ATEM Control with Stream Deck and Companion // Show and Tell Ep.61

hey everybody I am John Barker and in this episode of here to record show-and-tell we're going to take a look at how I use the stream deck and an open source piece of software called companion to control a bunch of equipment in my live video production so let's take a look in a few of my recent videos I have shown the stream deck in action where it controls the HM and hyper deck and a few other bits and pieces so this is how it all works and the first thing you want to do is gun load companion you'll find a link to that in the description and this is the sort of brains behind the whole operation it's an open-source piece of software that links all these devices together and it turns out the companion can talk to loads of different pieces of gear much more gear than I even have access to so for the purposes of this video and to keep things simple I'm just gonna show it controlling the ATM and maybe the hey protects Judeo as well and then in future videos I'll talk about other hardware and other fun things you can do with companion so first up what is companion and how does it work it can run on Mac Windows Linux and Raspberry Pi and when you launch the application it brings you through to an admin or you'll spend most of your time during setup in here you have a few things instances this is where you add devices and their IP addresses etc buttons is where you configure each button on your stream deck surfaces is where you connect your stream decks and then settings allows you to make a few changes to your settings first up we'll talk about instances in here I'm gonna add my ATM instance on my hyper deck instance and then I just entered the IP address of each one and give it a name I can also see here in the instance section that the connection worked over to the buttons panel I'll choose a button and set its style to text and give it a name like com1 for example then I'll set a key done action for this button and I'll set it to input on my ATM to preview and I'll choose input 1 now I can press the same button on my stream deck and you can see it already works though if you do have an 8 inputs which are like mine or beyond this will take a while for you to set up so let's talk about presets over on the right here I'm able to see some presets at the minute I can see my HM preview row and then I can just drag and drop one of these buttons onto a stream deck button the other cool thing is that it's dynamic so whatever name I give this input on my ATM will be brought into this button so I can change it over my item and that will be reflected within companion and on the stream deck buttons the other nice thing about this is because it's linked to the ATM it can pull back tally information like what's on preview and what's on program and the background of the button will update to reflect that so if I press some buttons on the stream deck you can see it work on the ATM and if I press some buttons on the ATM you can see it update on the stream deck so far things have been pretty simple so let's take a look at a more complex example with stacked actions at a recent gig I wanted to set up a button called play clip and when you pressed it it did a lot of different things pressing that button triggered all of the following actions it set the ATM preview input to hyper deck it press play on the current clip in the hyper deck it auto transitioned the hyper deck to program it then waited one second and then it put the white shot in preview for whenever the clip ends and that's a lot of things for one person to remember and to do in the right order at the same time so with the stacked actions I could just let them press one button and all of those things happened once you get a little more familiar with companion you'll start to find yourself with a few different pages in my case I have about five different pages of different types of buttons or groups of buttons that I might need my first one is direct control of the ATM the preview and program row the next one is aux control of the hm so I can send whatever I want through the aux the third page controls my own logging software which means that I can press buttons in here to log edits and then I have another page which talks to my own graphics software and then finally I have a page that just has a few test buttons that I like to mess around with like I said there's loads to talk about with companion so let's just fire through a few more things that I really like about it the emulator will let you pretend that you have a stream deck and you can test things out before you actually buy one with web buttons you open this page in an iPad or in another computer and you can trigger all your actions and then you have OSC and HTTP every button can be triggered via OSC or HTTP allowing you to integrate with other software's now let's talk about a few of the pros when it comes to the setup one is how inexpensive the stream decks are relatively speaking in terms of other production gear and other types of controllers the price is really nice you can buy one or two of these things on Amazon for not that much money the second Pro is configuration a nut on a recent job I was able to just move all the buttons around really quickly to whatever way the director wanted them so it was super easy to do and I could just customize it exactly the way they wanted it and the third Pro is like I mentioned before stacked actions and especially for someone like me who does a lot of their stuff by themselves it's just much more simple to press one button to play a crepin to auto transition and to do this and to do that and so that's it that's a huge pro in terms of the cons of the setup I can't really blame companion for much and it's more the stream deck side of things sometimes you press a button and it doesn't quite do what you think it's going to do but what can I expect from a device that's not really made for this kind of professional production environment the other great thing about this whole infrastructure and companion is that because it's open source and because it's constantly improving it's only getting better so if there's a feature request you have or a bug that you find you can flag it on the github and they will fix it or at least point you in the right direction so thanks for watching I do hope you find this useful and let me know in the comments if you have any questions or if you have any problems with companion or if you have any success stories as well I'm super interested to hear what you do with it

Channel: Here to Record

Views: 161,561

Keywords: here to record, here, to, record, event videography, stream deck, elgato, companion, atem, how to, control, hyperdeck, pro, av, live, video, production, blackmagic, bmd

Id: Xn95LuF6x6I

Length: 5min 41sec (341 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2019