 If you've been waiting for the day when you could do multi-camera live streaming and recording on your iPad, well, the wait is over. Today is the day that Camo Studio has been released, and it's obviously from the fine folks that have bought us Camo, and it is really quite phenomenal. And this is all possible because of the latest version of iOS, iOS 17 for the iPad, which now allows us to connect external cameras. So take a look at this. Here I am with my iPad mini. Yes, just a mini. It doesn't require M-series chips for this to work. This is the latest generation, albeit, but the iPad mini 6. I've got here my U-Green USB-C dock for the iPad, and this has got a number of different ports on the side of it. So first of all, I've got my power going in here, but then I've got these two USBs. And one of them is the RODE Streamer X. So suddenly, what is already a pretty phenomenal device as well, the RODE Streamer X, has now suddenly got a whole new use case, which is a mobile streaming rig plugged directly into your iPad. Because as soon as you plug the Streamer X into your iPad, you suddenly get your capture card functionality in here. So I'm bringing my camera in. I'm actually doing some splitting here with my cameras so that I can record in e-cam to show you this demo, but also it's obviously all coming into the iPad as well. So this here is coming directly from the Streamer X. My camera is going into the Streamer X. Then over USB, it's going straight into the iPad. That's how my camera is getting into here. Incidentally, the camera that you're seeing on the right-hand side of your picture, I'm using the pass-through from the Streamer X. And then I'm taking that into my computer and in through a capture card, another secondary capture card. So that's on getting duplicates going on here. Obviously, in this scene that you're seeing right now, on the left-hand side, we've got my top-down camera. Well, wouldn't it be great if we could also have my top-down camera coming directly into the iPad as well? Well, guess what? We've got this little scenes tab here. If I switch over to this view here, you can see that now we've got on the iPad, we've got a side-by-side that's pretty similar to what you're seeing in the video right now. But just know that this is completely separate. This is what's happening in Camo Studio on the iPad. And the way that I'm getting that in is I've got a cam link here from Elgato, and that is just plugged in over USB as well into this dock here. So that's it. Power going in, the Streamer X going in for audio and for video, and then the extra camera going in there. Obviously, if you've got a different kind of dock with multiple different inputs, I actually have got an extra USB so I could bring another camera in if I wanted. But there's no sort of limit. I can say there's no limit to what you could connect. There is probably a limit. You get the idea, though, you can bring in your external devices. You also have access to your built-in cameras as well. If you think that I'm going to sound a little bit excited about this, I pretty much because what this means is think about this from a compact streaming setup. I mean, you can bring in also like an external device. So let's say that you've got a gaming PC or something like that, and you want to bring that in, or maybe you've got a presentation slide deck and you want to bring that in. Then you can bring external things into here as well. So it's not just for cameras. You can bring those external things in, have you're streaming your gameplay with your camera and you're just running everything from your iPad. It's pretty, pretty amazing. And from a mobile point of view, I mean, if you wanted to simplify this further and you didn't want to have all of the functions of the Streamer X, for example, you could just use a cam link and then use something like the PodMic USB. So you're still getting your great audio, obviously, or using something like the Rode Wireless Pro. If you wanted wireless mic setup, that could just plug directly into here as well. No end of options here. But let's take a look at how this is actually working from the app's point of view. You've seen me sort of pull out this thing with the scenes window, but let's talk through the full interface. So this is what the interface is looking like right now. So let's start at the bottom, shall we? That's panel that I pulled up. So that's called the scenes panel here. And you can see that I can switch between these different scenes that I've got set up. And that's how I switched from that one, which was my split screen there to this one, which is my main camera. So there we go. We've just switched the scene. I'll talk through how to actually build out scenes in a moment, but let's just talk through the full interface first and then we'll come back to that. Over on the right-hand side at the bottom, I can swipe up. And there we've got the stream panel. So this is going to be for when you're live streaming, for the live streaming chat and things like that. And depending on what you're hooked up to and what you're streaming to, we'll dictate sort of what you've got available to you in here. I've got my mouse connected. So it should help to actually just show you on here my iPad mouse. Over on the top row, let's take a look at what we've got on the top. So there is, first of all, a little sort of pop out side window. This is related to everything in the current scene. So this is where we're going to select our cameras, the audio and a few other different things. But I'll come back to this in a moment. Next to that, we've also got this little pencil icon. This is a brilliant feature because what they've done is they've just added in on-screen note taking. I'm a huge fan of this. I use it when I'm using Ecamm. I use Video Pencil is the app that I used to do that. But here, if you're streaming from your iPad, you've now just got it sort of built in. So here we've got the pencil selected. I could be obviously using my Apple Pencil. But if you want to annotate on the screen, you can do that. Obviously, probably something a little bit more useful from a squiggle. But if you're live streaming and want to draw a diagram or flowchart or whatever it is, you can do all of that on here. So it's just sort of built in. So that's a great little feature in itself. Coming along to the center here then, you've got the