Controlling vMix with the Elgato Stream Deck

g'day everyone tim from vmix here today in this video we're going to take a look at programming the elgato stream deck with vmix shortcuts we have over 300 shortcuts in vmix and you can use them with your stream deck simply by pressing a key want to do something like switch cameras mute audio start your stream or perhaps overlay a title just press a key like this stick around if you want to know more we've had a stream deck tutorial here on our youtube channel for a few years now but there have been a couple of cosmetic menu changes in the stream deck app and how you set it up with vmix so we thought we would go ahead and make a new video to reflect those changes if you've been using the stream deck with vmix already there's no real need to watch this video as the functionality hasn't changed feel free to leave a comment though seeing as you're already here maybe let us know what your favorite cake is or perhaps how you're using the stream deck with vmix since the last video that we made we've noticed that so many different productions are using the stream deck or in fact stream decks to produce their content we've seen them use all over the world in all kinds of different production scenarios currently there are three available models the stream deck mini with six keys the stream deck with 15 keys and the stream deck xl with 32 keys and it's not uncommon to see producers with three stream deck excels in their production so that they can use all the keys now i'm sure that there'll be new models out in the future with maybe less keys or more keys we'll see what elgato comes up with so this video is about the stream deck and how you can use shortcuts with it but vmix also supports midi devices x keys xbox controllers and keyboards and mouse with shortcuts and vmix so you can check out our description for more information about using those if you're wondering what the stream deck is it's a usb device that has programmable keys much like a keyboard when you press a key it performs a function so for vmix it means that you can program your vmix shortcuts to work when you press a stream deck key a neat feature of the stream deck is that it has lcd keys so you're able to program custom displays on them that can include text colors images gifs or even your vmix live input previews now you aren't limited to the physical keys that you have on your stream deck for example this one here has 32 keys however the stream deck offers pages and folders options which allows you to add multiple levels of keys to your device so instead of just the 32 keys that i have here i can add a page to it which will add another 32 keys and i can another page and another folder to create more and more keys for use in vmix the stream deck is available in a lot of different retail stores and through online retailers such as amazon so if you ever forget one or if you want to try one out they're very easy to purchase you can just head down to your local shopping center and you should be able to find one in a store down there now i know i've bought them in all kinds of random places in the u.s for trade shows places like best buy gamestop i think maybe even target i think i might have bought one from there as well okay so you've bought your stream deck and now you're ready to set it up so what you'll need to do is go to the elgato website and download the stream deck application then you'll need to install it to your computer and make sure that you've got your stream deck plugged in to use the stream deck with vmix you'll need at least vmx 22 and stream deck version 4.1 however i'm using 5.1 today of the stream deck application and i'm using vmix24 and i'd recommend remaining up to date with the latest version of the stream deck app and vmix as well now we do have plenty of stream decks in the office here so we make sure that when the software is updated that they work with vmix as well so i definitely recommend staying up to date with vmix and stream deck okay so this is the stream deck application now on the left you'll see all of your keys that are available to you so i have a stream deck xl which you can see in the preview i have 32 keys and on the right hand side are the different plugins and actions that i can assign to those particular keys so on the left you have the keys and on the right you have the different actions you can assign to them so in order to add a vmix shortcut to your stream deck you'll need to add the vmix plugin so you'll need to go to the stream deck store which is this little icon right here you'll just need to click on it and that will open up the stream deck store we can search for vmix in the top right hand corner here by just searching vmix like so and then we can install it we can click on it and then we can click install up the top here and what we want to do is install this plugin if you feel like giving us five stars feel free to do that as well all right so once that's done you can see that it's installed we just click x up here and now we have the option to add a vmix shortcut to our stream deck so we just scroll down the bottom here and now you can see that we've got vmix now you can minimize these like so or you can go up to the organizational menu up here and remove the things that you don't want so i don't want this one here and i don't need this one here and then i can save it just makes it a little bit cleaner for you if you just want specific things in this menu all right so what i'm going to do is start assigning my shortcuts to my keys so first of all i'm going to remove this one here and you'll see that it will correlate with the preview right here see this will remove once i delete it so it's happening in real time from the app to the stream deck so what i'm going to do now is drag across the ability to have a vmix shortcut on my keys as you can see the icons are now appearing so that's the vmix icon meaning that i can now assign a vmix shortcut to that key so i can just drag across all of these like so i can fill this out if i want to so now i have my top row they now have the ability to have vmix shortcuts so let's say i wanted to have more than just these 32 keys i can click here and add a page so now i have a second page and if i want to put a shortcut on that page i would drop it there maybe on a third page i can put shortcuts here as well and i can double click this to go back i can also have folders as well so there's a folder option here let me find it create folder it's the top one so i can create a folder here as well and put shortcuts in folders also so