 Can you use Ecamm Live to create a full TV studio? Well, I guess we're gonna find out. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech. My name's Alec and this could all end in disaster. I'll just give you some warning. And it's a bit different to my normal videos actually. And the reason I'm doing this is because somebody in the Ecamm Live group, Daniel, had a little clip of a basically a TV production and asked if Ecamm Live could be used to create something similar. And it sounded like an interesting challenge really. So I thought I'd give it a go and just sort of reply to be able to show how you might be able to achieve some of these effects in Ecamm Live. Now it's a bit different to my normal videos as well because two things really. First of all, I've done a modicum of preparation. I've actually downloaded an image that I'm gonna use for it. I've done a little bit of cutting and trimming of it just so that it's gonna work right correctly. So I'll tell you how I've done that but it's just to save you basically sitting through it. And the other thing is normally when I'm doing these tutorials, they are things that I have done before and I know how to do and I feel confident about doing them. Whereas this one, it could end in disaster really. So let's just hope that some good comes out of it. First of all, let me show you exactly what it was that we are trying to achieve. That's completely the right way. It's gone off the rails already, hasn't it? There we go. Let me come to the correct scene. There we go. So this was a, this is a snapshot from a YouTube video. And the question was, can we achieve something like that in eCAM Live? Now, basically what we've got here is a TV set. There are two live presenters. There is TV, no, there is not TV. There is a football playing on a screen over to this side. Then on this side, you've got somebody outside being brought in as an interviewee. So they're speaking on this screen over here. And then behind, you've actually got a sort of TV wall if you like effect. So all of this area behind can change as well. Finally, there is also this area here that is for advertising. So this essentially is what we are trying to recreate in some way. Now I didn't wanna just go and totally take this entire set. So I have taken something slightly different, but it's got a few similar effects. I'll tell you a couple of the limitations of eCAM Live right off the bat that would make this not entirely possible as is. First of all, although with eCAM Live, you can add overlays for videos and things like that and all sorts of ways that you can sort of resize things and have a video coming in behind things, graphical elements and so on. One thing you can't do with eCAM Live at the moment is something called corner pinning, which is where basically if you see how this video over on this side is basically slightly skewed. So it's, because it's at an angle. So that is not actually a sort of perfect rectangle on the screen. It's gonna be slightly shorter here than it is over at this other end. And then it's sort of tapering back. So that's one thing you can't do with video and images in eCAM Live is you can't do that sort of skewing thing because it's just not something it's intended to do. Maybe in the future, but it's a bit of a niche use case that is. So it's not something you can do as is, but what you could do is we can make an overlay which basically has this cutout, which perhaps would be all right for a sort of talking head like this. Somebody just as an interviewee, but it would obviously crop off some of the football play. And so it wouldn't be exactly right. But with that in mind, most of these other things we should be able to do. So what I've done is I've actually got this image here of a set. And what I'm gonna try and do is I'm gonna try and create a scene basically with me in the set. So you are stuck with me, I'm afraid. And then I'm gonna also add something into this sort of TV wall at the background. We'll have a place for advertisers down here to copy that from the original. And then we've also got this TV wall over here where we can add another presenter. And of course, we can also just zoom in on parts of this as well and create a version of it that is sort of zoomed in. So with the original, then sometimes during this particular show they did sort of zoom into these people. Now, one thing I'll point out is that this is, I believe, a totally CGI desk. It could be real, I'm not sure, but you can see how they didn't notice that they were actually leaning on it as such. So the arms are sort of behind the desk. But you do need to make sure you get the perspective right. Now, one thing about this one is really, you can see quite a lot of the top of the desk here. So it isn't necessarily ideal for a green screen as I'm gonna be doing today because I'll appear that I'm sort of right behind the desk and there's no way of me putting my hands on the desk. If I had a little bit more time and could be bothered to do this and I was doing it for a professional real project, what I would actually do is I would have a green desk top and then I would just sort of position it exactly correctly so that my camera angle is looking at exactly the same angle as the camera that was used to take this shot. And then you would position the desk with the green top on it so that when I leave my hands on my desk it does actually appear that I was leaning my hands on this desk. But anyway, with that said, those caveats out of the way. Sounds like I'm making excuses before I've already started. But that is where we are with it. So let me just come out of this for a moment and I'll show you now, I'll just shut this down. I'll show you also, one thing that I've done is if you remember, I mentioned about having those sort of advertiser slots in there. I've made a little sort of movie role really just in keynote to have something that we can put in there. And this is basically, I thought I was in a live demo mode there for a moment. That's better, that's what I wanted. So you can see that I've created this little movie role which basically is just going to cycle through, advertiser number one, two, three and four just to basically be able to show that you can put whatever you want in here. And it's just showing that there's something moving and something changing. And so this is gonna appear in this desk area just below me. So let's start by creating a blank scene which I've already done. So let's go into that blank scene and here we go. What I'm gonna do now is I've actually, in fact, I'm getting ahead of myself already. It just shows I don't know quite what I'm doing. So what I've done is I've got the original image. So let me show you that one. Here we go. I've also created another one which has some cutouts. So if I come