- Check, check. Appears to be working. Hey everybody I'm PhotoJoseph and I am going to be
taking you on a tour today of the brand new Blackmagic ATEM Mini, one incredibly impressive
piece of hardware. Now this show is going to
be a little bit different than the last few months of edited shows because while this does
appear and will appear to be an edited show, this is actually recorded live to tape. Not broadcast live but recorded
live to my recording here. All switching, all camera angles switching that you see in the show
today, will be performed live through the switcher itself. So this is very much proof in the pudding showing you exactly how
this whole thing works. So, let's back up a little bit. What is the ATEM Mini? Well first of all, the
Blackmagic ATEM hardware line is a very big, very
expensive, line of hardware for doing live switching for broadcast. I own a ridiculously expensive one, that allows me to do the live shows the way that I've always done them and it has a whole bunch of inputs and has a lot of fancy features
that this does not have, but this little guy here
actually has features that my big, bad boy doesn't, which is a little bit
disturbing to some degree, especially considering this is only $300. One of the main things that this has that my switcher does not, is a scaler on every input. So , let me back up a
little bit even further to explain what I mean by this. First of all, as a
switch of the whole point is you feed in multiple inputs into this, in this case, it's up to four inputs in
different camera angles, computers, whatever you like, and then you choose which one goes out. You have a switching hardware
to choose which one goes out. On a traditional ATEM,
every piece of every camera, every input, everything coming in has to be exactly the
same size and frequency. Meaning it has to be 1080p at
29.97 or whatever you choose, it all has to be the same coming in and that is also what goes out. You don't have to do that with this. This doesn't have that limitation. This will actually do
it scaling in real time. In fact, what I've got right now, is this camera coming in at 1080p 29.97. This camera up here, and we'll go through all
the inputs in a moment. This one up here is 1080p 24. That's 24.00, True 24p, This one over here is coming in at 59.94, and then the computer I think
is set to 25 Hertz right now. I am outputting, a 30p (or
29.97) file for recording. So it's completely scaling on input and then on output as well. It's kind of remarkable that it does that. Normally scalers are individual
things you have to buy and they're quite
expensive to get good ones. And these are now built in and
from what I've seen so far, they look top notch. So, this is scaling all these
inputs that are coming in, which is wonderful matching
the frame rate doesn't matter. Just plug it in and away you go. The whole point of this
thing as I said is switching. So, let's take a little
tour of the hardware, while taking a tour of what is actually
plugged into it right now. So let's get this out of the way. And here we go. This is my hardware box right here. I'm going to go from
camera one to camera two. Camera two is this guy over here. Camera two is looking over my shoulder, and I can see the switcher on here and all the other gak
that I've got going on. we'll come back and
explain what everything is. Input number three, is going to be this camera right here. So if I go to three, that's this camera, close up of the switcher itself. And then input four is
the computer screen, I've got my computer plugged in, so that we can take a
tour of the software. Now, that software that you just saw, is the software for the ATEM switcher, but this is not required. You can actually do a lot of what, everything we're going
to show in the beginning, you can do without touching
the software at all. The software just allows
you even more control. But everything that you need
to use this as a switcher, is built into the box. So, I explained that I've
got these different inputs coming in, camera one,
two, three and then four as the source is my computer. The output now is going into
a recorder and to this TV. So if we look at this angle here, you'll see one of these cables coming out is actually feeding into my Atomos Ninja, what is this thing, Ninja Inferno, you can see the red box this
is actually recording right now that's recording the show, and then I'm feeding off
from there into this monitor. And that is simply so that
I have a picture here to see which I probably don't really need this because I can just look
at it on the display there but, you know, I have it
so set it up this way. This is so that you can
see what is going out. You don't actually have to do this. Because the other way that this
device outputs it's signal, not only over HDMI into devices like this or whatever you want. It'll also output over USB. And that USB signal goes out over USB into your computer and your computer, then sees this as a webcam. So what this means is that you