there's a couple of different options for adding multiple layers of keys on your stream deck and so you don't have to just have the vmix shortcuts here any other plugins you have here you can also add them to your keys as well so if i wanted to add a brightness option here i could do that or timer all those kind of stuff can be added to that as well all right so now i'm going to show you what you can do to the key itself like what display you can have for it so i'm going to select the one in the top left hand corner here and what i can do now is change the text on it so i could just write wow on it and as you can see that has now changed on the stream deck key and i can change the way that it looks by the the font the color where it's laid out all that kind of stuff can be changed from here and once that's done i can also change the background of the key so i can add an icon to it so instead of having that vmix icon i can set a file so i can create an image file for it or i can use one of the icons that they offer as well so that's up to you now we can also use the vmix display so the live preview as well and i'll show you how to do that a little bit later on now one thing to consider is that if you write text on it here that overwrites anything that you add in vmix as well so you can still have your live previews but it will have whatever text is written on it here so if you don't want text on it make sure that you remove that from here you just delete that text okay so now that we have our stream deck with our vmix shortcuts assigned to the keys we're going to go down to vmix now we're going to set up some shortcuts now you'll need to restart vmix if you've just installed the stream deck app so that will recognize the key so make sure that you do that i've already done that because i had it already installed okay so what i'm going to do now is go to the shortcut section of bmx so that can be found in the settings menu in the top right here and then we go down to shortcuts so then what you want to do is add a shortcut so click on the add shortcut key here then at the top here we'll need to find our stream deck key so we'll click find and now what i'll do is go over to my stream deck and i'll just use the wow key that i created in the top corner and i'll press it down now as you can see here as i'm pressing it up and down you have two different options you can have the down action or up action now i typically like to have it on the down action so i'll press it down so as soon as i press it that shortcut happens so that's what i like to do i'm going to click ok so now i have a shortcut ready to go on that one and i need to select what function that i want so what i'm going to do is just do a simple transition for now so i'm going to select transition and i'm going to select fade so i'm just going to do a simple fade transition i can set the how long it's going to take so i'll make that half a second and i'm just going to make it go from my preview to my program so that's going to be the shortcut that i create you could also set it to a particular input if you wanted to like fade to a particular camera or to a particular video i'm just going to go preview to program as an example so underneath the input section you do have some other options here if you want to know more about shortcuts i'd recommend checking out the shortcut video that we have on our vmix youtube channel underneath that i can give it a title if i want to so i could just call this fade for example give it a description and that sort of thing the most important thing down here is the display so if i want to i can choose thumbnail now thumbnail will represent my live vmix preview on the stream deck key so i'm going to select that to show you what it looks like and i'm going to select a local shortcut just because i'm going to save it in this preset that's typically how i do it so now i've got as you can see up here on the button press down of my key it's going to fade from my preview to program and i am going to use the thumbnail display which is the live preview of the input so i'm going to click ok down the bottom here and then click ok so let's go ahead and press this button and we'll see what happens i'm going to press it now as you can see it has faded from the preview to the program and it's going to display what's in the preview because that's what's coming over and so if i move this back you'll see that it actually changes to what's in the preview so you can see that the live preview is the stream deck and then when i move it over here it is now the program output because that's what's in the preview window now so that will change which is pretty cool so i'm just going to transition this back like so and i'm going to quickly show you how to do another one so we'll go up to settings shortcuts click add and then we'll use this uh we'll go down a folder here so let's go down this one here let's go down a folder and we'll use this guy here so what i'm going to do now is go to find and press this one down so this is down a folder and i'm going to click ok and now for the function what i'm going to do is just overlay my title so as you can see here we have 300 more or more functions you can add to your key so what i'm going to do is go overlay overlay input 1. so that'll put it in the first overlay channel and then i'm just going to select my title that i've added so that's the input that i'm going to use give this a title if i want you don't have to it's up to you and then for the display i'm going to select thumbnail as well just to show you what that looks like and then i'm just going to click ok down the bottom as you can see just then it now has changed into what my title looks like so that's my lower third and it's gone from that vmix icon to that lower third and then when i press this key here it will now overlay my title wow and i press it again and as you can see it moves off the screen now these are only a few frames per second because you know you don't want too much data flying back and forth but it will give you an idea of kind of what's in that particular input so that's a handy way to do it so that's how you can use the folders and the pages and that sort of thing as well so i can go back up here and then i could select this to do the switching and then i can go down here find the folder and then press this one here so as you can see it's like multi-layered if you wanted to have even more keys than this one offers we go up again and then we move that across so yeah that's how you can set up those keys to do a lot of different types of shortcuts