How to add graphics and titles with the Blackmagic ATEM Mini

in this video we're gonna look at three different ways to add titles and graphics to your videos with the Blackmagic 810 mini hi I'm Erin Peggy if you're watching this I'm assuming you're already familiar with this little incredible device it's an extremely affordable 4-input HDMI switcher and it is packed full of features if you haven't seen this yet I'm gonna leave a link to my other video down below where I talk about my three favorite things about the switcher and why you should absolutely get one right now so today I want to talk about three different ways you can make your live streams so much better by adding titles and graphics to your streams okay first of all if you are streaming using a computer then you can just use the free app OBS which can use the ATM mini as a video input and you can push that video from OBS directly to YouTube or twitch OBS is a fantastic app and I am NOT gonna go into all the details of the features in this video because there's just a ton but it also lets you do things like create scenes to easily switch between different graphics overlays you can even use like a web browser as an input it's fantastic I highly recommend it if you are using a computer as your live streaming encoder you can create lower thirds with in OBS you can load full screen graphics from image files and this is a super flexible option but it's actually not my favorite for a few reasons it means you are stuck using a computer for the streaming there are much better options for that such as using a dedicated stream encoder device and that means you don't have to bog down your computer doing that encoding and probably it's also quieter since you're fans gonna come on another downside is that your only copy of your main program out the video that you're feeding to the live stream lives only in your computer which means you're trusting your computer to not crash but also it's kind of awkward to switch between controlling OBS and also controlling the a-10 mini especially if you're just running a stream by yourself this is not my favorite option so I'm not gonna go into the details of how to do it this way it also isn't actually specific to the a-10 mini so you can just go look up any tutorial on adding graphics and OBS and you will find plenty of those tutorials if you're interested so instead let's focus on the other two ways that I actually would recommend adding graphics to the a-10 mini so the eight-time mini has a built in media pool this is something that you don't get on any of the other similarly priced switchers wait what am I talking about there are no similarly priced switchers with the same level of features as those a-10 mini yeah so it's actually kind of incredible that this thing can store 20 full frame images in internal memory and then you can switch to them like they were a camera angle or you can use them as overlays on top of your video as well the trick to enabling this feature in the a-10 mini is that you need to use the software control app on a computer that app unlocks a huge set of features that you don't get from just the buttons on the top I have a separate video that goes over a whole bunch of the pro features of the a-10 mini so I will link to that below as well so you need to get this software control app installed and talking to the a-10 mini and I will admit this is not the most obvious thing if you just go look at the black magic website so let's walk through that really quick it took me a while to figure this out and I swear I have to relearn it every time so first go to Blackmagic Design comm click on the support tab at the top then click on am live production switchers now it's going to look like nothing happened yet because the contents actually loaded down below the page here and I think somebody should tell them about this I swear it confuses me every time so if you scroll down after you click that it then shows the information about just the am switchers and not the rest of their products so look for the first one in this left column here that is called 8m switchers update that's the one you want to download you can skip the rest of it you're gonna get this pop-up skip registering here you've probably done that already click the download only option in the corner it's a pretty big download it's like a couple of gigs so it might take a while this is actually the same app that is used for every 8m switcher they sell everything from the cheap mini to the $10,000 8k switcher ok once you've got that installed make sure you've plugged the 810 mini into your computer over USB or configured it on your network either way is totally fine now you're ready to start using the graphics features so this middle tab media is where you can load up graphics into the switcher let's talk about a few different ways you can use this the simplest way to use the media pool is to load up full screen graphics for your intro and outro and your break screens take any 1920 by 1080 image and you can drag it into one of the slots here then you can drag the image from this slot into the active Media Player and it becomes a camera angle you can switch to with the still button on the switcher this is a good start but in reality you're not gonna want to go into your computer to switch the graphics all the time I definitely recommend using macros in the ATM to give yourself buttons you can actually press that will switch the image in the media and cut to that media all one button press you can assign these macros to physical buttons on something like the stream deck which makes it super easy to switch between your different still images when you're in the middle of a live stream my last video about the 810 mini Pro features walks through that whole thing how to get that all set up so again click the link below to go watch that video if you want to see exactly how to create those macros that will let you do this okay let's talk about lower thirds and other overlays loading up full screen graphics is great and all but what's really amazing is that you can also load in images with transparency into the media pool which means you can create lower thirds or corner bugs and if you create a transparent ping and load it up it will actually overlay perfectly onto the video with the transparency and everything so you can go into Photoshop or whatever image editor you like create a lower third that's as fancy as you want export it as a ping and then drag it into your media pool if you're in Photoshop then you can actually use the plug-in the ATM ships to push graphics directly from Photoshop into the switcher it's really cool feature so let's go ahead and do this really quick so you can see what I'm talking about I'm gonna just here quickly make a lower third graphic nothing fancy I'm not a designer we'll have a little rectangle here we'll put some text with my name in it maybe another color down on this bottom