could be using this switcher, for something like Skype, you can be using it for YouTube Live, you can use it through Open
Broadcaster or Wirecast, or any software that would take - - you can use it for a FaceTime call! -- anything that will see a webcam , will see this and just think it's a webcam and then you just have
all your control here. Now, I do want, I want
to point something out. When you look at the box it says, streams to Facebook, YouTube,
Facebook, twitch, Skype. It's a bit of a misnomer. This box doesn't stream to anything. This box is not streaming
hardware, it is not an encoder. It is not streaming hardware, it is not going to get
you onto the internet. You still need something else, between this box and the
Internet to get there. For most people, that's
going to be your computer. And it might be like I said, you're using Open Broadcaster
(that's OBS), using Wirecast, or just using Skype,
something along those lines. And that's great. Or you could use hardware. So, for example this right here is an Epiphan Webcaster X2. This is a low cost hardware streamer, that I could take the HDMI signal coming out of here directly or the recorder they did here, whatever you like, and then use this to stream online. And if this is something that you're interested in seeing
the whole solution for, let me know that in the comments. I'll be happy to do a show on that. It's been a while since
I've looked at this guy, It's a great great little hardware, hardware streamer, hardware encoder. And I've got a full setup of kit for it, like this tiny little keyboard so that you can control it
and tiny little monitors, you can see what's going
on, it's kind of fun. So if you want to know more about that, let me know I'll do a
dedicated show on that. But anyway, the hardware itself is switching between all the inputs, and that output goes
either to HDMI or USB. And actually, it goes
to both simultaneously. So that you can use both
an external recorder or monitor and feeding
it into your software. So, now let's take a look at the layout of the buttons and
what these things all do. So let me go into the close up, up here, looking at camera three. And essentially here's the breakdown. So obviously inputs one,
two, three and four. Above these, above each input, you have six buttons that
are related to audio. The audio is... well your
options are levels up and down, volume up and down, audio of or on. Reset, which just resets
everything back to it's default. And then this button that
says AVF or sorry, AFV. AFV means Audio Follows Video, and so what that means is
if I had audio follows video on multiple inputs as I switched inputs, that mic coming in or that
audio coming in with that input, would be enabled. And then as soon as that camera was off, you wouldn't hear that anymore. So for example, let's say you've got
like a wide crowd shot, and you want to, when you
switch to that wide crowd shot, hear the crowd, but you
don't normally want that. Or you've got a journalist
on camera with a microphone stepped out, is outside somewhere, and they're feeding into your system and when you switch to them, of course, you want to hear them when you switch away from them you don't. So, couple of ideas of how you might use audio follows video. Or, as you saw in here, you could have the audio simply on and then that's on all the time. So the way that my audio is set up right now for this recording, is I am feeding through
a wireless mic pack I'm wearing a Sennheiser AVX pack that is plugged, the receiver
is plugged into that camera. So my audio is tied into
that video coming in here. The device also has
dedicated audio inputs. But here I'm going to tell
you one of the problems, right away. If you use the dedicated audio inputs, and you have control
over those right here. So there's your audio; see that's mic one and mic two, there's two little mic
ports in the back on here. If you use those, there's
no method that I found yet. And I've gone through the software and I've searched the manual, there doesn't seem to be any
method to delay the audio. And you might think, well why would you want
to delay the audio? The inputs on this device are all HDMI. HDMI video is always
delayed, from real time, it's only a few frames,
maybe three, four or five, six frames, just kind of
depends on your hardware. But there is always an inherent delay. And so if I had audio plugged
into the mic input here, and I have tested this, if I have an audio plugged into the mic, it is going to come in in real time. Audio feed into the device in real time. The video coming here is not real time it's a few frames delayed, which means you will have a mismatch between your
audio and your video. That's no good. You can't do that. So what we do instead is we have audio going into the camera. So the audio is now
delayed with the video. So by the time it hits the
switcher, it's in sync. So whenever you're going to
have anybody talking on camera, you need to have their
mic fed into the camera. Or instead of plugging the
