Ecamm Live + ATEM Mini: A great combo for Live streaming

so you've heard people talking about the a10 mini and you're kind of wondering what it's all about and if you've got an a10 mini why would you use ecamm and if you've got ecamm do you need an a10 mini i'm hoping as i walk you through the next 20 or 25 minutes you'll get an idea of what you can do with the a-10 mini and how it may be of value for you in your live stream production i'm edward moffat i do commercial video and until recently until kovid i had enough commercial clients that i really didn't have a website i didn't need to advertise things just kind of kept me busy and everything was great and obviously all of that's changed my wife is a yoga instructor and we have a studio in our house and i use it for photography and videography she uses it for yoga and so ordinarily it looks like this and it's just a big long room you can see the mats are socially distanced there appropriately but now there's camera two uh i have uh just um thrown up some lights and uh put some gear here on a card table and uh that's what i'm doing um uh so camera one for me for this show if you will is this one here right in front of me uh camera two you just saw is over here camera three is an overhead uh camera which is this camera right here and it's shooting this shot of the a10 mini and i'll try and leave it in when i'm doing interesting things with the a10 mini and camera 4 is this macbook air over over here macbook air over here and this macbook pro this is actually my wife's macbook pro that i'm using ecam on to um make this recording for you all right so that kind of gives you an idea of what's going on here what i wanted to cover here was some quick assumptions i'm going to walk you through the a10 mini and what it's about in terms of the buttons on top there's lots of buttons but they're actually laid out very logically there's a lot of connections on the back but also pretty straightforward that should open your mind to the possibilities of what we can do with this piece of hardware i'm going to talk about the software that comes with it i'm going to talk about the a10 mini versus the a10 mini pro lots of people say well you need the a10 mini pro no you don't i totally disagree i will discount that right now and i will show you why i think you don't need it but there is one scenario where you might need it so um i'll i'll let you decide i'm going to walk you through why i think you might want to use the a-10 mini with ecamm live i'll walk you through some final thoughts on a couple of tips so from an assumption standpoint i'm assuming you understand what ecamm live is all about obviously you have a mac or you wouldn't have ecam live and where this starts to make sense in terms of your live production as well as financially i'll touch on it financially i think it makes sense when you've got two or more cameras what does the a10 mini do it is a small hardware based switcher this thing here you can see i'm switching from camera to camera and i can go over to that camera i can go over to this camera and when i say camera a camera just means an hdmi input into this device so it could be a gaming console it could be your phone it could be your laptop could be a tablet doesn't matter if it's got an hdmi output you can use that as an input to the a10 mini and use it to switch a number of things there are four inputs i would argue there are four inputs plus a still picture kind of media player thing not as robust i would say as ecams but it does have its uses it allows for detailed audio management i know people complain about audio control on ecamp and i don't think that's actually what ecamm is for ecamm will just take sources play them out whereas a10 mini has very powerful audio controls i'm not going to spend any time on green screen keying today where ecam does an acceptable job i would say a decent job of doing green screen keying uh you have to have a green screen you can't have a blue screen you can't have a yellow screen kind of plain white can of plain black uh whereas uh with the atem products these are broadcast quality um switchers and effects built into the atem mini if you don't know blackmagic design they make television switching systems broadcast systems so the green screen capabilities are far more detailed and it doesn't matter what the color is in the background you could have a purple wall behind you and you could just key that out the a10 mini is connected to your mac and it's masquerading as a webcam even though it might be four cameras that allows your mac to do less work because a lot of the heavy lifting is being done in the a10 mini so for people that have an older mac and are concerned about resource consumption that might be an interesting benefit for you it has scalars base built into each input which means you can take an older camera that maybe maxes out at 720p and you can take something that is doing 1080p they can have different frame rates and the atm mini kind of equalizes all of that and turns it into whatever your output setting is and from an output setting standpoint there is only 1080p that's what it does it outputs a 1080p signal so you can have 1080p at 24 frames a second or 1080p all the way up at 60 frames a second which looks pretty spectacular for live streaming keys on the top the buttons are laid out into logical groups the top left section is all audio so let me come over here all these buttons here all these little ones that you can see above my hand all of these are audio and if that looks complicated it isn't let me walk you through it real quick these four buttons here so if i do that these four buttons here are just for in my audio input one so there's on and there's off and there's volume up and there's volume down these buttons here are associated with each of the cameras so um right now uh the only audio input that's on right now is audio coming from camera two because my wireless mic is