to this next image, this now has a cutout basically where these TV screens are over here. It has a cutout where this TV screen is. What you can see through there now that sort of ready color, that's just my desktop basically. And you can see the desktop through here. So it's got these transparent sections but the desk is all still left exactly where it is. Now the next one that I've created is basically just the desk. So this is another layer which is just the desk cutout but still the same size image. It's still got this sort of the TV screen, mock screen in there at the moment. And then I've created one more that is basically exactly the same but with a cutout for that. Now, probably with a bit of planning and if I was to do this properly and create a proper model, then I would probably slim this down and only have three overlays but you'll perhaps see why I've got four in a moment. So let me come back to my TV set for a minute. And what I'm gonna do is I'm basically just gonna drag these images in. So we've got the first one going in one second. There we go. That is in now. And what you'll notice is, let me see if I can make this a bit bigger. Might make it easier to see what we're doing. There we go. Oops, I don't wanna move the actual scene. There we go. So what we can see here is over on this side, if we look in our scenes tab, in fact let me just close down some of these other ones that we don't need just for the moment. There we go. So now we can see show in current scene and we've got TV set one. I've called them one, two, three and four. One being the one that is at the back and two and three and four getting sort of closer to the front in terms of the layering. So now I'm gonna get this number two and I'm just gonna drop that one in there and that's gonna take a little minute and then I'll drag number three in there and then I'm gonna drag number four in there as well. So now basically I have got a stack of overlays like this and number one, let me just take these all out. So the very first overlay I've got is this one, the front desk with the hole cut out. The second one I've got is the front desk but with that little part still filled in just in case I want to not run an ad in there or something like that and we're gonna just leave that there but obviously like I say, if we were gonna be doing this in the real life then I'd put a little bit more thought and care into it. The next one is the background but with all of these holes basically, these transparent sections here and here and over in this little TV screen here and then finally the very back is the original picture as it is. So let's now add me into the picture. I'm sorry but I'm gonna be coming back. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go down to the camera overlay button. So I'm gonna click on that one and there we go, I'm back. Now we have got, I've got my green screen on obviously. So I'm gonna come into my camera effects section and I'm just gonna toggle the green screen on and it will default to this background but you also have the option to make it transparent. So I shall come down to here and change it to transparent. So now I am transparent and I am a giant in this studio. You can see the scale is a little bit off but I can move myself around. I could reposition myself, scale myself up, whatever I want. Now I'm just gonna do one thing. Just bear with me one second. There we go, I'm back. I just had to sit on a cushion because normally I am a lot lower down than this so this would not work otherwise and I'm just still cropping the top of my head off slightly but it would have looked a little bit peculiar even when I scale myself down I just wouldn't have looked right for that desk. So I don't know what you think about this, how big I should be in this scene. We just come out of demo mode and you can see what I'm doing a little bit better. It's just a case of getting the scale right. Now, obviously we could actually have two of me. So if we wanted, I don't know if you want two of me if that's too many to handle. There we go, now we've got our two presenters and now what we need to have a look at is obviously if you were two people in a studio then you could just simply be sitting next to each other but the point about this is you could also be two people in two completely different locations and just bring in the feed from one person and put it next to the other one. So you could be social distancing and still be right next to each other in the studio. Now, I don't know if you can see from this at the moment but basically I'm sort of sitting over the top of this desk a little bit. Let's get these both at the same height but I am over the top of the desk. So what I need to do now is if I come out from here and I'll come back into demo mode to show you, here you can see that we've basically got my different layers and then the two camera shots here are right at the top. So all I need to do is just drag those down and if you remember TV set number three and four are both actually the desk. So I just need to move those down so that they're behind the desk and then if I come back to my full screen mode you should be able to see that I am now sitting behind the desk. Now, what I was trying to say before was if I was to have created a green screen effect on my table then I could almost have my arms on the table and I would have a cut out for the artificial table so that it appeared that I could actually have my arms on the desk but that is just a limitation of what I'm doing today in the short time that I am bothering to give myself for this. But I hope you can still see a little bit of what is possible. So we have got this extra desk in front and we've got this little window here. Sorry, you can't see what I'm doing, can you? There we go. We've got this little window here. Now I did create that little animation of the advertisers. