Slides vs Scenes in OBS or Ecamm (Which is best?)

are you bringing slides into your streaming software to use with your virtual camera so maybe you're doing a presentation we have slides but you also want to have those graphics you're going to bring your slides into obs or ecamm depending on whatever you are using and what ends up happening sometimes is that's a lot to coordinate so you've got one hand that's advancing the slides maybe another hand that's advancing you're changing your scenes but also your computer might not appreciate you running all of these things at the same time or at least that is what i have found in my experience and some of the students i've worked with have found the same thing so that is what we're going to talk about because there are options and this today we're going to look at slides versus scenes should you bring in slides from a presentation software like powerpoint or keynote into your streaming software or should you consider importing your slides as individual scenes and just progressing through your scenes so that is what we are going to talk about today now in case any of you are new and you are not familiar with me my name is kat and i help people to create more professional and engaging online presentations and i do want to share today because i am live i just launched today the pre-sell of my recorded self-study course meaning i was having some trouble getting it made and i thought well i'm just going to put it out there and if people decide that they want this course they can self-study at their own pace but if people buy it then i will make it so i've recorded the first few lessons they are ready to go so i'm offering a discount for a limited time you can go to catmovehill.com elevate to get more all right so what i'm going to do is actually show you what this looks like and i'm going to use obs so i'm streaming today in ecm but i'm going to show the demonstration in obs so that i don't have any of that weird infinite loop stuff happening so if we take a look there might be a subtle lag because i've got two programs running but what what i've got here is a typical maybe set up at the at the start i've got my main camera and then i might switch to my picture and picture with slides so what i have here these are some of the slides from my elevate your online presentations live training that i did recently and this is actually pulling from keynote so i can stay on this scene and i can actually change my slides and this way what i'm doing or i should be able to change my slides of course of course this is happening to me while i'm live okay theoretically i'm pulling in this window and i'm supposed to be able to change the scenes let's try just the slides and see what happens here keynote is not cooperating because it's a live stream and that's how things work and i think my computer's gotten used to you making sure that something goes wrong every time i go live so what you do usually is you have this scene and you are running right now i'm pulling in keynote keynote's not cooperating it doesn't want to change scenes maybe it's just trying to build some suspense it doesn't want to show you what i share in my class maybe that's what's going on however what i would typically do early on and what i have taught in the past is you set up your overlay so you've got you in the picture and picture you have your slides in the main window and then you simply navigate your slides while you are on this one scene however if it comes time where you really want to punctuate a point you really want to drive home a certain thing or maybe it's just there's a lot going on on a slide you can change to slides only and you're still pulling the exact same feed from your presenting software this would work with powerpoint this would work with keynote this would work pulling in from another device it doesn't have to be running on your computer and i have videos explaining that but if you find that this is kind of a lot to coordinate is to be trying to change your slides and maybe like me right now if my presentation software is starting to act up or freeze on me well that's no good i don't want that to happen so this this alternative of adding in multiple scenes with images of your slides is actually a way to reduce the load on your computer and you just have to flip through your scenes you do not have to navigate going through your slides so what i have done is set up a few empty ones and i want to show you a demonstration so here's hoping this demonstration works what i have done is i have actually downloaded some slides to my computer and i'm going to show you this of course now my computer is not showing me where i put these so that's fun i swear today oh here we go i found them i found them alright so i'm going to drag this over to the other monitor here you can see this is what it looks like when i exported the entire presentation in individual images so all of them are one two three four they are not renamed but i just know that they are in the order of the slides so i have these slide images here so i'm going to drag and drop some of these so let's drag and drop this into the sources now this has kind of popped in and taken up a lot of the screen so what i'm going to do now is just scale that down so we're going to grab this corner and drag this till approximate size and then we're just taking this slide and we are fitting this in here approximately and you can use your arrow keys to kind of move things around and then i'm going to drag the slides underneath the overlay and actually it's a little bit a little too cropped so i'm going to bring that in there so i can see a bit more of the border so now i can lock all of these if i want keep them all in place i don't accidentally have it so this is the same slide but this is an image so i don't have to worry about navigating on my computer so now let's do another one so i've got a placeholder here and we're going to drag in slide two and we're going to drag that down and bring it in it's not an exact science but you get the general idea we're just grabbing these corners until it's about right toggle that down and then just make sure that the overlay is on top and i can lock this so now what i'm doing is i'm basically setting up these slides in a way where all i have to do is drag and drop them and because you are probably aware of animations if you have an animated slide you can export that animated slide as a movie file and so