recording settings and the streaming settings. If I just hit the little recording pop down here, then at the moment it's recording to library. Obviously, I've got this iPad dock plugged in at the moment from Ugreen. So I could have an external drive plugged into there. So you could be saving this recording directly to an external drive rather than your internal, which is a great feature as well. To be able to have a couple of cameras connected streaming to an external drive, what an amazing sort of very, very portable mobile solution. Next is the streaming setup. So clicking on here, then you've got at the moment, I've only just linked it up to my YouTube channel. It will show you a list of different streams that are upcoming. So if you've got some scheduled, you can just select those from in there. But you can also click on new broadcast and you can actually create the new broadcast from here as well. So you can just type in your title description, the time, the schedule, the visibility and all of that kind of stuff. So you can actually just schedule it directly from in here. If you want to add in another destination, you can also just click on the little plus icon here. So at the moment, you can stream directly to YouTube, Twitch or Trovo. I've got to say, it's not one that I've heard of personally, but then you've also got custom. So you can just put in your RTMP settings. So in that respect, you can effectively stream to anywhere using your RTMP key. Also along the top here, we've got this little slider here, which is your muster volume. Obviously, I mentioned that the Streamer X is plugged in. That is where my audio is coming from. I've actually got a second mic, which is plugged into the Streamer X. My PodMic is plugged into my roadcaster for this recording. But just note that the audio is coming directly in from the Streamer X over the mic that I've got plugged into that. So I'll just move that out of the way, though, but this is where you could adjust the sort of muster recording, muster stream volume from here. Next to that, then, we've got some settings. I'll go through these in more detail a little bit later, but that is the settings area. You've got a little help section. And then you've got this one, which basically just maximizes the screen. So if you want to get all of that interface off the screen, then you can just tap that one in the top corner and get it all out of there. So maybe the best thing then to do is to actually go through and talk about the way that these scenes are built up, because there's a few little things that you need to be aware of. And then we'll go through how to set these things all up. So the first thing to know is that although you can have multiple cameras connected to your iPad, and there's obviously the built-in iPad cameras as well, in any given scene, you've basically got two cameras. So there's camera A and camera B. Sorry, camera one and camera two. Let's talk with the right language. So you've got camera one and you've got camera two. There is then also the background. So you can see that in this particular scene that's showing at the moment, there is this background lighting effect going on. That is actually just a video. So that can be either a looping video or it can be a still image as well. So actually this is just a little Adobe stock image. And then you've got the camera one. The camera two is if I go over to that other scene there. So this one here, we've basically got two cameras. So we've got camera one. In this instance is actually that top down shot and the camera two is my main camera. Note that as well, camera one is always going to be behind camera two. So it's just worth noting this so that when you're building out your scenes, you think about where you want things to be. Obviously it doesn't really matter in this particular scene because these two things are side by side. It doesn't really matter from a layer perspective which one is in front of the other. But if I was to go to this scene for example, you can see now it does actually matter which one is which because we've got my main camera as in my camera that I'm in is actually over the top of that top down camera. So just beware of these layers. You've got the background with the image or the video. You've then got the camera one and then you've got camera two. There is actually another layer going on though, which is anything that's going over the top of that. So overlays over the top of your cameras. Now in fact, this little border that I've got around my image here is in fact rather than a border on the camera itself. You can see that it is just actually an image of a little circle there that the camera is in and that is an image that is over the top of the scene. So you've got those four different layers. Then you've got the background. You've got camera one, you've got camera two, and then you've got the image that is over the top. So then let's go into have a look at how to change some of these things and I'll probably start with this top down and side by side one because what I'll do is if I go into this settings here on the top left, this is going to give us the pop out. This is where we've got all the settings related to this scene. So first of all, we've got the camera one, then we've got camera two and these are basically five little panels here, sorry, four little panels. So you've got camera one, camera two, camera one second. My iPad's a battery, although it's on charge. It just keeps tethering around the 10% mark and you've got the microphone there and then you've got the background settings. So I'll start off with the background since we are in this particular thing. This is where you're going to set what is in the background of your scene and obviously I've got this sort of animated, colorful thing going on in the background and here is where I selected that. So you can select image or video. So if I go into here, I could select one of these other things instead. So if I go to office wall, for example, that's a bit plain. You probably can't see what's going on there. Maybe go to roof. These are just some of the built in ones actually, but you can just select any image from your iPad as well. So if you've got some sort of background image, you can just go into the background, your photo library, sorry, or you can go into this background gallery which has got a whole series of