Today’s ATEM (mini) Tip is all about
controlling the Picture in Picture or the PiP in your ATEM hardware and software. This tip
applies to any ATEM - however, it’s primarily focused at the ATEM Mini, ATEM Mini Pro, ATEM Pro
ISO, ATEM Mini Extreme and ATEM Mini Extreme ISO because those are the ones that have the hardware
buttons on them to control the Picture in Picture which you want to watch out for. However, as far
as controlling this and software goes, everything I show you here will apply to any model.
So, first let’s take a look at what we have on the hardware; you have on here a series of
buttons to enable Picture in Picture. There’s the Off and the On button that just turns that on
and off and then you have a series of buttons to load up preset Picture in Picture positions; the
bottom left, top left, top right and bottom right. These buttons here are a little bit dangerous
because if you push one of those buttons after you’ve spent time configuring your
Picture in Picture the way that you want it, it might actually reset everything,
so, you’ve got to be careful of that. So, I’m going to show you first how to set up
the Picture in Picture however you want it. I’m going to give you a little bit of a nod
towards something else that you can do in here, although there’s a lot of options that
we’re not going to cover today and then I’m going to show you most importantly
how to save the work that you’ve done so you don’t lose it. Let’s get started.
The first thing I want to look at is what’s actually happening when you push
this button. As I turn this on and off, you’ll see a couple things happening - first of
all you see the Picture in Picture showing up in the video stream so there’s a Picture in Picture
of myself there, not terribly exciting yet, but look at the software interface -
notice up here, this is the Upstream Key and as I turn this on or off, that is
what is being brought on air and off air. This On Air right here indicates that the Upstream
Key is on air, and this is your Upstream Key. What’s inside of that Upstream Key is determined
by the Fill Source. It’s currently set to this camera, the main camera here which I could change
in here to any other source, for example here I have a little running loop of a stock video but
what would actually make more sense is to leave this as me and then to change the background,
the primary stream as that background video. So now we’ve got a more traditional
Picture in Picture type setting, and again, if I change the position of these, all it’s doing
is moving me into one of those other corners. But let’s look at how to take control over this.
Again, this is an Upstream Key and it’s a DVE Upstream Key. DVE stands for Digital Video
Effects, and it’s just the basic type of Upstream Key that we have on the ATEM hardware.
We already saw the Fill Source - underneath this you have Position, Size, Masking, Shadow and
Border controls. There’s more as we go down here as far as animations go but we’re not going
to get into that today. By the way, at any point you can go up to this menu and reset any of these
characters or go ahead and choose Reset All to reset everything back to its default position,
and this is the hardware’s default position. Now we’ve got the Picture in Picture, the Upstream
Key of me centered, scaled and not cropped. Once again, if I hit the hardware in here though, it’s
going to immediately push that back into those other positions. So, if let’s just say that this
position happened to be what we really wanted, hitting one of those buttons on the
ATEM itself is going to reset that. But now let’s look at the controls that we have
in here. First you have your position controls. I can control these by clicking
on the arrows here to move them, I can click in this field and then use the
arrows on my keyboard to move them as well, or I can just punch in a number. So
if I wanted to say 3.0, I can do that. There’s also a Size in here, I can change the size
of this, make it a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller - you’ll notice that the X and Y axis are
locked, however, I can actually unlock this. So if you wanted to scale and stretch something
for some reason, you could do that as well. I’ll go ahead and re-link these and then I’m
going to set the size to 1 which is 100% and makes it full screen. However, you can actually
make this bigger - you can zoom in pretty far. This was a feature that was added
at some point in the software and you can go - anyway let’s not do that. Next is the mask - it’s by default set to zero,
not masking anything, but if we go in here and start typing in numbers or moving this with the
cursor, you’ll see that we can start to mask the image. You can crop the top, bottom, left or
right on this and what’s probably most common would be to crop off part of the edges on here
to give yourself a smaller Picture in Picture if you just wanted to crop a square out of a video
feed, for example, this is how you would do that. You can add a drop shadow to this but make
no mistake, this is not a fancy drop shadow, it doesn’t even have blur to it,
you can change the position of that, you can change the altitude of that just as how
far it goes, but that’s about it. You can also drag in this little guy here to reposition that.
But as you can see there, it’s - this is not a fancy drop shadow, so don’t get too excited.
You can add a border to this - the border allows you to change the color so you
can set any color that you want in here which you can do with the Color Picker or you can
do with the Hue Saturation and Luminance controls, which is extremely important because if you are
going to build the color choice into a Macro, you’re going to want to define the Hue,
Saturation, and Luminance inside of the Macro. You can change the outer width,
the inner width of that border, you can soften it which kind of like the shadow is
not really all that exciting but it’s there if you want it. I’m going to go ahead and set all these
back to their basics, we’ll leave a simple outer width on here and you also have a Border Opacity,
so you can make that solid or a bit transparent. Again, none of this is terribly exciting but
you do have the ability to do it if you need it. Most likely if you’re going to use this, you’d
keep it pretty simple - you’d probably leave the border opacity at 100%, set a nice simple outer
width, let’s just say 1 or even 0.5 on there and then set a simple color like a basic white just to
ensure that you have a nice clean border and let’s get rid of that silly shadow on there as well.