actually plugged into my gh5 panasonic camera over there on camera too afv means audio follows video means that when that camera is on you get audio from that camera if you are in a live situation where your cameras switch around a lot and they are presenting audio there may be good value in using audio follows video so that when you're on say camera one you're not getting audio from camera three where there might be noise in the background or something like that or you can just leave it on the whole time which is what i'm going to do for this live session that we have here picture-in-picture is pretty neat so one of the things you can do is i mean you just turn it on and it pops a picture into a corner and then these four buttons allow you to select which corner you put it in what i have done is gone into the software and i'll talk about it in a second and set this up so that i can just have a funny shaped one this is not a ordinarily it would be a 16 by 9 shape but i have trimmed off the top and the bottom so that i can leave that on the screen but come back over here and do other things and i can point to buttons and whatnot the last section really are is the faders and the way the faders work is there's two principles here one is cut and one is auto cut means i'm going to go to the next camera by click when you press cut you go to that camera right away so i'm on camera one i want to go to camera two boom there's camera two right however i can also use auto uh so if i use auto right i don't know if you can see this but there are four buttons that control the amount of time it takes if i go and turn on two seconds you see it's a much slower change so i can change instantly using cut or i can change nice and slowly using auto so let me go back to the overhead shot these buttons here select the type of uh transition you have from one camera to another so for example right now we're using mix that's what black magic design calls what the rest of us might call a cross fade or a dissolve right but you can have a dip and what a dip does is it fades to a predetermined color and then moves back to uh the second camera so you see how it goes to white and then goes to the next camera uh personally i don't use that there are other things like slides pushes kind of dissolves across and then a wipe like that so that's all built into the hardware and it's just push button simple if you're doing something where you know you've got a rant and you're screaming and yelling at the camera and you you know you want really quick cuts or or your dj and you've got tuned stumping and you want the camera changes to be really fast then i think ecam does that really well or you could use the atem and um switch really really quickly between the different cameras and uh fool around like that um a lot of my the productions that i do are more business uh oriented and with my wife's live streams for yoga having uh you know a one second fade between you know one sort of thing and another makes a lot of sense to me because it's less jarring it you don't need that energy that energy is not what it's about so that's the way i use it all right and then the um i guess let's go back over here the final button over on the right hand side is the fade to black button which does uh exactly uh what you think it does yep okay so uh looking at the back uh where all of the cables come in we have the ethernet control on here they call it atem control allows you to put your atem mini on a network and it allows one or two or three or even four different computers either on the same network or connected remotely this is how powerful this is connected remotely to manage the atem you literally could have four different people doing four different jobs in producing your live session uh with the atam the webcam out it's just a usbc connector you plug that into your mac and your mac thinks it's seeing a webcam the hdmi output can be set one of two ways it can be your program out which is your live what's happening now right so right now camera one that's my program out it can also be set to show you your preview out meaning what do you have queued up next so the hdmi output can either be preview or it can be program program again being your live view obviously you've got your four hdmi inputs as i said they can be you know whatever kind of device they don't have to be a camera and then you've got two additional audio inputs which can be mic or line level inputs okay that was the hardware let's talk about the software now the software control panel for switching is divided up into similar sections you have the program section over here which is what's live right now we're in this picture camera one is what's live right now what's queued up is your preview that's your next thing and it's also camera one which is okay a really bad example so let me come over here all right so now you're seeing what i actually have running live here what's going on is camera 4 is what's going out of the atem uh we're ignoring it because in ecamm i've chosen to show you an application but what's coming out is actually camera four and what's cued up is camera one so instead of pressing the auto button on the a10 mini i can click this here this button so now we have switched from the one camera to the other uh and you can you we actually saw this pretend to move uh as if it was a real you know old-school hardware switcher um but uh what's nice about that is you can take your mouse and grab that switcher lever in the software and slide it slowly and do things that you might otherwise not be able to do for example let me do this so that's about 25 of the way so let me come back here so now you can see this and i've just moved the slider to there and what that gives us is something like that so where would you use that well you might use that if you're if you're uh well maybe not quite like that maybe a little stronger you might have church lyrics uh you know the the