different ones. So let's just choose that wavy one. That looks a little bit more interesting. So now you can see that that wavy background then is in the background of this particular scene. Moving elements around on the screen like the cameras is as simple as just tapping and moving. So I'll move that one around and I can move this one round. I can resize by just pinching so we can easily sort of layout where we want these things in the scene just like that. Clicking back on this little panel at the side then. The other thing that you can change in the canvas settings is also the resolution. So you've got 1080, 30, 1080, 60, 4K, 30 frames per second. Or finally, you've got the vertical video there which is in the 1080 vertical. So 1080 by 1920 and then 30 frames per second as well. So then also you can just change the, by the way, the color as well. So if we didn't have an image in the background so if I just chose none, then you can just choose any color if you just want a plain color in the background just by tapping on that. But let me just put it back to something a little bit more interesting. I'll go back into that background gallery and just choose that one again. So then we've also got the audio settings in here. So whilst we've got this side panel out, we've got this one for the microphone. This is where we're going to select the mic that is coming in for this particular scene. One thing to note there, it does make it very abundantly clear. Only the most recently connected audio device can be used for audio input. That must be some sort of limitation with iOS, the way that it handles audio coming in. But basically what that means is that if you've got the StreamX for example and a Cam Link, bear in mind that Cam Link can pass audio as well. If you want to use the audio from your StreamX, all you need to make sure you do is just plug that one in the last of the devices or unplug it and plug it back in again and it will be the most, the one that you can access apart from obviously the built-in iPad microphone. So that's how I've got the StreamX bringing the audio in. So then we've got these camera settings. So camera one and camera two. As I mentioned in this particular scene, camera one is actually that top-down shot and camera two is the main camera of me. So what we can do here is we can choose any camera that is connected. So if I click on camera here, you can choose either a camera or an external device. So if that's what I was saying, if you're sort of passing through maybe gameplay or something like that, then you could pass that directly into your iPad that way. But here we've got a camera selected. So then just down below that, you can choose the camera and you can either choose the built-in cameras from the iPad or any one that is connected. And as you can see here, we've got the cam link selected. Down below there, we've got some image enhancement options and probably is better if I go over to camera two because it will make a lot more sense in that context. So camera two here is my camera, but we've got exactly the same options, but just note that the StreamX is the camera that is selected. But here you can do a number of things. So first of all, you can actually just remove your background. So if you want to do something where you are over the top of a scene, this is sort of catching the microphone. But you can see it's doing a pretty reasonable job of removing the background from around me. So if you're doing something where you wanted to be kind of you down at the bottom, maybe over the top of a screen share or something like that, I should have had a more charged battery before I recorded this, but never mind. You can use that. So obviously this is something in the foreground that is just sort of tricking it, but actually it's pretty good if you don't have anything like that right in the middle of the view. The other thing that you can do though here is use the portrait mode. So that's just going to sort of enhance the image. You're not going to see this too well because I've got obviously this thing going on in the background here. So my particular background image is not really suited to showing some of these off. The other one is privacy. What that's going to do is basically sort of blur out your background a little bit. And then you've also got replace, which is if you want to use green screen, you can see how it's basically just instead of removing the background, it's putting the green there, but then I can go into the where it says replace. You'll see that there is also then a choose background option. So I can go and choose a background to use with that green screen. So I'm going to turn that off for the time being though. So I'll just put that back to normal. The other thing that you've got in here is filters. So in filters, there are some listed up here, but notice you've got this filter gallery as well. So if you wanted to do something like black and white, for example, click on that one and then just close this down. You can see that my camera is now black and white. So I'll leave you to play around and check out all of those different filters. So for the time being, I'll just turn that off again. You've also got this feature, which is called spotlight. The point of that is to kind of put the background more into darkness. If I toggle that on and then adjust this slider here for the spotlight effect, you can see that what that's done is it's kind of dimmed down the background. To be honest with you, it's giving a bit of a weird effect here, but that is largely because of the fact that I've got such a vibrant background going on. It's not the best background for the demonstration of this. But anyway, that is the spotlight feature. And then what we've got is the frame shape. Now at the moment, this is set to custom, but let me set this to rectangle. You can see what's happened there. We've got the rectangular shape, so a typical 16 by 9. If I just pop that out again, obviously the others are pretty self-explanatory. We've got square. So now that's a perfect square. And then you've also got the circle, which surprisingly is a circle. But the custom is the one that I was just using. And what that does is it's basically taking the rectangular shape and you can sort of crop in from the side. So this slider here, you can see what that's doing. It's basically just cropping in. So if you wanted