and you can see what's happening on the screen with those live previews now with the live previews you may be better off to use a picture in the stream deck app depending on what's on it like you might have a video file that has a blank first frame which means it's going to be blank on the stream deck which may be hard for you to be able to pick it up so you may want to use the text using the stream deck app or potentially using a an image in the stream deck app to help identify it just a little bit better as opposed to just having a blank frame i thought i would quickly go over the profile section in the stream deck app just to explain a few things so here i am in the app again in the top left hand corner you'll see what device you're using so i've got the stream deck xl underneath that you'll see what profile you're using now by default it's actually called default profile and your profile will save your actions that are on the keys like these vmix ones across here my folders pages and any other actions that i have associated to the keys now each of these keys have their own letter number combination in order to know which key they are so if you remember when i added the shortcut before a little letter number combination appeared when i pressed it so all of these keys have their own special identifier in the profile so if i switch the profile now like if i created a new one and switched it all these keys would have a new letter number combination so sometimes people switch their profile and then they go into vmix and they say well why aren't my keys working anymore that's because each profile has its own new set of keys so typically i use my default profile because i use the same kind of combinations and presets in vmix so i don't need to really change them however if you are making changes to the way that your stream deck works and the different keys and that sort of things you've got assigned to it then it might be an idea to create a new profile for each preset that you have in vmix and how you want to lay it out it'd be a good idea to play around with this and see what's going to work best for you if you're looking to move your vmix preset and production to a new computer and also move your stream deck to the new computer with all of your shortcuts intact you'll need to take a look at the profiles option in the stream deck app so we're going to go here to profiles and then we're going to go to edit profiles now you can import and export an individual profile if you like by selecting it and then going down the bottom here and going to import and export unfortunately this is going to only export what actions you've got on those keys so it will move across all of these vmix shortcut actions so when you load up your new stream deck app and install the profile it's only going to show these across here it's not going to bring across the letter number combinations of those keys so if you did it this way you'd have to go into vmix load up your shortcuts and just reassign your shortcuts to the corresponding keys on the new stream deck app now you can back up your entire stream deck and then restore that by using this section down the bottom here called backup all create backup and then you can restore it on the new computer however this is going to kind of override everything on that new computer all the shortcuts will work then because it's bringing across all of those letter number combinations but anything you had on that stream deck app is going to be overridden so you probably have to back it up if you had anything on that new one first before restoring it and then kind of working from there now it's a little bit convoluted i'm not sure why they do it this way but this is just how they do it so it's probably an idea to play around with this if you are moving around a lot of computers and having different presets with vmix and just try it out and see what works best for you the stream deck also works with vmix activators now vmix activators are a way to display feedback from vmix via the stream deck keys for example i can use different colors on the stream deck key to tell me things such as whether my audio is on if i'm streaming and recording if something is being used as an overlay or if my input is being used in the program output just as some examples there are a lot of different events that you can display so check out our full length video on activators if you want to know a little bit more now i've quickly set up an example here where my microphone audio is being used as an activator so i know whether my microphone that's right here is on or not whether the audio is going to be coming through so when my mic is on this button down here is red and when the audio is off for my microphone it's going to go blue so i can tell you all my secrets when i press this button and you're not going to be able to hear me and it's going to go blue when that audio is off so and now when i press it again the audio will come back on now i have this hooked up to a shortcut but you don't have to do it that way you can just use it as an activator so the color changes when the audio is on or off so i'm going to show you what that looks like from the vmix interface down here when i turn my audio off here you'll notice that the button also goes on and off so it'll go red then blue and then when i turn it back on you can hear me again this and nothing's happening see it's going on and off so it lets me know that my audio is currently on which is pretty handy now i'm going to show you how you can set that up from scratch so to set up an activator on a key we need to go to the settings section in the top right hand corner and then we just need to go down to activators so that's just below the shortcut section we were working on before so these are the activators that i already have set up for that key for the microphone audio on and off and what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go down and click add so i'm going to add a new activator so just like shortcuts what we need to do is find the key that we want to use on the stream deck so what i'm going to do is click find and then i'm going to click let's go with this one right here so i'm going to select this one and then i'm going to click ok now keep in mind that like shortcuts you will have to have that vmix plugin action assigned to it so it has to have this little icon here to make sure that it's a it's a vmix action so you can do stuff with it alright so as you can see below it it has now showed up the stream deck button so as i mentioned before in the presets this is