 Ecamm Live Beta 4 has been released and it's another good one. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Ali. Now, about a month ago, they released Ecamm Live version 3.9 Beta 1 and I did a video all about it and it was packed full of great features and I thought, this is amazing. If this just gets released now, everyone will be really happy. But about two weeks later, they released Ecamm Live Beta 3.9 Beta 2 and I did a video about that one which I'll link to up at the top and that had even more great features and I thought surely now it's ready for release. Well, there was a Beta 3 that snuck in about a week later that was just a couple of fixes and things like that but I was waiting for the main release. Well, they've done it again because now we're onto version 3.9 Beta 4 and it's just got some awesome new features, some of which I requested myself as well as many other people requesting them as well and so that is what I'm gonna talk to you about in this video and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run through the features first of all, very quickly and then I'll go and demonstrate some of them as well and I do give you advanced warning, there is a little bit of silliness in this video so apologies in advance for that but I'm hoping it's all to illustrate a point. So before I get into it, I do just want to say, I did say there'll be silliness, I do just want to say that I really love the new Beta. It's got some great new features that are gonna certainly change the way that I can or make it a lot easier to do the things that I normally want to do with Ecamm Live. There's lots of ways that I like to integrate graphics and things like that for not so much from my channel actually, but some of the other things that I use it for and this is gonna make it so much easier. So let's just get into the actual features, shall we? The first thing is related to cameras and the first one on the list is that there is enhanced support for network cameras or enhanced network camera support whichever way around you wanna say it. This isn't something that I use to be honest, I don't use network cameras but I know a lot of people in the community do so I'm sure you'd be very pleased to hear about the enhanced network camera support. The next is related to USB support. Now a lot of people don't realize that you can just plug in a camera directly over USB and in many cases Ecamm Live will just recognize it. Certainly with the Canon cameras for most of them it does do that. I didn't realize this at first myself, I thought you needed the Canon EOS webcam utility if you wanted to use it over USB. And whilst that is true, if you wanna use it directly into applications like Zoom and Teams and things like that, Ecamm themselves have just done all of the work for us. So they've got all of the compatibility built in and then obviously now I just use Ecamm as my virtual camera anyway. So, but now they've added support for some new cameras so whenever new cameras do come out they do need to do a little bit of work just to add in that compatibility. So the new cameras are the Fujifilm GFX 100S that is now compatible over USB. The Sony A7S III, the Sony A6600 and finally my next camera by the way, the Sony ZV-E10. So these now are all compatible directly over USB directly into your computer. I should say that I think there is a limitation of this way of getting the signal in over USB that you might only be able to get 720p. So I know that's the case with my Canon. I don't get the sort of full resolution necessarily out of it, but Ecamm does a great job of the upscaling in any case. So that's why people still do use things like the Elgato Cam Link 4K where you can plug in, go from HDMI on your camera to HDMI in the Cam Link and then plug that into your USB and then you can get a higher resolution. But nevertheless, it is still great to have that compatibility for USB built in and we just got these four new cameras added to the list as well. So next up, sorry about that. I did mention that there would be a bit of silliness. Next up is in overlays. And I'll go through all of this and demonstrate actually how it works. But just quickly, we've now got overlay stroke or outline. This is something that I put in as a feature request as did other people as well. And that's basically where you can see my camera screen at the moment and it's got this white line around it. That is just a border around the outside or a stroke. So you can now add that to camera overlays, to text overlays and also to screen sharing overlays as well. I really think this is one thing that's gonna sort of transform the way people use Ecam and sort of negate the need in a lot of cases for like graphical overlays, which I've made for all of my scenes and things like that before. Well, now you can almost just do it really without the need for that. So that is absolutely wonderful. Next up is the screen share green screen. This was another thing that I put in as a feature request because I do a lot of stuff with, again, not so much on the channel as such, but I do a lot of stuff with Ecam with presentations where I, well, basically what I'm doing right now, actually having bought in this little sidebar here with these bullet points. So I'm actually doing this now in, not PowerPoint, in Keynote. I'm gonna talk about PowerPoint later in Keynote, but then I'm just doing it on a slide with a green background. So I've keyed out the rest of the slide and you only see the bit that I want you to see. So that's something that I've used quite extensively before, but I had to do a sort of work around for that. So now to have it just sort of built in that you can do the green screen in Ecam is awesome. Next up is the text overlay window. So when you are editing text, before the window used to be just stuck right over the place where you were really putting your text. So it was a little bit awkward and I'll come onto that and it's probably easy to just show you that one in a moment. Next is the option to show the most recent comment as an overlay. Obviously, when you've got your comments in a live stream, you can always go and just double click on them and add them into the live stream. But this means now we've got a keyboard shortcut to actually just go and add that last comment into the stream. And that brings me on to the next section, which is a stream deck because we've now got two new buttons. One of them is to show and hide the window controls. So that's the controls that are all over the actual Ecam window itself. There was always a keyboard shortcut to do this. And so I used to have a sort of multi-action in stream deck to go and activate Ecam live and then to activate the keyboard shortcut. Well, now they have just added it in as its own button. So that's great. It means you can get the controls out of the way to see what you're doing, especially useful if you're just sort of preparing and editing things or