to make it vertical, that is how you would do that. The other thing then that we've got down here, just coming down a little bit further, is we've got the corner radius. So you can see, as I increase that corner radius, just down at the bottom here, as I increase that, then it's increasing the corner radius on that particular overlay. So I'll just take that one back down so it's more the same as the other one, which was about two, I think. The next thing you've got then is framing. And this is using the feature that we're kind of used to in the iPad, but it just means that it works with any camera, actually. So if I click on Auto, and then I just adjust the... Oops, I need to turn that framing down, sorry. Then what this should do now is, hopefully, with a bit of look, it should actually follow me around in the scene. So if I move around, you can see that it is sort of following me. It's not got a lot of room to move, but if you've got a sort of wider angle, then I'm pretty much well-framed. Then it will sort of follow you around in that scene. The thing that we've got underneath there is the framing. That is to do with how you are framed in the scene. So you can kind of zoom in and out like that. This is now doing a much better job at following me around. So you can see that as I move, then the framing feature is working to sort of keep me in shot. So that is how that works. So I'll just turn that off, and I'll turn the framing off. The other thing then that we've got here is rotation. Obviously, I mentioned that if you want to have a sort of more vertical looking video, you could sort of crop in the sides. The other option, of course, would be just to mount your camera on its side and then go into the rotation settings and you could adjust those there. The other thing that we've got here is mirror as well, if you want to just mirror your video to the left and right. So those are the camera settings that we've got and the levels of adjustment we've got. And obviously you can do that for camera one and for camera two. So then I mentioned about there being these four levels. You've got what's going on in the background. You've got the camera one, then you've got camera two, and we've also got what is happening in the front there. So that would be something like that scene that I showed you, which is this one, where in actual fact, that border that is going around my main camera down there, that is actually a sort of transparent overlay over the top of it. The way that you have to do that is it can't actually be added in directly from here, from this panel. The way that you do that is when you create the scene. So I've got a couple of scenes here that sort of show this. So this one, for example, what you can see is I created this scene where I've got this thing that is sitting over the top of everything. And in actual fact, if I move this camera around, you can see that that camera is just behind that window. So maybe if I make that a bit smaller, I've also got this camera here. And you can see that they're kind of behind that overlay. So that overlay with those cutouts is actually just over the top of these cameras and then I'm just simply positioning those cameras where I want them within that framing, that frame there. So the way to do that then is in the scenes. So far, I just showed you how to adjust things in scenes, but if you want to add in a new scene, you click on the little plus icon just over the top. Let me just show you where that was in case you missed it. Just over the top here, click on the little plus and you've got a few options. If you create a new scene, it's just going to be a completely blank scene with one camera in and then you can go through and make those adjustments adding your second camera, adding the background and so on. In order to get this overlay over the top though, you need to go to this one new scene from image and you choose the file from either your files on your iPad or from your photo library. So that will then import that and you'll have that as the overlay. So that's what I've done here. This sort of overlay that I've got going on here, including the little title, Live Streaming from iPad with Camo Studio, that was created on my computer and then I just bought it into my iPad. Obviously you could create that on your iPad too. The other option though that you've got here is you've got here to import new scene from web. So if you're using some sort of web widget overlay, then that is how you would bring that in from there and the other option you've got is import Camo scene. So Camo on the desktop, if you're not familiar with Camo, that allows you to use your iPad or iPhone camera as a webcam on your computer. And in fact, actually, they've got a way of creating scenes and so on in Camo Studio on the desktop. So you can actually import those from here as well if you've created them in that. So I'll just come out of here. So that is how you basically create new scenes is just by hitting that little plus button. You can actually organize these as well. So you can see that there's a sort of list of scenes here but there is up at the top here it says all scenes. They are the moment grouped by all scenes, favorites, templates, conferencing and streaming. And so if I go into favorites, for example, here we have a smaller list of just a few different scenes. So think of this as well as different use cases you may have. You may want to just sort of group different scenes together for different use cases in the same way that they've sort of shown there. So maybe some streaming setup, maybe some for conferencing or whatever. So that's how they've organized those. But you can go in and change this by clicking on the little four icons here, little four boxes icon. Opening that up is going to give you access to all of your different scenes. It shows you sort of a preview of what they're looking like of course as well. And then what you can do is you can just basically long press on any of those scenes. And then you can organize them by add them to a collection. So these different groupings are called collections and you can just go in and choose which one you want to add that into. And so if I go into conferencing now, then you see that scene has been added in there. As you can also see, you can just add in a new collection as well. So if you want to add in a new collection, you're just going