lyrics to the hymns uh going down the screen from one source while your camera is maybe showing the congregation and you can manually move this and go as slow as you want to get to that fade to the other side the other thing you can do is um when i press the buttons on the atem mini so you see this value here is one second well i could make it a second and a half uh i can make it two seconds right but i can also come over here and make it three seconds or well that's actually three and a half so it's three seconds and 15 frames because i'm broadcasting it 30 frames a second so what that looks like uh if i then go and press on the auto button is a three and a half second fade we have the media player so right now in this i have this set up to one of my wife's openings for her classes so let me set that up over here in my actual on my atm i have 20 different slots for media i've just chosen you know from a picking list i'm going to turn on the media player as my next camera so see how that's gone green and let's see can we see that yeah so you see how this button here has lit up green it says still so there is a still image queued up as effectively the next camera right so if i press auto this is an opening screen that i would have before my wife's class starts and i would put that up using the a10 mini but i would use a timer from ecam that looks like this and i might call that either from the overlays menu on ecamm or i might use my stream deck final thing i want to show you was these things down here remember i told you you could have different computers managing one atem mini so right now we're looking at the switching panel right but there is a media panel which somebody could like it could be their full-time job during the production to move media in and out there's an audio panel and there's a camera panel so i'm going to walk you through those this is the media panel and the media panel is broken up into logical sections this is where you're pulling your media from so your hard drive or even an externally connected hard drive or a raid array or whatever you have 20 different slots for media but in the middle of your live you can pull things in and out and then you have what's ready like queued up what is the one thing that we would use next if i come back to i was in switching views so now this is the media view so we have these different uh pieces of these different stills so if i want to show this car getting really really close to the wall on a race i shot then i would do that and i would turn on the media player and i would make that the image now you can't see it because ecamm is showing you the software but if i come over here and switch back to the output of the atem there you go there's that picture and i can bring that right back to so that effectively is kind of almost like input five if you will i can choose another image and i can choose another image and i can choose another image and every time i make a change there you would see that in your live production so for example there's an image from that media pool there's another image there's another image right and so i can go and grab these different images i've made um and drop them into my live session whenever i want but if that's too complicated for the person doing the switching and i would argue it is then sure you can use a stream deck or you could have somebody else do it and that's where having the ethernet control and a second person or a third person or a fourth person leveraging these different control panels live in your production uh can be of value the next thing is audio every one of these channels has gain control an equalizer a bunch of dynamic controls i'll show you in a second a slider which works exactly like a physical slider would panning left right and then there's a master channel over here which also has eq and dynamic controls let me again take you over to the live view of things here there you go so you can see camera 2 has audio on and that's why we've got these bright red bars none of the other inputs have that so you can see how this is set up every one of the channels has eq it's a six band eq a very very powerful and i can take something and put it up like this and you probably hear a change in the sound of my voice and i can pull it down and you can you can be you know very prescriptive on how that gets used same thing with the dynamic range uh controls over here we have an expander a noise gate a compressor and a limiter and i quite often use the limiter especially with any of the live microphones because if somebody coughs let me show you what happens when i cough all right so i have the limiter on this right side so this channel has a limiter and this one doesn't even though they're both being fed by the same microphone so if i cough so this one got up to -20 but it never actually hit zero but this one with the limiter only got up to minus 4.6 so you see how potentially awesome that is that allows you to manage your audio and especially during something live and complicated like with musicians or different people speaking on different types of microphones the other thing to think about here is that there are one two three four five six inputs but there are 12 channels to this mixer every one of them has their own pan control this could be keyboards and this could be guitar and this could be bass this could be another keyboard this could be an overhead drum on the right this could be overhead on the left and so on so you can kind of use this a bunch of different ways turn all of the different mics on with or all the different audio inputs on and i can do that remotely from the atem uh i'm gonna turn them all off okay now watch i don't know can you see my no you can't see my mouse okay so watch the volume level here see how that's going down you can probably barely hear me now so i'm going to talk louder but now i'm going to turn it back up so i can control all of that so i can control