mic directly into here, you can plug it into some
type of hardware mixer that has built in delay. A lot of hardware mixers
will have built in delays in that would allow you to do that. And then you just find the
right amount to delay that in. But you cannot plug a
mic directly into here, plug a camera into here
and put the two together, they will not sync up. Super super important to know. You could now still use it though, as like a background music. Let's say maybe I want some
music to fade in and out to background tracks, something like that, that'd be a perfectly good
use for that input as well. Okay, so let's go back
to the buttons on here. So again, levels up and down on or off, audio follows video and reset and you have these for
each one of these inputs. So let me just do this. I'm going to set this to, on all of these and now as you can easily tell the audio switching so
there's the good audio. This is now the built in mic,
it points right this way, the mic that's on this camera. This is now we're listening to
the mic on this camera here. And if I switched over to the computer, we wouldn't hear anything at all. So I'm going to go back over
here and set that back on to this, and turn off
all this other audio. so that audio is on, the
rest of them are off, which is what I want for this show. Okay, next up over here on the right, you'll see two buttons still and black. Black simply takes the frame, to black, that's all there is to it
pretty straightforward, and go back to whatever shot you want. So black just takes you
to black and it's instant, it's just an instant
cut to black on there, still, loads up the still frame. Now, the still frame from the still store is something you do have
to use the software to do. The ATEM software is how you
load your images into here. But the images are stored in the device. They're uploaded into the device and there is room for 20 stills on here. Let's take a look. There's room for 20 stills on here. Now I've loaded one on here. So what that means is if I go over here and I push the still button, we're going to see that one picture that I've loaded up there. Which is now a perfect opportunity for me to introduce to you,
picture and picture modes. This is another feature we have in here. We'll come back to the
buttons in a minute. I want to do this now because it's a great chance for
me to tell you that... see this picture right
here, that picture there, that's India. I did a workshop in India
last year, I'm going back. I'm going back in November of
2020. [PhotoJoseph.com/india] If you're interested in an
absolutely[PhotoJoseph.com/india] mind blowing photography
tour through India, in late 2020, [PhotoJoseph.com/india] let me know in the comments,
but more importantly, sign up for my newsletter, go
to photo Photojoseph.com/india find the newsletter button. Tweet me, whatever, I'll let you know. We're going to start
selling those tickets soon and we're only taking six
people. [PhotoJoseph.com/india] And I've got five already interested. Those are kind of like my
early early pre announcements. People who've been on
workshops before with me, so there's not going
to be very many seats, but it's going to be awesome.
[PhotoJoseph.com/india] Anyway, let's get back to
this. [PhotoJoseph.com/india] So back to this. That's what the still store is and again in the software here, you could load up to 20 of them. And then whichever one you want, you simply drag over and
that's what loads it up. That's the first thing we seen where you have to use the
software to do anything. But if you don't need
the still image on there, then you don't have to use
that and that's perfectly fine. Okay, let's get back into this. We have over here a button says cut. And you've noticed that
every camera change that I've made has been
a strict cut a hard cut. You can also do transitions. A transition is called auto. And an auto will transition and it could be anything
from a simple crosses off, that's what mix is. Dip, a dip to color,
by default it's white. And then you have a push, you have a squeeze and you have a left, left to right or a top to bottom wipe. The duration of that
transition is set right here. You can set a half second, one second, one and a half or two
second transition in there. So let's do a top to bottom. It's two, set to two
seconds, we're in auto. So now when I go to
choose a new camera angle, you'll see that nice slow wipe. I'm going to set it to a side to side, go to one and we see that slow wipe over. I can speed that up. Let's go set that to half a second. And we'll do a squeeze on here, squeeze into another camera angle. The mix is a simple cross-fade. So nice simple cross dissolve in there. And then as I said, there's the dip, which is a dip to color, which by default is white. But this is something that we
can control in the software. Now I prefer in general
to just do straight cuts, I find them to be just
a lot cleaner looking. And also the other thing about a cut is versus a dissolve, is if you're streaming, think about how when you're streaming, everything is compressed for streaming. And the way compression works is it's looking for
