How to unlock the secret PRO FEATURES on the Blackmagic ATEM Mini

in this video we're gonna look at how to use the secret Pro features to turn the 810 mini into a professional broadcast tool the 810 mini is a super affordable 4-input switcher Blackmagic is clearly going after the creator market with it rather than their normal professional broadcast market just take a look at their marketing images for the mini compared to the next model up but the amazing part and why I think everybody should buy this including professionals is that this device is actually a lot more powerful than it looks like on the outside out of the box it's set up to be really easy to use for people who are brand new to the whole concept of switchers the default mode is that the input buttons actually cut immediately to the camera that is selected which is great when you're getting up and running and by default both the HDMI out and the USBC show program output this works great for people who are just getting started with gear like this but if you are a more seasoned professional used to using two higher-end models of 8m switchers then this seems like kind of a toy so we're gonna walk through a couple of settings you can change to make this work more like the high-end switchers and really get the most out of this tool quick note this video is not sponsored I really just am a huge fan of this thing and I am super excited to talk about it the first thing you're gonna want to do is to change this into preview program mode instead of the cut bus mode the confusing part is that this is not something you do through the regular software control interface you actually have to do it through a separate application so go on to the am setup tool and make sure this is plugged in via USB because it doesn't let you control this over the network go ahead and click the little icon and that will open up the settings go down to switching mode and choose program preview instead of cut bus hit save and now it's ready now you'll notice when you hit one of the buttons it turns green indicating that that input is in preview and you actually have to press auto or cut to show that camera in the program feed next you're gonna want to change your HDMI out to actually be the preview instead of the program that's going to let you do things like preview the angle before cutting to it and also preview your key effects in transition so for this one you're gonna want to be in the ATM software control app up at the top as a menu called output click that scroll down and choose preview now you'll notice that your HDMI output is no longer showing the program feed it's actually showing the preview of the camera that's about to be cut to so at this point things should now already feel a lot more familiar if you're used to the higher-end 8em switchers and this where it starts getting useful so now you can do things like preview your key effects before pushing them live or even preview your transitions toggle this previa transition button on and then when you press Auto it keeps what's on programer but you'll see the transition happen anyway on the preview okay next up you're probably gonna want to configure the output format to your particular needs go down to this little gear button in the corner and then you can change the video standard to different frame rates it is limited to just 1080 resolution there's no down scaling to 720p and also it doesn't support 4k at all and you can only choose progressive not interlaced but it does give you a wide range of frame rates between twenty three point nine eight and sixty while we're in the settings tab here go over to the Audio tab there's a couple of really cool features in here you actually have the ability to split the right and left channels from any of your inputs into separate tracks that can be really handy if you're doing things like running two microphones into the camera on the right and left channels you can get it back out in two separate audio tracks here that you can mix independently once you actually split one of the audio sources here you'll now see two tracks in the mixer the other thing you might want to do here is choose whether you're eighth inch inputs are at mic or line level that way you get the right levels if you're plugging in a microphone like a lav mic or a line out from another mixer so let's go dive into the audio mixer now this is actually something that was previously only available on the higher-end models and now they're putting it in the mini you actually now have access to a complete equalizer and dynamics processor built in this is a huge deal this is going to give you way better audio without bringing an external mixer you can actually go in here and tweak things like the EQ for each Channel you can even add a compressor and limiter so you really have a lot of tools available in here I will say the only downside is that there actually isn't a headphone jack on here so the only way you can hear what you're doing is by monitoring the output from you the HDMI or the USB see on here I do wish they had out of the headphone jack because that would have made it even simpler to go and preview what you're doing with your audio adjustments all right next up let's start digging into the graphics capabilities just like in the larger 8 x this has a media player and a media pool it'll let you load up twenty different still images into the media pool and then choose one of them to show in the player and then that actually lets you use the still button here which will show the media player as the program out so click the media tab at the bottom here and then you can drag and drop files in your computer into the slots you can also load a Photoshop and create lower thirds or title graphics and then you can actually push from Photoshop to the media pool directly this actually makes it really easy to create titles on the fly if you're doing a live event so once you've got your graphics loads up in the media pool you can now drag them into the media player to prepare them you can use them either as a camera angle like if you've got a full-screen title graphic or you can actually accept the downstream keyer to use the media player as well and then I'll do things like let you create lower thirds or a little bugs make sure your Photoshop files have a transparent background because it'll actually use the alpha Channel and you can actually get gradients that way and very clean edges so there's no physical button to control the downstream keyer which means you actually need to control either from the software control panel or from an external control surface which is what we're gonna talk about next so the physical buttons here are good enough for camera switching these buttons and the cut and auto buttons will go plenty far for just basic camera switching but most of the rest these buttons actually control the audio and you'll probably quickly find the limitations of the physical buttons as soon as you start doing more complicated things like using the keyer or adding title graphics so the next thing you're going to want to do is use an external control surface like this one I'm a big fan of the stream deck so this has these twelve keys but each of