it's going to give you this weird sort of view to infinity if I do that right now let me just do that though just to show you if I tap on my Mac it should bring it in and you'll see this kind of now basically it's bringing in the Ecamp view in here it's looking like this right now I'm sharing my screen normally you won't see anything like this what you'll see is just basically the output from Ecamp will be coming directly onto the screen and this is where I was up before where I could just basically draw on the screen and you would normally see that but you can't see that right now because we've missed out a step we've got to add this step I've been able to add that in as an overlay so that's the next step then step three which is to come into Ecamp so if I just share my Ecamp screen with you again and although we are technically writing on a screen it's an iPad screen isn't it but Ecamp is seeing this as a camera so in order to add this into Ecamp we need to add it as a camera overlay let me just change to a scene for a second that's maybe got no border on it which one this one it might make it easier to sort of see this and I'm going to add a camera overlay so in Ecamp I'm just going to come to the bottom here new camera overlay and it will add in a default camera which happens to be exactly the same one there I'll just make it a different size on the screen though and here if you go to the camera picker click on settings video source live streamer cap 4k is the video capture card the moment that I'm using however what we want to change it to is video pencil now if you look in this list here because I've got the iPad mini plugged in over a cable it is actually showing up in itself so that is not the one we want this one here that has video pencil in brackets at the end of the device name so that's the one that you'll look for it will be the name of your iPad and then it will have the video pencil in brackets so we want to change that over to that and now actually you can see that effectively I've got an overlay and it's transparent we've got that box around it and that is then coming into Ecamp so now what we need to do is just kind of position this on the screen but before I do I'll just mention something an issue that some people seem to have had or some people have had which is that they may see that there is a kind of like solid background to it like that and the reason for that is if you've got a border selected on the overlay because whenever you bring a new overlay into Ecamp it will just use the sort of previous settings that you've had so if previously you had some sort of border width going on on that screen the way that Ecamp implements borders is actually to effectively create a full block behind the overlay of whatever colour you select and then it just sort of shrinks the overlay within that slightly to give the effect of there being just a border around it if that makes sense but that's because Ecamp is not expecting to receive a transparent input like that and so that's why you basically have this issue and so if I was to have come in here and changed that border to a different colour you can see that it doesn't look like a border to you but that's because the input coming from video pencil is transparent so just know that if you've got any kind of solid colour going on in the background there that you just need to come into the border width section here and just reduce that border width and as soon as the border width goes down to zero then that does completely disappear and now you can see it's just completely transparent with that bounding box the other thing that you may want to do that may catch you out slightly is just double check that you don't have any corner radius because if you have a big corner radius on there as you can see it would technically clip the top corners of anything that you draw on the screen so for me personally it makes sense to have zero border and zero corner radius as well and then what you want to do is we need to just align this on the screen because if you don't have it completely filling the screen then what you'll get is this slightly weird effect where when you look at the output on video pencil I don't know if you can see that but basically I've got a kind of duplication of that little squiggle so there's the one where is it there the one that I've actually drawn on the screen but then we've got this weird little duplicate of it off to the side and anything that I do draw on the screen will have the same effect of being sort of duplicated elsewhere on the iPad mini screen it's a little bit hard to see it's trying to focus on my eyes but basically what we need to do is make sure that as I say the overlay in Ecamm is completely aligned with the actual main window so let's come and do that I'm just going to grab this and move it until it is lined up with the top then move it till it is lined up with the left hand side there and then come and grab the bottom right hand corner and drag that all the way out oh my thing is disappearing off the screen there drag that all the way down to this bottom right hand corner so now that it's completely filling the screen and here you can see that's where it's appeared here is this overlay iPad mini video pencil it's completely filling the screen so always just make sure that it is completely full like that and maybe center it horizontally and vertically as well so just notice that there is there is a vertical line that comes when you are lined up with the vertical plane and horizontal when you are lined up with the horizontal plane like that so like that there we go just get it exactly right and then you'd want to come and lock that overlay so here video pencil just click on lock you might want to rename that as well so you may want to just call it video pencil and the other thing to do is just make sure that you have got this showing in all scenes so in Ecamm you do have the option of putting things either in the background or you can have them in the current scene only but what we want is we want this to be in show in all scenes because then we can just toggle it on and off whenever we need it and know that it will always be there so just make sure that if it has come into this showing current scene just drag it right up to the top so it's literally at the very top of the stack and then you know that you'll always be able to write over the top of absolutely everything then so then the next thing to do then once you've got that overlay is to then go and add an action to your stream deck to be able to show and hide that so I'm just going to get rid of this for a second but if I go over to my stream deck then we can go to the Ecamm plugins here or the Ecamm plugin, go to the actions and look for show hide overlay drop that button onto there and then go to where it says overlay just down here and you're going to pick the name of the overlay which we've just given it the name video pencil conveniently it always brings in the top one of the whole stack so if video pencil is at the top it will just naturally default to that but if not just go and find it and pick it and then what that means is so I'll just draw something on the iPad screen, you're not seeing it right now but I've just drawn around all those little actions but when I press the button on the stream deck that we've just created it basically toggles this on and off so for me that is a really simple setup what it also means is you could create a scene that is specific for a whiteboard so I've got a scene that's just like this this is kind of my virtual whiteboard and then as long as I've got video pencil toggled on then basically I can just draw my little diagrams and things like that so