pixels that are changing. And anything that's not changing, it doesn't have to re encode, when you do a cross dissolve every single pixel changes for the entire duration of that dissolve. So when you do a cut every pixel changes. But it's one frame everything's here and then the next frame
everything's there and that's it. That's the end of it. If you do a dissolve, let's say you do a one second dissolve and you're doing a 30
frames per second broadcast, that's 30 frames, where every single pixel
on that frame is changing. And what ends up happening is you can end up getting
some compression artifacts, some macro blocking, some
stuttering in the stream. So in general for streaming, I tend to not recommend
doing any kind of dissolves, or any kind of transitions like that. But if you want to, you certainly can. Okay, so that's, that's
the cut, that's auto, we've talked about, that
there's fade to black. Fade to black is a simple,
bring you down to black. Hit it again, and it
brings you back up again, so it's a great way to end
the show or start a show off. Now let's go to the picture and picture we talked about this, or
I showed this briefly. What this allows me to do, if I hit on, is it puts, well,
it puts a picture up there, it's well, pointed at the wrong place, it puts a picture here!... and you can change the position of it. So you've got a top right,
top left, bottom left, bottom right corner for that, you can put it wherever you
like, off and back on again. The image that is coming in
over this picture in picture is input one. Now you can change that in the software but it is input one which of course in this
case is this camera here. If I wanted to be doing a software demo and have a picture and picture
of me in the corner there, I can do that. Now the size of this, you'll
notice is quite small. And this is where we
start to get into things that you can do in the software. You can change that. What I have not figured out
yet, what I've not figured out, is how to reprogram these
buttons so that they load the picture in picture
in a different size. And I've looked at the XML code, I'll show you this in a moment. I don't think it's changeable. I think that's hard coded in there. But you could still change
your picture in picture by doing it in software and
building macros in software just not using these buttons to do it. So, I'm hoping that there is a way, if someone watching this knows
how to reprogram the ATEM so that you can use, have
your picture in pictures be different sizes than
the default positioning. I'd love to know it. But yeah, right now I don't. Last button on here
that I want to show you is up here, the key. Now this is really really special. So the key would be like a
green screen blue screen keyer. The key that's built into
this is apparently phenomenal. In fact, I didn't realize
exactly how great it was. But a buddy of mine, Guy Cochran at the
DVEStore called me today we're chatting, and I asked him to send me a little video recording
of him doing this. So, um. Okay, I lied, not a
complete unedited Show. I'm going to insert that here. - So one of the things that
people are talking about inside of the ATEM Mini is the keyer. So it actually has the
advanced keyer inside of it. So I have one of the boxes right here. And on the box, you'll see that it says
ATEM advanced keyer. What does this mean? It means that there's more
processing power inside of this box and even in the
older like $5,000 ATEM. So it's a tremendous value to be able to get this clean clarity. So if you wanted to feed
in two HDMI devices, let's say your camera and a laptop, done. You don't have to go keying
in post, it's composited, its composite, it's done
right then and there. So if you're looking to
get an ATEM just the keyer alone is worth a couple
thousand dollars and Ultimatte DV used to
cost two grand and now you're getting an Ultimatte
for $295 inside this box. So hope you guys enjoyed Joseph's session and catch you guys later. - Okay, so that was Guy if
you want to know more about Guy Cochran and his store
go to the DVEstore.com they have generously
loaned me green screen kit before if you've seen,
I'll link to that show at the end of this one. We did a whole thing with the green screen stuff was pretty fun. But the keyer that is built into here is apparently phenomenal. So that is something I'll have
to do in a whole other show. You can use that keyer,
also to key out graphics. So you can load up graphics
into the still store that have a green background
that are then keyed out. You can also load up graphics that have alpha channels in them so you could have a lower third that sort of thing, on there. And that's all stuff
that you can do in this. Now you cannot, from what
I can see in the software, load up a series of
frames to do an animation. So I don't think that you
can do animations in here like an animated lower third
graphic kind of a thing. But you can do static graphics