these keys is actually a screen and then they can show text or graphics on here there's a separate app that you can download called companion which is what this uses to talk to the a-10 I'm not going to go into a full tutorial on how to use this with the ATM I will leave a link to John Barker's tutorial who did an excellent tutorial on how to get this up and running from nothing installing the companion app and getting and talking to the ATM I will say the one thing that's a little bit unique to this is that even though the ATM software control panel works over USB the companion app actually does require a network connection you need to plug in a network cable between this and your laptop and get the your network as well in order to have that work so I'll show you how I've got this set up to control some of the particulars aspects that would make this mini very powerful let's say for example you're doing an event with three speakers you've got a close-up shot on each speaker and then you've got a wide shot of the group what we're going to do here is we're actually going to make a button on the stream deck which will cut to one of the speakers bring in the title the lower third title with their name and then fade it out after five seconds and that way you get just quick buttons to be able to cut cameras bring in the titles have it automatically fade out after the right amount of time so what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna go into the ATM software control and record a macro then we're gonna create a button on the stream duct to run that macro go up here open the macros window recording macros is a little bit finicky because you don't actually get any visual feedback as to the steps that have been recorded already and you kind of just get one shot to get it right or rerecord the whole macro I will show you a little trick after the end of this note which will help you debug this a little bit better so make sure you're on the create tab and then click this plus icon give your macro a name like the speaker so I'll just say errand with title now click record and now anything you press in the control interface will be recorded into the macro so it's important to remember don't touch anything right now that you don't want any part of the macro so first go into the media pool and then drag your lower third for that speaker into the media player go back to the switcher tab and now us at the program out to that speakers camera doing a cut immediately now open up the downstream key choose media player one and media player one key and then press the on-air button for that keyer so right now you should be looking at your camera with that speaker and the lower third overlaid already so next click this little add pause at the top enter a number of seconds like five and that's gonna be how long you want the macro to pause running which means this is how long your lower thoroughly visible click ad pause to confirm next we want the lower third to fade out so click now auto in the downstream keyer that's going to do a fade out of the key and that's it now you can stop recording and now these steps that you've just done are now recorded in the macro so next we need to create a button on the stream deck to actually run this macro this is actually a perfect example of where I wish I could actually reassign some of these buttons to other actions like running macros so Blackmagic if you're listening feature requests let me use some of these buttons like the transition duration because I'm never going to be pressing those ever let me just reassign these two macro 1 2 or 3 4 I'll be very happy and so instead we're gonna create a button on the stream deck to actually run this macro now I'm gonna assume you've already got companion up and running and got the stream duct connected to it and already loaded the ATM presets into companion if you have not done that yet pause this video go watch John Barker's video and be waiting here when you come back I promise I won't go anywhere [Music] all right welcome back now you can go here click buttons go over to presets and choose the 8m click this macros button and now you should see your list of recorded macros including the title you created earlier go ahead and drag that macro into the first button on the stream deck so this creates a button when you tap it it's gonna run the macro that macro is going to switch the camera I have the lower third wait five seconds fade lower third out I like to go into the button settings here and change the background color to black rather than the default blue because I don't care about knowing whether or not these macros have already run in the past while the macro is running the button will be green which is kind of cool lets you know the lower third is still there and is about to fade out so if you want to try it out you can now just press this button and you will see the macro play out now of course you'd then repeat this process to set up similar buttons for each of the three speakers so I mentioned I would show you a trick for debugging your macros so if you go into the file menu here click save it's actually going to export all of the settings in the ATM as an XML file this is also useful trick if you're managing multiple projects and you want to save settings differently for each project open that XML file in a text editor and scroll to the bottom there you're gonna see your macros this is actually going to list out in each macro section it's going to list out every action you've configured in the macro like switching cameras or changing what's in the media pool if you make a small mistake in recording you can actually go in here take out the line change the values fiddle with the you know reorder things as needed and that's often easier than trying to re-record the macro so you can do everyone here change settings just make sure it's still about XML and then go ahead and save the file and you can load it back in so back in the software control click the file menu go to restore and choose your XML file and that is going to actually now load that state back into the switcher so some other stream deck buttons you might make loading a particular image into the media player so that you can actually have one button access to all your different titles that saves you the trouble of going through the UI drag and drop thing really there's just so much you can do with this it's really only limited by your imagination so that's all I've got for this video let me know down in the comments if you have any more questions and I'll be happy to talk about them in a future video and if you haven't already watched my last video about this I'll leave a link to it down below as well if you're thinking about buying this I would appreciate if you would use my affiliate link down below that gives me a small kickback if you buy it off of that link and it doesn't cost you anything don't forget to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe for more videos like this thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Aaron Parecki

Views: 139,866

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Id: zzEYsi_P0RU

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 17 2019