instead of having i don't have any animations in this particular presentation but let's say that i did have an animation all i have to do is just export that as an animated overlay and bring that in as a media file so you can actually see how how basically straightforward this can be and all you are doing is in advance putting together all these slides so now i flip between these instead of flipping between my slides i don't have to worry about running powerpoint or running keynote or google slides or whatever the system program is all i have to worry about is setting up a bunch of slides now our scenes now some people might say that's a lot of scenes i'm not sure i feel comfortable with that however all you have to do when you are in this presentation is just hit the down key and so if you have obs open you just hit the down key if you need to go back you can hit the up key you can program hotkeys in both ecam and obs and if you want to just jump to your main camera or you can actually just duplicate your main camera if you know you're going to make another main point maybe between you know three and four i can have this already set up so i know it's going to come back to me before i go to my next point or if i want to create a new scene and maybe this is just slide four only it's just the slide let's drag slide four over and maybe i just want this to be on the screen so i can really put together a presentation where i have my slides with me i'm going through i can come back to me to make a point really punctuate that point i can go back to a slide with me or i can also set up i know i want this slide to be the focal point and i can hide off of the screen so this is the type of thing that you can do when you switch from traditionally bringing in powerpoint keynote etc slides into obs or ecamm and instead just set up all of these different things so i'm just going to take a look at the chat because i'm a little behind and had those fun tech challenges so so hi okay hi to all the people i haven't said hi to yet ego marco stefan um let's go sew with joanne banco hi frank uh okay so let's thanks for showing obs you're welcome your website doesn't accept foreign cards oh okay frank send me um send me an email okay i see also practical example of what happens in with me with my obs so does that mean things not going right in your obs is that is that what's happening a much better option when i know i'll be pushing my computer yes so if you have a longer event and you know that your computer is going to be drained and the other thing is when you have a really important event you want it to go really smoothly and so that is the type of thing where just making sure that your entire production is ready to go and all you have to do to navigate so a hint here is that in obs it's the arrow down if you are using ecamm it's page down page up and page down we'll just go to the next scene if you don't have a fancy stream deck or another tool to be automatically navigating those things you can just use your page up page down or your arrow keys so and actually let's check i'm going to just pop over to obs for a second and see page down and page up work in obs as well okay so um yes joseph uh i do laugh off the tech challenges that's really the only option for me is i know that things are gonna go wrong and that's okay as long as i show up and i'm commit what i really care about is teaching a lesson and sharing something so that i can improve people's lives and so whatever stag happens i also want to kind of show you that this happens and people usually don't mind in fact i think people enjoy sometimes when they see tech going wrong now let's talk a little bit about pros and cons because there are absolutely some pros and cons to these so one of the things with slides is it really is the advantage really easy to edit if i am preparing for a presentation and i look and see a slide that uh maybe has something that i need to update or change i can just quickly go into the editor update that really quickly and then throw that in presenter view even during a break i could say oh i want to add something i can go in there if you are doing the scenes option you have to first go into your slides edit that export that image and then bring that image in so it is a little bit more work to do that editing the other thing is that for many people they really do appreciate presenter view now presenter view can be tricky if you are running a virtual meeting where you have a let's say a zoom call and you have your obs or your ecam running and you've got your program it's actually not always easy to see your presenter view with the what's the next slide coming up what are my presenter notes now when you are running a program on a different device if you have maybe a laptop coming into a computer and that has your slides you can have the option depending on how that's connected to see your notes and to see the next slide you can also there are mobile apps that will allow you i know for keynote for example you can use your tablet or your phone to actually see what's the next slide coming up and actually use it to advance your slides so there are some practical benefits to using the slides however that being said when it comes to scenes i really like that there is far less of a demand or drain on the computer because you are simply adding images to your scenes and really really simple navigation and you can actually map out your entire production in advance and really think when do i want to be on camera when do i want to emphasize a slide when do i want to maybe just have me with a graphic even right now i have me with a graphic that i've put together where i just have a background and some text you can mix it up you don't have to just have slides you're not restricted to slides and i think that this option of going with scenes kind of pushes you to think outside of the slide box because a lot of us just say i'm doing a presentation i need to put everything on slides and then throw that up there well when you're using a virtual camera or ecam or obs to create a production you'll actually start to rely less on slides and in fact as i am recording my my course lessons for my self-study program i'm not actually using slides so i have these slides you can see these slides i've actually gravitated more towards just using graphics and using these scenes to set up and to add the visuals that i want to add so i think the scenes has that added