not editing, but preparing overlays and positioning things, that's what I meant to say. Next one is the show last comment as an overlay. So that is that feature that I just mentioned previously. Well, they have actually just added in a custom button for it as well. So you don't need to go and set that all up. There's just a button to add in the last comment to your stream. Then by the way, when you do all this, if you want to get the update for, in order to get access to this, when you do update to the beta, you'll be prompted to update your stream deck plugin. So just, this is a little pop-up that'll come up during installation. So make sure you do update it and then you'll get these two plugins just appear in your stream deck. And while we're on pop-ups, there'll also be one to update your virtual camera as well. So make sure you do that so that you won't have any issues with your virtual camera running from Ecamm. And finally, the last thing is you can now stream to Twitter from Ecamm Live. So that is something that I shall certainly be trying out later, of course. You know that I will. And yeah, it basically just shows up as another destination in the same as you can choose between Twitch, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and so on or to record. Well, now you can also just stream directly to Twitter. So that is a summary of them. Let's go and actually have a look at how these work. But before we do, I just wanna mention once again that I love this new beta. And so what I'm gonna do is I show you how some of these things work and then show you how I've done a couple of these little silly things that I've done today because they are silly examples that I threw together in a few minutes. And basically, it shows you how you can use Keynote with Ecamm Live to do something a little bit more special really. So I'll do a whole video about how to use Keynote with Ecamm with these new features because I did do one before which I'll leave a link up into in the top corner. And in that one, I talked all about the workaround that you need to do. Well, now there's no workaround, it just works. So I'll update that video at some point. But for now, what I'll do is I'll come into my live demo mode and then I'll give you a bit of a demonstration of some of these features. Here, by the way, down at the bottom, you can see I've got this big green thing. This is actually just my Keynote slides running. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a new scene. I'll just come and create a new scene over here. Blank scene. Let's get a moving background. I'll just use the same one. This is just a moving video background that I've got. And then what I can do is I can come down and add it in a camera overlay. So I'll click on the camera overlay. Let's change the shape of this. So this was all in the previous beta releases where you can change the shape to be, let's have a squircle. I don't tend to use those ones so much, but they do have a very pleasing look to them. So now what you can see is that, as I say, this corner radius was added in in the previous version and as was the squircle shape itself. But now we've also got this one here, border width. So I can just move that one up and add a border to that particular overlay. So let me just move that out of the way, make it a little bit bigger. So now you can see that we've got a border around it. Let me just get rid of my green screen background. There we go, put my usual one in. And got a bit of a halo up of my head. And just, excuse me, move that out of the way. So you can also do this on text overlay. So let me show you with a text overlay. If I come down to over here, click on text overlay. Now, what you might remember is on the previous version, this text overlay box always opened up here. It was kind of like pinned to the actual frame. And what that meant is you couldn't actually get to what was behind it. Now that was a bit frustrating at times for me because often I would be trying to use the color picker to pick out a color from the scene that I was in. So if I'd created a background, something like this, then I would be, whoops, I've got that one looping. Let me start that to loop, there we go. I might be picking out a color from here, for example. So if this was over the top, you wouldn't necessarily always be able to get to the color that you wanted. So that's one use case for it. But if I just call this one text, and you can see here, you can add the stroke as well. So we have the rounded corners that were added in the previous version. But now you can also add in the stroke around the outside of the text box. Previously, the work around to do this was to have a sort of a blank text box that you could use and then you could use that to make the border and put the other one in front of it. That was, again, a bit finicky. Whereas now it's basically, here we go, we've just got the text on the screen. I can obviously use alt and drag to copy it. And let me just change this one to be text two, so that we can tell the difference between them. And we've got text one here. So the other benefit of having the text box off the screen is it means you can actually, as well as going in and editing this one, if you just double click on one of these, then you can go and make adjustments to that one as well. So say we want to change the stroke or something like that or the margin, then you can just go in and change it like that. And then if you click on this other one, it will activate that one. So you can just sort of flick between them as well. To activate the changes, though, you do still, when you click save, it does still come out of that. So it perhaps would be nice if actually this box could persist until you close it. But obviously as soon as you press save, then it closes it down again. So you do still have to go back in if you want to actually physically make any major adjustments to the other one. But there you go, that is how the outlines work on text boxes, which I think looks really good. Not that particular example, but just the concept of them. So then the next thing that I'll want to look at is the screen sharing overlay. So I'm going to add in a screen sharing overlay. Again, you've got borders on this, but I'm just going to take the borders off for a moment. Let me take the borders off and I'm going to share. I've got my stream deck open down at the bottom. So I'm going to share that particular window. So I'll come up to here. Instead of the primary display, I'll share stream deck. In fact, this is probably a good idea just to quickly demonstrate. While we've got this open, I'll just move this down here. Just let's delete these text overlays or move them out of the way. But let's put it down there. So with this overlay that I've got now, let me just make the shape a little bit different. I will make it a custom shape. Now, obviously, we can crop in on windows, can't we? So since the previous