bit oh and then let's do this little gradient fade out on the side so that we can make sure it's actually handling transparency correctly so once you've got this template created for your program you can actually now go and you'll quickly change the text here to other names of your other presenters maybe export a whole batch of them into the media pool so let's go ahead and export this into the switcher either from Photoshop directly or you can export the graphic as a ping and then drag and drop it into a slot into your software control app so now that it's in the media pool you can drag it into the player but this time we don't want to use it as a camera angle because we don't want it to be the full screen right we want to have this up here on top of some other camera and that is what the downstream key section is for so let's walk through how to set this up step-by-step we're gonna walk through poking all the buttons in this interface but in reality you're probably gonna want do this in a macro so that you can quickly toggle this on and off and switch to other graphics as well so first of all make sure your program out shows the camera angle that you want to see then go into the downstream key tab and choose media player one as the fill source that should also automatically choose media one player key as the key source so now when you enable this effect you're gonna see that it overlays the lower third on top of whatever camera angle is active so go ahead and press the on-air button under this dsk one section in the app and you will see your title overlaid on top of the video you can also press the auto button to fade it in over a second or whatever you have configured as your duration here so I am kind of sad that there are no buttons on the a 10 minute itself that will let you do this the picture-in-picture and the key buttons are for the upstream keyer and these buttons are not reprogrammable yet just gonna mention this again in case Blackmagic is listening I would really love people to reassign these buttons to be able to run macros since I am really not going to use most of these buttons most of the time during productions okay so now that you see how to create graphics you'll probably want to go create macros that will load the right graphic and set the downstream keyer and all that you can even make a macro that shows the lower third for 3 seconds and then fades it out automatically with just one button press again go watch my other video where I walk through this step-by-step of how to create that so you may have noticed that the limitation here is that you can only use still images the ATM mini doesn't have an option to load up animations so that means you can only do static graphics as your titles and lower thirds that brings us to the third option this is definitely a bit more involved but it can get you a really great end result that is to use an external program to generate the graphics and bring them in as one of the HDMI inputs there's a really fantastic free app called h2r graphics which is designed specially for doing lower thirds or tickers in live streams I will leave a link in the description to where you can go download that and some other good tutorials on how to set it up and use it but I will give you a quick idea here of how you can use this with the ATM mini so first things first you're gonna want to use a dedicated computer for this since you're gonna be plugging the computer's HDMI out into the mini and you don't want to risk messing up the graphics as you're using the software control app or anything else so once you got the app downloaded and up and running you get a few options along the top for now we're only gonna look at the lower thirds option to start and this is where you can preload a list of lower-third titles that you want to use during the program so go ahead here and add a few to the list and when you're ready click this chroma option on the top this is going to open up a new window that you can drag run on your laptop and that's where the graphics are going to be displayed so if you press the show you will see your lower third appear for a few seconds and then fade out so you'll want to drag this onto your second monitor which is actually you know the 8m mini and then make it fullscreen there so on your 8m mini you should be seeing a fullscreen green and when you click show you'll see the title appear on top of the green background so now you're ready to go into the 8m mini and green screen this out so go into the upstream key tab here on the side and under fill' source make sure that it has the input that you've plugged your laptop into so here I've got my laptop plugged into input 4 so I'm going to select that as the fill source and again make sure your main camera is that is the program source right now this chroma sample feature is super handy because it lets you kind of just I drop the green color right from the video instead of having to guess it so click this chroma sample and then drag this little box to the corner it'll pick up the green that your laptop is sending and because you've got a perfectly flat green here you shouldn't need to worry about any of the other knobs and dials down in the section here that talk about how to tweak the green screen this is more useful if your green screening from a camera input where you may not have perfectly let your background and you have a couple different shades of green I need to you know make sure that your green screening all of the different greens out ok so if you ready to go try this out make sure your camera is the active input and then press the on-air button under next transition since your computer isn't actually displaying a title it's just green you should see nothing change so now click show on h2 our graphics and your lower third should fade in and out so this should give you a quick idea of how to set up h2 our graphics now you should be able to go play around with the rest of the tabs and see the other things that it has like the ticker feature the only downside to this approach is that you have now used up your keyer for the graphics so you can overlay graphics on top of yourself but you can't also then green-screen yourself out of the background so if you want to sit in front of a green screen and then have yourself appear on top of a video you can still add graphics on top it just has to happen via the media player not from an external input so this is my two favorite ways of adding graphics and titles using the 810 mini I hope this gives you some ideas of how to do this on your own live streams thank you so much for watching I hope you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up it helps more than you might realize and I will see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Aaron Parecki

Views: 281,150

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Id: Nm0xXjmMs-M

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 31 2019