all of this from the atem hardware itself the last thing that we have uh to talk about and i don't use it at all is camera control so this screen here gives you the ability to control four cameras remotely but they have to be blackmagic design cameras so for most of us not a lot of help but certainly people have blackmagic design cameras and this would allow you to control uh the amount of zoom and the focus color temperature the amount of light bottom line here is that these four panels could be managed by four different people during your live production and you could keep them all busy let's uh move to talking about the 810 mini versus the a10 mini pro the atm mini pro can stream it has an encoder built into it it will stream directly to youtube facebook twitch periscope wherever the a10 mini pro can record directly out the usb port to a connected usb hard drive the a10 mini pro can provide multi-view out of the hdmi port the a10 mini pro is twice the price of the a10 mini the a10 mini pro can stream directly to youtube and facebook and others and that's great but i've got ecam i don't need it to do that the a10 mini pro allows for direct recording well that's great but again i have ecamm and what you're seeing right now is ecam being used to record this session the third item though is kind of interesting and the concept of multi-view can be of value to people in certain situations so i'm going to touch on that on the next slide but i did want to go back to kind of a financial view of this if you have two elgato cam link capture cards plugged into two usb ports then you've spent x amount of dollars for the price of the two elgato cam links you probably could have bought an a10 mini and be doing what i'm doing but be doing it with four cameras and have all of the audio controls and slightly you know some interesting digital video effects and better green screen keying and and that kind of thing the question then becomes um does that make sense for you an atem mini is half the price of an a10 mini pro so at double the price the only real difference with the a10 mini pro from a hardware standpoint that you can see as a user is there are buttons over here in the a10 mini pro if we come back over here these are these buttons here i don't know how well you can see that financially if you have two cameras or more it starts to become a probably a wash if if an elgato cam link is what you might use to bring cameras uh over hdmi into your computer so multi-view what's multi-view multi-view is one hdmi output that sends this whole thing to your screen and as the live producer this can be very powerful so we've got you know preview over here this is what you've got queued up next this is what's live and the audio meters for what you're sending out right now across the middle you have your four hdmi inputs this is your uh what's queued up in your media pool this shows you that you're on air right now what your bandwidth stream is like and that it your the cache to transmit is okay if you're recording uh this tells you your recordings are going fine uh and how long they've been added and then you've got a quick view of all of your audio inputs so that all sounds fantastic but i would argue ecamm is giving me my live output i can actually see it on my screen right now when i look right there i can see that what i'm showing you is a picture of me right now and oh look there's my slide deck right so i don't really need that um all my cameras are locked down i know that this is camera one i know that that's camera two i know that this up here uh is camera three that i'm using for a picture in picture so in my situation there's no value for me in spending an additional you know a couple hundred bucks or whatever it is to get the a10 mini pro because i don't need that functionality however if i was doing live events and there were camera operators actually managing the cameras i wouldn't know what was on camera three i know that bob is over there managing camera three but i don't know what he's got right now that's where this concept of multi-view is of value i would say that knowing what's in the media queue that's kind of interesting but you know i can manage that really nicely from ecamp the overlay panel does a great job and if you're using a stream deck i mean i can stick a picture on the screen and another picture on the screen and another picture on the screen and if i have them set up in advance i can do all kinds of crazy stuff right and you know leveraging let's see what i learned from bradley vincent you know i can bring in sidebars and we do that all the time in my wife's live productions uh you know and here's an example of a sidebar i built for gravity yoga my wife explains what gravity yoga is at the beginning of her lives because it's a different kind of thing you're holding poses for a really long time and there's timers involved which ecamm is great at but i've got this set up to go really really slowly because her explanation takes about two minutes but she's looking at a 42-inch screen she can time what she's saying to it uh and all of that so is multi-view of value for me no it isn't but if you're doing a live thing and multiple people are managing cameras um there could be a lot of value in that all right you've got multiple cameras and you want more control you want better control over your audio you want more control over your fades the amount and duration and that kind of thing the fine grain control over keying as i said is the kind of quality you would expect and has been in television stations for years you want your mac to do a little less processing so you're offloading the camera management from ecamm to an external piece of hardware that may be a value for those of you that have older or less powered machines the device that i'm doing this recording on right now so this one right here is a bottom of the line uh 2019 uh macbook pro 13 inch right so it is a quad i5 uh the