beta, you can hold the option key and you can crop into the side of the window. Well, what you can actually do now with the screen share overlays is you can activate green screen. Now, this obviously doesn't have any green screen, but one thing that they've done is if you do actually come over to here and click on the overlay, you can see where we've now got green screen at the bottom. If there's no green in it, or even if there is in fact, what you're sharing a specific application. When you click on green screen, the other effect it has is to remove the background, even if the background isn't actually green. So it just means that you're only gonna see that specific app. So that's something that I used to do previously with, as I say, with the cropping where I try and crop in the side to get it to exactly the right size, just to crop in on that specific area like this, something like this. Well, now basically it's a lot easier. You don't need to bother doing that. You just simply select the application you want and then click on green screen, and then it will activate it. Oh, sorry. It will crop out the background from the desktop. One thing to bear in mind is if you do do that, but you do have green in your application or something, then that will obviously key that out as well. So that is one thing to bear in mind. It won't work in that instance. But if you are trying to key out the green screen, then it will work perfectly, which is what I've been doing down at the bottom with this keynote presentation. So in that case, what I've got is I've actually set the keynote presentation. I've got no radius on it. And then I've set that to my keynote. And then so you can see I've got this window here, and that is basically now, if I stretch that over the full screen, I've now got this whole window here over the top of my screen. So if I come back to my previous slide, whoops, Daisy, come back to this one rather, and then come back to my previous slide in here. There we go, that's how that was working basically. It was just showing over the top of it. And if I just come down one more time, then I've got this one that slid over the top of it. And as you can see from down below, all I'd done there was the actual text was just green. That's how I got that effect of the text running in. So let me just show that one more time. You can see that if you look on the bottom part, the actual presentation, you'll see that the text coming in is green, but the effect it has on my screen is that it gives that see-through cut out. And that's an effect that people do in editing software and things like that, but now you can obviously just do it in e-cam itself. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna take off that screen sharing for the moment and just come out of here. And this you can see is the presentation. Like I say, it didn't take me, I don't know, 30 minutes or something just to throw this together before we started before I started recording. And so I've got my little lower third, this little thing that came bouncing in. And it means basically you can use all of the animation effects. I wouldn't recommend going overboard with animation, to be honest. But you can use all of the different animation effects that you've got in keynote and you can use those in e-cam live. The only one thing to bear in mind is when you are doing this, you could share it out to an extra monitor. So if you've got a separate monitor, then you could just play this as normal and share that particular screen. But what I'd recommend doing is there is a play in window option. I did talk about this in the video that I did all about keynote with e-cam. But if you come into this play at the top, it is either play slideshow, which is the default. So normally just when you press, you know, to play a slideshow, it will play full screen. But you can also play slideshow in window. There's also a button for that in the menu bar that is not there by default. So normally you have this play button, but if you right click in the menu bar and click on customize toolbar, by the way, most Mac apps, if you click in the toolbar, you can customize it in this way. But somewhere in here, there will be one which says play in window, which looks like, I can even see the icon up here, but for some reason I can't find it in this group of icons here. Somewhere in there, there is play in window. There it is. So if you just drag that one up into the top, then you'll always be able to play in window. So now when I click on that one, it actually just plays it in a window. And then you can see that little animation that came in at the start. Now you can do this in PowerPoint as well. So let me just get rid of this for a moment, just get rid of that overlay. And I'll show you how you would basically do exactly the same thing in PowerPoint. So if I open up PowerPoint, and by that, I mean showing in a window rather than full screen. So if you open up PowerPoint and then you come over to the slideshow here in the ribbon, click on slideshow. And then you've got one here that says set up slideshow. So you click on that one, and then here you've got a few different options. And it's basically these top two that we're looking at. So the default is presented by a speaker full screen. Well, we want to click on the second one, which is browsed by an individual in a window. So if we click on that one, then now when we activate this as a slideshow, it will basically just pop up in a window exactly the same as the keynote version did. Well, there you go. That is Ecamm Live version 3.9 beta four. It's just packed with new features. I can't wait for this to be released. I'll be doing a whole series of new videos basically that are a new workflow really for Ecamm Live. I won't be using the same way that I've been using overlays and things like that before. I mean, graphic overlays to create borders and things like that. It's basically a whole new way of doing things and it's such a great update or will be a great update when the final version comes out. But in the meantime, if you haven't got it, definitely go and give this latest beta a try. And I'd love to hear what your favorite feature is or how you are thinking that you can be implementing some of these things yourself into your workflow. So don't forget to go and like and subscribe and comment down below with all of that. Doesn't this overlay look boring now compared to that last one? So I'll probably be doing a bit of an update of all of my overlays in the next week or so, I should imagine. If not later today. I'm usually one of these people that when I get an idea into my head, I'll just go ahead and do it. So we'll see. Maybe in the next video I'll be looking a little bit different. But yeah, great features, really love it. And don't go anywhere because there are some more great videos coming up all about Ecamm Live over on the right hand side. So until the next video, have a great day.