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go and add in a movie overlay. So that is this little one here, the little moving image. And I'm gonna click on that and I'm going to get this advertiser roll. And I'm going to open that and whoops, that is a bit big, isn't it? And that's because it's just open it full screen but not to worry, we can resize that. And what I want to do here as well is I just want to have this to loop so that it is constantly looping. And then I can just position this roughly where it should be down here. I just need to move it up actually because if you notice in this thing it's now behind all of the desks. So I just wanna move it up in front and I'll get the position right first and then I'll move it back behind that front desk. So here we've got some advertisers number one, two, three and four, is that properly lined up? There we go. And that now can sit behind there. So now I've got some advertising running. So let me just come back to full screen and you can see how we've got that. So that looks like it's basically a TV screen behind me, below me in the desk that is running ads. And the reason why I made that sort of double desk is so that if ever we want to turn the ads off and just leave that static image then I can just turn that off and it goes back to the TV screen that we had there before. So that's that part done. So next we've got the actual wall behind me, the TV wall. So I thought what I'd do for that one is I would just actually run one of my other videos that I've done. Cause I don't want to get into copyright claims by starting playing any football matches or anything like that. So what I'm gonna do is come back into demo mode and then I'm gonna come over to this side and I will grab another movie overlay. And then I've got this one, which is a video and this interestingly is a video I did. Well, I'll say interestingly, you may not be interested at all. It's a video I did all about the Ecam Live beta release or beta release that came out last week. And that would make actually some of these movie overlays a lot easier. So I'll leave a link to that video up in the top corner because yeah, standby for when all of this stuff makes it to the mainstream. It's a really amazing update. So now what you can see by the way is not me now. This is me talking in one of my previous videos. So I'm just go, this is what I'm gonna use and put this on the wall behind me. So if I just scale this back down and we're gonna fit this into this little spot here. There we go. And I'm gonna just set that to loop although it should be probably playing for a lot longer than this video. So now what I need to do is I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna move this down to be basically this TV set number two is the one that's got the cutouts for the TV screen and things like that for the TV wall behind me. So I'm gonna move this down behind TV set number two. And there you can see it's now put it in this frame behind me. And I actually look like I'm in prison behind bars. I suppose some of my videos are a bit criminal but there you go. So now I'm sorry, you've got three of me now. You've got three stuck with three of me. Let me come out of demo mode. So now you can see that there is me two presenters and there's this video going on behind me in the TV wall and we've got the advertising going on down here. So now we've still got these other two slots that are over on this side. So one of the things that they had on this other show which wasn't done in EECAM by the way but I'm sure they could have done it a lot better in EECAM if they'd had a bit of time with it. So what was in there was actually a guest, wasn't it? So what I can do is I can come over to my camera overlays again and I'll select a camera overlay and it's just gonna put in the default which is me but what I can do now is I can change this to instead of my camera I can change it to guest number one. So if I had a guest then they would just be able to come in on this screen. So if I move this over here like this and what you can see now is this is the issue that I was talking about earlier because there is no way that this can fit exactly into this box because if I make it right at one side like that. So that now is lined up perfectly along the left hand side but then it's not lined up along the right hand side and if I make it correct on the right it won't line up on the left but the way that you do this is basically just get it as close as possible so that it will cover at least all of the angles and then what I'm gonna do is move this down behind the background so I'll move this back down to here. So now it does appear that it's right. So you would be able to compensate for this if you were doing a program just making sure that the person in this shot, this guest was at the correct angle to make it look right and so there we've got the guest and there is another TV screen over here and you could have whatever you want on there really. So if I just move the advertiser roll again perhaps I can just duplicate that one in fact so if I come over to this advertiser roll and I will just duplicate it. So now we've got another copy of that. I'm gonna bring it over here and put it over this TV. Now this one definitely will not work because it's really cropped quite, is it quite an angle for this sort of fake TV screen in the set, is it quite an angle so it's not gonna look too great I'm afraid but you get the idea and obviously if you were doing this in fact let me just start this one playing as well and I'll set this one to loop as well. Second, we'll have to do it like this first. Can't quite get it to do what I want it to do. That is looping anyway, there we go. I've just moved one of my sets out of the way. There we go, I'll move that back there like that and then I'm gonna move this all the way back down to the bottom as well. So that I believe is if I just come to my full screenshot that is pretty close to how you could do something like this in e-cam. Now I've literally spent 20 minutes before I started recording doing this to actually just download that image from Adobe stock and then I did the little cutouts in Photoshop so that to create these four different layers and then we've been going for 20 minutes. So in 40 minutes I've created something using a stock image, albeit, but that has a lot of the elements and things like that that you might imagine from the sort of example that we saw originally that I'm trying to emulate. Obviously if this was gonna be something you were going to invest a little bit of time in and do properly, you'd be able to do a far better job than I'm doing here. So I hope that that gives you a little bit of an idea of how you can actually use e-cam live pretty quickly and easily to create some of the sorts of green screen effects that you see on TV, the way they have these sort of fake studios where very little of modern TV studios is actually real. Often it's just the desk and everything else is green. Sometimes the desk and a little bit of the flooring around it or things like that. But anyway, that hopefully should help answer the question, Daniel, as to how you can do something a bit like that TV set in e-cam live. If you have found this interesting or useful, don't forget to like and subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications. And let me know in the comments of anything you've been doing that's a little bit out of the ordinary with e-cam live as well. Or if you know of anyone who's been doing actual proper TV productions using techniques like this as well. So that's all for now. I'll leave a link to a e-cam live playlist over on the right-hand side. And until the next video, have a wonderful day.