the predetermined button or key number that is working in your profile on that particular key all right so under that you'll see the event option now firstly we'll need to set up the default state of the key so this is going to be the color of the key when there are no events happening on it so what we're going to do is from the drop down select default now you can't set up multiple events on a single key you can set up a default option and then you can set up an event option so keep that in mind you can't have multiple things happening on the same key with different events so underneath that you will see the option to select type now we can leave this off if we want just a blank key or we can select a color so i'm going to select a particular color so first of all i need to select stream deck as the key type and then i'm going to select my default color for the key which obviously is going to be my favorite color which is going to be brown and at the bottom i'm going to just select local preset because i'm saving all these as a local preset shortcut and activators all right so what i'm going to do now is just click ok down the bottom and you will actually notice that this key up here right here will turn brown when i click ok so there we go we now have a brown key set up as the default state for that particular key so now we need to set up that key to change color when an event happens so i can go to add and select the key again or i could just select it and go to clone to save that step and then just edit this one here now up the top here you'll notice that it's still the same key and i need to now select an event so i need to select an event so what i'm going to do i'm going to show you how to do the audio activator like i did before so i'm going to go down here and select input audio so i'm going to show you how you can display whether your audio is on or off for a particular input so for the input i am then going to select this believe.mp3 file and no unfortunately is not the sure grammy award winning song it's just another song named believe now underneath that you'll see a sign activated to input number i like to untick this because i like for my activator to move whenever i move my input no matter where it is in vmix so i like to untick that that's opposite to the tick box in the shortcut section so it's just a little bit different now underneath that we've still got the stream deck type selected and then i need to select a color that i want to use for when my audio is on so i am going to select red underneath that i'm just going to leave that local preset and then click ok all right so as you can see now i've got a default state which is brown for this key and then when my audio is on for believe.mp3 it's going to go red so let's just go ahead and click ok down the bottom and what i can do now is i'll show you this believe mp3 file so it's playing on loop but the audio's not actually on so when i turn the audio on you'll be able to hear it and you'll notice that the color here will go from brown to red so it's probably a little bit loud so let me just turn that down a little bit and let's just turn on the audio and there you go we've got a red key now [Music] so there you have it that's how you can set up an activator for the audio event now in order to wrap things up completely what we can do now is go and set up a shortcut on that as well so we'll bring it full circle so what i'm going to do now is go up to settings and then i'm going to go to shortcuts and then i'm going to go to add find find this key up here oops just reset itself there we go hold it down click okay and now for the function i need to go to audio i can also search up the top here as well but i know that i want to use this audio option here which will toggle the audio on and off set the mute on and off and then i need to select my believe.mp3 file again not the sure grammy award winning single i can give it a title if i want to i don't need to now for the display i'm going to leave this as default i just want to use the colors that i've got set up for the activators i'm going to make it a local shortcut and then going to click ok and then ok again now before i show you that shortcut what i'm going to do is just make it a little bit more obvious to know what exactly i'm doing on the button so what i'm going to do now is just quickly load up the stream deck app here i'm going to go to the key it's on and just type in believe believe no believe all right that was a close one okay so now it says believe and so i know exactly what it is so now i'm going to press it the audio is going to come on and it should go red because the audio is on there we go all right so that is setting up an activator and a shortcut on a single button and having feedback and everything so you can yeah use it in your production as i mentioned before the stream deck allows you to have multiple devices connected to vmix at once so you can have multiple ones programmed for vmix a lot of people use one two three as a part of their live productions now you can also have multiple pages and folders which gives you options for hundreds of keys if you do need them now you may not be able to afford a larger stream deck so with the pages and the folders options you're able to give yourself a lot of keys to work with as the stream deck has become more popular there are other pieces of software that work with vmix and the stream deck but this one here this is the official method and it's the only one that we can officially support and troubleshoot because we made the plugin for the stream deck and know how it all works if you have any questions about the stream deck feel free to drop us an email by the contact form on vmix dot com we can't do any diagnosing or troubleshooting via youtube comments as we have no idea about your setup and hardware so just drop us an email and our friendly support staff will get back to you if you are having any issues with maybe a new stream deck update or something like that just drop us an email as well so we can make sure it's all working properly it's a little bit easier than posting it on forums and facebook groups and hoping someone might have it have a fix when we've already found a solution for it so thanks for watching and we'll stream you later [Music] [Music]

Channel: vMix

Views: 7,092

Rating: 4.9316239 out of 5

Keywords: vMix, live streaming software, webcasting, live video production, video switcher, live production software, live streaming

Id: ziA37gdLYew

Length: 25min 15sec (1515 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021