those are the four steps essentially turning on NDI on your eCAM on your Mac then turning on NDI on video pencil then coming back into eCAM and just bringing in that camera overlay and making sure it's all aligned and everything on the screen and then creating that button on the stream deck to toggle it on and off it is as simple as that so with the actual drawing tools themselves let's just take a quick look at those so if I just change out of here so that it's not going to repeat on you, I've just kept it as a sort of completely blank background here just to make it clear the tools down at the bottom we've looked at the settings at the top then the tools down at the bottom is going to look familiar to the Apple Notes tools actually the developer sort of redid this to look the same but with some added functionality so if I tap on any one of these pens there's basically five pens at the bottom there and I can just cycle between them if you tap on the active pen you can change the size of it I like how the actual size of the pen underneath increases in size based on the size that you've got so it's very clear what size pen you're using then you've got the colour picker so you can use either just a grid pick off one of those colours you can use the spectrum picker or you can use this sliders and then there you can see you can also enter a hex code so if you want to use your specific colours you can do that in there as well also here if I just draw a little squiggle on the screen you've got undo and redo so I can press those those are the tools to the far left of the toolbar there undo and redo you can go back quite far so I could go all the way back to the thing that was on the screen at the beginning like that as well or go forward again then also next to those five pens you've got an eraser tool so I can click on the eraser tool and then I can just undo something like that as well you've also got this selection tool here so if I wanted to select something from the screen you can actually do that and then move it round so I'll just undo that so if you want to move things around you can do that as well and also sort of reposition them on the screen next to that is this little add-in now this is an in-app purchase and by the way this app is free to use with a watermark but to remove the watermark it's an in-app purchase quite rightly to keep the developer's lights on and keep him developing but there is an in-app purchase as well for a laser pointer which is I think three dollars or three pounds or something like that and that enables you to just basically point on the screen so useful if you just want to highlight something then you can use that little laser pointer for that as well there are the clear drawings so that it's going to clear everything there are these three little dots here that enables you to so either share the drawing one of the things I've put in as a feature request is kind of multiple pages I would love to be able to have multiple pages that I can sort of swipe through and then at the end of the meeting just export all of them as a PDF so I don't know whether that'll make it in but at the moment all you can do is you can share an individual drawing so if you've done something on the screen and you want to sort of share that little whatever it is doodle or whatever click on share drawing and then you've got all of the regular sort of sharing just share sheet essentially draw with finger so that is an option that you can toggle on and off if you just want to be able to draw with your finger you can do that in there and then the other one that they've got here is live titles now that's an interesting idea it's not something I use too much to be honest but I'll just show you what it is nonetheless if you've got live titles switched on and then you select a line tool and then you see that there is this little T icon next to where it says so you've got this one here if you tap on that then you can choose the language and then you can choose the font and everything but basically what happens is if I draw a line and then speak it will actually put the text in itself so if I go like this, hello then there you go and basically what's going to happen is it will fill the length of the line with that word useful in meetings so it is good for putting if you want to put headlines points or things like that but you'll see there that the text is very in different sizes depending on the length of the line and the length of the sentence it's going to put in but it is a nice little feature nonetheless but like I say, not one that I use too much I've got other ways of doing this kind of thing but I do like the fact that it's there you can see also because I use the Thai language on my iPad it has also got that so if I speak in Thai it will actually add in decent Thai subtitles as well so those are the sort of built-in controls for annotating and I really like the direction this is going like I say it is actively under development and once again going into settings and going into help and support and go to that Discord up at the top there you'll be able to go and join the Discord and put in feature requests and stuff like that so it's great to see apps that are under active development now I've mentioned the way that I'm using this completely wirelessly I do just need to touch on the app though because I talked about that and how I don't personally use the app but what the app does is in exactly the same way that I'm bringing in my camera from Ecamm and I showed you how you can see that in the camera list if you've got the app installed on your computer what you'll see on your iPad is instead of just the front camera, back camera and the NDI camera you will also see all of the other cameras you've got on your computer and the way that that might be useful is if you aren't using Ecamm but you just want to be able to annotate that you've got normally going into zoom so let's say you've just got whatever it is, either a webcam or whatever kind coming in over a capture card into your computer and you normally take that directly into zoom well now that can go into here and you would just see the output of that camera on your iPad but then what you have is you have the video pencil camera will show up in zoom assuming you've got the app installed on your Mac that will show up in zoom as a camera itself and so instead of selecting your actual camera you will select the video pencil camera in zoom and basically what's happening is the feed from that camera is coming into your iPad but then the video pencil app is then taking your annotations from the iPad and sort of adding that in to then go into zoom and so you can do all of the same sort of on-screen annotation as I've just talked about just directly onto any camera that's going into zoom teams or wherever it happens to be and technically that is a little bit more of a lightweight solution from a networking point of view because basically it's all it's doing is taking that transparent overlay and adding that into the feed that is going to your communication zoom or whatever it happens to be but like I say for me and for e-cam users I find that that is just a little added layer of complexity and so the way that I've just talked about doing it would be the way that I'd recommend going for sure so if that is something that is of interest to you I'll leave a link down in the description to the shoot app highly recommend checking that out and I'll also leave a link to some other sort of zoom related videos over here on the right hand side as well hope you find that useful if you've got any questions feel free to drop them in the chat or join the take one tech discord and join the conversation over there