processor speed is like 1.4 gigahertz or something it's very low power it is only it only has a gig of ram it was the cheapest thing and we bought it refurbished uh from apple so you know very low cost uh it was basically the cost of a macbook air but double the processing power so i like that and it is sufficient for pushing out live streams i like the idea of having my cameras connected over hdmi rather than usb and again i'll point to camera two camera two is connected over a 25 foot uh hdmi cable well there's no such thing as a 25 foot usb cable um usb protocol if you know about these things is very chatty and the larger the distance the higher the latency and at a certain point it just breaks there's no concept of of a usb cable larger than maybe 10 12 feet unless you start to involve electronic repeaters and amplifiers and that kind of thing whereas with hdmi you can get hdmi cables on amazon that are 300 feet long right and so uh very very different in term of stability um i like the idea of as much stability in my live streams as possible and as uh i think it was adrian salisbury that said uh there's two types of people who stream those who have had a crash while streaming and those who are about to the macro functionality that i i didn't even touch on in the a10 mini software is super powerful so for example you could set up a macro to go to camera two in five seconds now why would you do that because you're a one-man band and you want to not be too distracted by what's going on in the management of your cameras but you like the idea that the cameras change every so often so you could actually write a macro that says go to camera 2 after some amount of time then go to camera 4 then go to camera one then go to camera three then go to camera two and you could write this macro um so that your entire live uh except for the very beginning when maybe you start and are addressing one camera and your very ending where you're you know you've gone to a slide or something uh it looked like there was a camera or an operator and they were just moving the cameras uh all the time and they could be quick changes or they could be slow changes and you could basically make it look like it was completely random uh that that's one thing you could do you could set things up so that you had a macro that is built for the uh atem control software but that you pull from stream deck and you press a button and magically your green screen technology keys out the back wall and does and puts you someplace or does something and obviously you can leverage the power of a stream deck if you've got one um there are vents in the um atem mini so let's go back over here i don't know if you can yeah the lighting is such that you really can't see that but there are vents oh you can there there's a vent here and a vent on the other side all right so why is that important well there's a lot of processing going on in this device and the airflow goes this way from the right to the left and that's important because i've seen people go oh my a10 mini got really hot so i put a fan there and you see them with a fan over on this side well they're blowing the hot air back into the device well that doesn't make any sense so you want to keep these vents free you want to keep you know an inch of space here and you want the airflow to be able to go that way so with the a-10 mini we have a really fine grain camera and audio control and the software is very lightweight ecamm right now is running here and it's using almost half of a core intel thinks there are eight cores from a reporting standpoint even though there's only four cores but they go oh well there's four cores but each core can do run two threads yeah okay so that's what 1 16 of the machine's capabilities uh when we look at the atem control software look at that it's not even two percent right so the story for you is really this number right here you see that that is the resource consumption of your machine and it's basically at more than 75 percent idle this machine is only a quarter being utilized and from a power from a resource capability uh perspective i would argue that this machine is not a very powerful machine let's look at memory consumption uh ecamm is here at six you know around 600 meg uh and i've i've seen it up higher up around uh you know a gigabyte maybe uh but the atem software is only 200. so very very very light uh resource consumption here ecam is awesomely powerful with other things that it does right uh the overlay control is just super fantastic if i want to drop in a video boom i go to overlays i turn it on and and you know hey magically there's you know stars or whatever and obviously you know overlays like that or overlays like this where you can you know bring a ticker right onto the screen um and just as easily uh get rid of it film an eleven baby what about comments uh comments from your viewers in essentially real time um being brought into the live uh on facebook and youtube and again my wife and i use that and i've used that with clients and people just they think that's great um the streaming the bandwidth compression um uh the management and the reporting of bandwidth consumption with ecamm is almost too much there's so much detailed information there so that's it i hope this has been helpful uh i apologize for talking too long but there's a lot of stuff this atm mini does and i didn't even touch on all the functionality in the control software hopefully you've got a better appreciation of what this is all about and the last thing i'm going to do here is set this to a two second fade and i'm going to turn this off and we're going to move back over to my macbook air thanks so much if i can answer questions drop them in the comments and yeah all the best

Channel: Moffat Photo

Views: 15,590

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Id: 3-lgiDkSB0k

Length: 36min 9sec (2169 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020