benefit there is always a trade-off though if you want to go this direction there is more upfront work you are going to be setting up a bunch of scenes as opposed to setting up three or four key scenes or core scenes like a main camera that picture and picture window maybe a slide only usually if you have that you just have three or four scenes and you keep it really simple in this case you are building out an entire presentation and if you are doing that i really recommend that you're using either folders to organize so an ecamm or a scene collection in obs so you can cleanly have those different things now something that i want to say about these like let's say you have a presentation that you're doing but you have a slightly different one a modified one something you can do so in obs you can actually just duplicate a scene collection and in ecamm i actually don't know if you could duplicate a folder now that i think of it so for me in ecm i would just kind of go in like every week i have a live stream i go to my live stream folder and i just make some simple edits to that but you could have a second copy and then you just make sure that you are going to the right one i think this is a great option scenes are a great option if you are repeating a presentation maybe you are a trainer and you present the same presentation over and over to different groups having it set up in scenes you just navigate quickly great idea if you it's a lot more fluid if you are constantly producing new content you might find that this workflow is just not going to work for you and so that's something that is worth considering with this as well um and yeah so i'm thinking create a powerpoint and save as individual jpegs exactly that is what i did in this example is i just took my slides just said export as images the entire slideshow just exports into a folder names every single one of those slides and if you do have animations in your slides you just export those slides as movie files and then bring that into your scene as a movie file or a media file and then that way you have your animations and you have your static slides you have all of the benefits of that presenter view or presenter presentation mode for powerpoint and keynote but you have them all in your scenes so um okay so here's a question um i'm new to your channel are you saying that scenes tend to run more smoothly than keynote or powerpoint so the main thing like right now my computer fan is running because i have ecm live streaming directly to youtube i have obs running as a demonstration i have keynote which wasn't actually working but i have keynote on my on here and it's actually i have keynote not in presentation mode i was actually just i cropped it out and it's in preview mode and i would usually i just switch between slides and it works so i'm actually asking my computer to do a lot right now so if you are going to be using the virtual camera or sharing your screen to share your production in a zoom call or teams or whatever really what's happening is you are limiting the amount of programs that are running on your computer at the same time which is really good for your computer to limit those things because really what you would have is zoom and say obs or ecamm those are the only two programs running and you have already pre-populated all of your scenes with the images and all the graphics that you need all the slides would be loaded as pictures so you never have to open your presentation software you can keep all of those closed and keep the programs to a minimum just have zoom and just have your obs or ecam running and that is something that your computer will thank you for but also for you as the person navigating the production all you have to do is go to the next scene next scene next scene and it's all done for you so you can just start to focus on the presentation it's talking to the audience not having to deal with tech headaches so right now if i was in a proper professional presentation me not having keynote work that's a problem that is not good but if i just have scenes and everything is an image and it's locked in place and all i have to do is press the down arrow key then i can actually focus my attention on the people and the audience that i'm presenting to and i don't have to worry now that does mean that i might not be able to see the actual next slide coming up and that's where that advanced preparation takes place so if you are a person who really wants to see what is the next slide that i'm going to be talking about or i have presenter notes you might have to get creative maybe you have a a document that's open on your computer that actually has a little mini it's almost like when you export your slides let's say you could export a pdf that shows you and you could maybe just gently kind of scan that pdf it could have your slides with your slide notes so there are other ways that you can do that and be prepared if that worries anybody when they consider this concept of maybe not being able to see what's coming up next you would have your production flow you could even have it on a separate device maybe on a tablet or somewhere you could even print it and just but you want to have it somewhere where you can just kind of glance down quickly see your notes and then continue on so yeah that that is what that is where i'm leaning and i have realized lately that i prefer even though i am full disclosure a little bit of a prep at the last minute kind of person i do like this idea of having scenes so all i have to do is press next scene and i know that i have already thought out what this is going to look like and have that production and that flow so if that is something you are looking for i highly recommend that you give this a try see if it's right for you know that there is that upfront work but the the trade-off that payoff for that upfront work is a smooth seamless presentation that does not demand as much on your computer and if you do that i think you can benefit from having this more relaxed less stress but still have a professional and engaging presentation

Channel: Cat Mulvihill

Views: 2,268

Keywords: ecamm live, obs studio, streaming software, how to add slides in obs studio, how to change slides in obs studio, slides obs studio, slides in ecamm live, powerpoint in ecamm, powerpoint in obs, keynote ecamm live, keynote obs, add slides to ecamm, ecamm

Id: ltlTG-cZvrw

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021