with alpha channels in there. So that is the extent
of everything on here. I think I forgot anything on the back, we got the two audio
inputs, four HDMI inputs, HDMI out for this. One, two, three, four HDMI out to that. USB-C out, power port. There's also an Ethernet port on there, which would allow you to connect to this from anywhere on the network. Right now I'm connected over USB-C. But you could connect to it
over the network as well, which is just, again, gives you control over the
hardware from the software. Alright, let's dive into
the software a little bit. So this is the interface
for those of you who have watched my live shows
before you may have seen the interface on here. Let's go put me up there in the corner. You may have seen the interface
where there's usually a lot more buttons than this. This software is the same
software but it just conforms to whatever hardware you're plugged into. So we're seeing fewer buttons
on here than you would if we're plugged into my big switcher. But what you'll notice on
here is that we have on here our four camera inputs and
then all these buttons that are blanked out because
there's no additional inputs in there. I can control the camera here just like I can on the hardware switcher. So if I switch over to,
if I hit camera three, it loads up and now we're on three, on the software I'm going to hit two and on the software I'm
going to hit three again. And on the software I'll
hit four to go back to that. So I do have the ability
to control that from there which is, which is pretty cool. I can do things like go to
black, load up color bars. There you go, we'll load
up color bars from there. There's a lot of other things and there's a lot of stuff that we'll get into in future videos again
if you're interested in this let me know in the comments and I'll, I'll you know do some
more videos on this thing if it's something you
guys want to see more of. The picture in picture is handled through something called
the Upstream Keyer. Again; stories for another day. We can get into all that, but
all the controls on here so you have your mix and
your dips and your wipes all those controls again
are able to be controlled within the software as well
as on the hardware itself. We go within the media tab,
we see the media store, which we already saw. But here's something
else that is incredible. The audio capabilities of this device, absolutely blow away the audio
capabilities of my big ATEM. And now, this is partially in software. Well, no, I guess it's
really all in hardware... I think it's called Fairlight. Probably should look that up. And I think... well, I don't know. If I'm going to get any of
this capability in my ATEM when I upgraded it. There's
a software update for it. I don't know if it can do this. But let me just show you
what's in here. This is insane. So we are once again looking
at my audio coming in on channel one right there.
So we see it on there. You can see these other
ones are all muted. I could turn them on here, so now you're hearing that
other camera audio and so on. Not only do I have the ability
to adjust levels on here, and by the way, let me just show you this real quick if I go back to this view. So, I have on here these little arrows, up and
down for changing levels. Go back to this and I'm
going to hit those arrows and you can see, you can hear of course, the levels changing on that
if I hit the reset is going to take me back to the reset position. So that's kind of fun. It's always, I just find it
kind of cute and amusing to make changes on a hardware
device and see things happening over here in software like that. It's just kind of cool. Anyway. All right back to this, let's get that picture in
picture back up as well. So all right, so you've got your levels, you got your on off, there's your AFV button and so on. But then there's these two new things; Dynamics and Equalizer. Let me start in Dynamics. Look at what we've got in here. You have an Expander. You have
a Gate, Compressor, Limiter. An incredible amount of
control over your audio. In fact, we're running
the expander on here which I discovered is incredible. Let me just turn this off for a minute. This is my room without the expander on. This is my room normally so you're getting a little bit of background noise. I've turned off my heater. It's late so the neighbors aren't here. They're not... their fans aren't on, My humidifier is off. There's still highway noise. There's room tone. But when I turn the expander
it just does a phenomenal job of cutting all that crap out. It's really amazing. Now the gate is, I found,
to be a bit too aggressive. I think the gate is too harsh
in it's default settings. But you do have complete
control over that. As you can see in the software, when we go back to the Expander on there. There's a compressor, which
playing with, like, this stuff, I don't fully understand exactly
how the different settings, what the different
settings effect in there. So if I just turn it on, it's...