So those are the basic controls that you have over the DVE Upstream Key. Now, I said that I’d
give you a nod of some of the other things that are in here. If we scroll back up to the top
of this list, you’ll see that you have four different types of Upstream Keys; there’s Luma
keys, Chroma keys, Pattern keys and the DVE keys. The Luma and Chroma keys are quite complex and
quite powerful, we’ll cover those in other videos. If you’re interested, let me know in the comments
below. But for now I do want to take a quick look at the Pattern keys because these can be kind
of fun. Under the Pattern key right now, you’ll see that this diamond shape is selected. I’m
going to go ahead and set it to the circle shape and then under here you’ll see that
I can change the size of that circle, the symmetry of it - so if I want to squish that
out a little bit, make it a bit more oval, I can put some softness on the edge of that if I want to
and then change the position of the circle itself. Now this is the position of that crop, so
if I wanted to have a circular Picture in Picture type of a thing and I wanted to let the
person sit wherever they wanted to on frame, I can go ahead and move that circle
over their face and then from here, go down to the Flying Key position and
position where they are. There’s the Size, currently set at 50% and then the position in
here which I can now move to wherever I’d like. Let’s put that up in the top - let’s go ahead and
fix that symmetry as well to make it more like a real circle and now let’s go ahead and save this.
This is the Upstream Key position that I want to save, that I want to be able to recall
at any time. As you might have guessed, we’re going to need to use a Macro to do this. So,
let’s go to the Macros menu, open the Macro page, select a new blank one here under the Create tab,
click on PLUS and I’ll call this “Circle PiP”, for Picture in Picture, and hit Record.
Now as always, when recording a Macro, you do have to explicitly record everything
that you want the Macro to do; it assumes nothing. So, in this case, let’s start
by building out this Picture in Picture. We’ll go up here to the type of Upstream Key,
we don’t want a DVE key, we want a Pattern key. So I’m going to switch away from Pattern and back
to Pattern so that now a Pattern key is enabled. The Fill Source needs to be defined, it’s going to
be the picture of me, so I’ll go ahead and switch it to something else and then back to me again.
We need the right shape, so we’ll select away and back to that. Invert Pattern; you’d probably
would never use this but we want to make sure that it doesn’t accidentally end up inverted,
so let’s go ahead and toggle that as well. Next let’s go to the size - now, as we go
through each one of these fields, I could move the slider on here to get it dialed in or
since I’ve already meticulously put it into place, I’m going to go ahead and just click on here
and then tap up on my keyboard and down again, just hitting the up and down arrows just to change
the number and then change it back to where it just was. That will write that into the code.
So, we’ve just done that one, I’ll go here, up, down, up, down, position up, down, up,
down - we want the mask off in this case, so we’ll turn it on and back off, we want the
Flying Key on, so we’ll turn it off and back on. The position again, up, down, up, down, size,
up, down, that’s written that into place and now we’re ready to go except of course
we need to make sure that it’s turned on. So I’ll turn it off and back on again
and there’s our Upstream Key. Now I seem to have reposition myself in here but we’ll
leave it there, we’ll go ahead and stop recording, you can see that’s saved, go back to
the run position and it’s ready to go. Let’s just switch it away from this. Let’s go
ahead and switch it back to the default DVE key that’s built into the hardware. I’m going to go
ahead and hit the button down here to do that. Oh, wait a second - notice that the on button
is flashing here. In fact, at this point, if I push these buttons, they’re all going to flash
and nothing actually changes. This is because we have moved away from the DVE Upstream Key.
So, as long as we’re off of that tab, those buttons aren’t going to hurt us but again,
if we’re on that tab, it will overwrite whatever we’ve done. So, since those buttons are no
longer doing anything, I’m going to go ahead back over here and switch it in software back
to DVE. As soon as I go to that tab though, now these work again. So now I can turn that
on or off and I can change the position back to those defaults. But of course what we want, is
to bring up the circle Picture in Picture. Recall and Run is enabled, one click of that and there
we are back to the position of where I left it. So that is how you build a Picture
in Picture in the ATEM software taking complete control over its crop, position,
scale and everything else and then of course, how you write that into memory by saving it as a
Macro that you can recall at any time. Of course, as always don’t forget to Like, Subscribe and
Share this tip with another ATEM user and if you have any burning questions that you want
answered about your ATEM hardware or software, drop them into the comments below
and I’ll be sure to get to it.