to type that in there. And it will then add that to that list and those different groupings. So as I say, best way to think about that is for different use cases that you may have for this. So that is the scenes. So the stream panel, as I've said, this is going to be where your chat comes up. So I'm not going to show that right now because I'm not streaming. I'm going to do a completely separate live demo of this by just doing a live stream from the device which is what this scene in fact was set up for. Incidentally, another scene that I set up with an overlay just while we're talking about that if I go back to my favorites, then another one would be this one. So this is in exactly the same way. I created actually this overlay as a transparent overlay and then the camera is sort of behind it. So it means I don't have to bother about lining up corners and rounded corners and so on. I've just done it with one of these overlays. So now let's take a look at some of the other settings though. If I come up into this little settings section up in the top corner, I have to forget you can't necessarily see where I'm tapping. So this is right up in the top right hand corner here. So if I tap on that, then we've got some settings. So you can choose between either light and dark mode or obviously just following the system. We've got this concept called scene variables. Now I have been testing this since it was in beta and there were some other scene variables in here. So I can see that in the future, there are going to be some more added back in but this has been simplified for the time being. But these are things that can just sort of be bought in as sort of predefined elements in your scenes. And if I go over to another scene, perhaps which will sort of show this better if I go into all scenes something like this one for example, where's it gone? Well, in fact, that one that we showed earlier you can see how that's got my name up in the top and it's got take one tech. And then if I was to go into this other scene over here for example, then you can see that this one's been set up I'm actually set the cameras up. This has got my name and the take one tech as well. Maybe I can just show you quickly to go through the process. This is just the default for this scene. You can see it's got this rather flattering up the nose shot on this bottom right hand corner camera. So if I click on the little output there, click on camera two, I'm going to change that to stream X. So now you see it's bought my proper camera into the bottom and then let's come up into here. I'm going to tap on camera one, go into the device and then I'll change that to the Cam Link and then look at that. Now we've got a nice looking scene with that title and this is one of the built-in scenes. So this was one created by Camo that's just on the device as a default but that's how easy is to just sort of select these cameras but I digress slightly. The point of this was that you see at the bottom left it says Alec Johnson take one tech and that was added from these settings here. So that is what are scene variables. So the point about this, I mentioned that, you know, having tested the beta, the point about this is a brand new app just out. However, you know, it is still under, you know, active heavy development. So I'm really interested to see, you know, how this develops because it's already, already fantastic. The next one then is destinations. So this is where you can add in a new destination. So pick YouTube, you would go through, it would take you through to, I mean, just go back out of that. There it would take you through to just log in through Google and then it would connect you back into your, and connect you back in and show that it was connected. Next you've got recording locations. So again, it says photo library but if you had an external drive connected, you could connect those in there. You've got some other advanced things in here so like exporting logs, generally only to do when you were requested in terms of use, all of that kind of stuff. So those are the settings. Let me just bring this back to one of these different scenes for a second. I'll put it back to this one over here and I've just moved things slightly out of alignment. So let me put those back and then what else can I tell you about this? The streaming, I mentioned that you're just going to come in here and then you can just basically press on the start button and it would start the live stream. As I've said, I am going to do a test of this but I'll do that as a separate test on the channel and then what I'll do is I'll link to that from this video. But all in all, this is pretty phenomenal that we've got now streaming from the iPad directly to these different platforms. One thing that I'm not able to do on the iPad Mini but you can do on one of the iPad Pros with the M chips in the M series chips is you can actually also share an app. So I haven't done any sort of screen sharing on this because it's not possible with the iPad Mini but on the M series what you can do is you can share a specific app. So in the settings where you set a camera you can actually just go in and select a specific app that's running on your iPad and what you would do is you would basically minimize your iPad minimize Camo Studio on the iPad rather go into the app and then it would just be in there being shared to your recording or shared to your screen. So multi-camera recording, multi-camera streaming, screen sharing of apps from the iPad, screen sharing of external devices if you're plugging them in over HDMI through a capture device or whatever is pretty mind-blowing for me personally. Not least the fact that we can also connect now the Streamer X directly with the iPad. Just thinking about the compact nature of this because I have been testing some other portable streaming devices so the fact that the iPad that we've got in our pockets or bags already can now just be used for this is pretty fantastic. If you found this useful then do go ahead and click the like and subscribe button and definitely go and grab Camo Studio because it is free unbelievably. You'll find a link to that down in the description and what I'll do is I'll leave a link to the test that I do over on the right hand side as soon as I have completed it and then you'll be able to click and go and see what you think of the quality of that.