we're hearing I think the overall levels are quieter, which obviously we can compensate for. I think it's kind of it's
bringing the floor and the ceiling down a little
bit too close to each other. I don't like the way this sounds. So I left that off but again, maybe with the right
settings it would be better. And then you have a limiter. I don't have a limiter
turned on because my mic has a built in limiter and it
wasn't making any difference but if you're using a mic
without a built in limiter as most are, then you
probably want to have that on. So that's pretty incredible right? Now, let's go back to this. Now we run into the thing, I've done this, I've done this mistake on
live shows before where I was showing you the software but you weren't looking at the
software, you were looking at me. That's okay. You saw, you know what you needed to see. There's a compressor, there's the limiter. But let's just turn all that off. Now let's go into the other
fantastic feature in here. A full equalizer. You can go in here and
control, you know, whatever you want. Add a little bit more
bass in your voice in there. I'm not listening right now to myself. So I'm not sure how exactly
this is affecting me. But you have a full EQ in
here that you can adjust for each individual
input, just remarkable. I'm going to reset it
because I don't know what I just did it myself there. But this is absolutely,
absolutely incredible. All of this built into this tiny little $300 piece of hardware. So, I am going to wrap
up the show with that. Four inputs, with scalers built into them. That again, that's the
mind blowing part of this. You can feed anything into this. I plugged in my iPad, I plugged in a bunch of different cameras. And, everything worked flawlessly. Four inputs, one output, of
course, for your program out. Incidentally, I should show you this let's go back into here. If I go into the settings by default, it is outputting when you get
it out of the box 1080p60. But you can change that as you see here to any of these settings. So 1080p 23.98, 24, 25,
29.97 blah blah blah. So I set it to 30 because that's what we wanted to record at. So you just make that change
in there and hit the set button and it will change but
not going to do that there. You have additional controls
in here in the preferences we don't need to get into right
now but I just wanted to show you that you could change
the output if you want to. I think that's everything
I need to show you. So, there you go. That was the show live to tape minus the one insert of Guy's message for us. And that's, I could have
loaded on the computer. But I completely forgot to do that before I started recording. And, and that's about it. It's a remarkable device,
absolutely remarkable. I think combining this with one of these to have a totally portable,
very obviously very lightweight very portable streaming
solution where you can bring in multiple inputs like this is
just absolutely incredible. If you don't want to
use dedicated hardware, obviously you can use your software you can use OBS or whatever. And I was going to show you one more thing I was going to show in Skype, how the input... Okay, so there's the Skype input. And you can see that the video is set to the Blackmagic Design. We're not seeing me on here because we're basically seeing
an infinite loop of me. So let me just do this. I'm going to do a screenshot
and then switch back to it. So this is what it looked like before. So there was me coming in. So you've got me on video
coming in through the, through the Skype input so that you can, again, switch for Skype
or switch for anything that sees a webcam. That's a lot of talking. Pretty cool hardware. Pretty cool hardware for 300
bucks, absolutely a steal. It really is remarkable. And yeah, I guess we're
going to leave it at that. So once again, if there's anything specific
you want to see about this let me know in the comments. If you want to see a demo, a full show about using the Webcaster with this, let me know in the comments. If you want to come to India with me, let me know in the comments. And I guess we'll just leave it at that. Whatever you specific
you want to see next, let me know and I'll dive in. See you later. Bye bye. I forgot to show you something. I said that I was going to
show you the code part of this the XML part of it. So from the switcher itself, you can go up here and choose Save As, and you can choose whatever
components of the software you want saved out to an XML file. So this is all the different
things that it can do. So if we just hit select
all, turn everything on and then hit save, what that is going to
do is output an XML file that looks like this. This XML is totally editable. And then you can re-upload
that back into the device. So you can go in here and
hit restore and load that back into the hardware. This allows you to have total control including doing macros you
can have, you can script multiple things together,
multiple events to happen together when you hit one button. And that is something that
I do in my regular show, my regular live show through
the big ATEM all the time, all of my camera angles, switches are actually
controlled through macros, partially because I don't have hardware like this in front of me. But also because with a macro, I can trigger a lot of
things to happen at once or the series of chain of events. That's all entirely
possible in here as well. The, to do a macro, it is
as simple as hitting record doing the actions and then hitting stop. However, what I found is
that for most of them, you end up wanting to
go in and tweak the XML. And that sounds a lot harder than it is once you start to look at it you kind of start to understand
what it is and you kind of do a little bit of reverse engineering you figure things out, figure out how to write
your own lines of code in there too if you want to, but you don't have to.
You don't have to do that. You can just hit record and go. Okay, I had said I'd show
that you and I forgot to So right now I'm out, bye.
