vMix - Shortcuts, Triggers, and Activators

hello everyone welcome back to streaming alchemy i'm john mahoney and on today's show we're going to be taking a look at three of vmix's top automation tools specifically we're going to look at shortcuts triggers and activators but before we get into that i'd like to invite everybody please feel free to engage with us if you have any questions if you have any feedback please just answer them in the comment section below and we'll try to get to answer them here on the show so as we think about automation uh we've talked a lot about the importance of automation especially with things like remote productions so we think it's it's really worth taking a slightly longer look at some of the automation tools inside of vmix which is very popular with people that do uh remote streaming with you know deployed in things like aws so the three key tools that we're going to be talking about are really foundational to most of the automation that takes place so to have some context for how we can use these what i'd like to do is run through a brief news segment rundown that we put together that will then take and decompose to automate using these vmix tools so let's let's take a look so normally you're going to start off you know fading up from black and you'll have somebody at a news anchor desk that will be setting up a story providing whatever context and background so what i've just done now is i've queued up a video clip that will play behind this and as i send that video clip out you now have somebody that could be doing voice over with this and talking behind this i'm gonna be setting up a two box shot and i'm going to use merge to bring that in so we have a very smooth transition in with both the video plane and somebody that's involved with the segment that's actually talking i'm going to bring up a lower third which would be a bit more descriptive so finally esports in the olympics uh and at a certain point usually a couple of seconds ago and we'll pull that down i'm cueing up a shot of the person talking here as a full screen so we'll slide that in and have them talk if you have multiple videos this could be something where you may want to switch between this person talking uh by themselves and talking with different video stick clips here uh and when this segment is done we'll cue up the anchor desk fade back to the anchor desk they'll do whatever sort of end to the segment they want and then we'll just fade into either black or anything else that you know if it's another segment a commercial or whatever so that's really the segment that we're going to be automating against so just like to welcome both ken and richard for joining the show so thank you very much both of you for being here so uh let's start to break this down the the first thing we're going to want to do is we're going to want to take and at least automate the sequences that we had in here so it it breaks down into a set of really five key things that we did uh and that would be you know everything from going from the anchor desk to you know putting up the lower thirds things like that so we're going to use shortcuts to trigger these and the shortcut is going to basically work off of a key press when you press a key that will initiate a shortcut that shortcut will then initiate some vmix function which will typically be applied to a specific input or component inside of vmix and to do this triggering of the uh shortcuts what we're going to use is a stream deck so we really love stream decks here we think they're absolutely fabulous uh but we set the stream deck up in advance so it is now talking to vmix and it has five different keys that are we have set up in advance so we have one to go to the desk segment where the anchor talks one to bring on the clip one to bring on a two blocks which has some some involved party and the clip playing together a a button to go full screen with the party that's talking and then also a button to toggle on and off the lower thirds so the way we actually set up shortcuts is if you go into the vmix interface so the upper right hand corner we have a settings button so we press the settings button and down in the menu on the left hand side there's a segment called shortcuts so you click on that and then you have and basically a list of all the shortcuts that you may have already put together in this case we have nothing here so let's start by adding the shortcut to bring the anchor desk camera on air so when i click add the shortcut the first thing it's going to ask me is what key do i want to use i have assigned to this shortcut and you do that by clicking the find button so when we click the find button what we're going to do is we're going to go over here and we're going to press on the desk key and you see that's been detected over here so we click ok so now that i've assigned the key i'm going to tell vmix what function i want to marry to that key and so what we're going to really do here is we're going to bring we're going to fade on the news desk because i don't have a camera we're just going to use a video segment that i have here called newsdesk so we're going to assign this fade of this segment of this uh a camera to this button now there's a few more things before we say okay the first is that we can give this a title as you add more and more shortcuts to your productions having some sort of title could be very helpful so in this case we're just going to call this newsdesk so when we look down we'll be able to know what it is we can add more details like descriptions that will show up the other thing that we have is we have the ability to say whether the shortcut that we're setting up is going to be local or whether it's going to be global and all this means is that you would be able to use this shortcut if it's local just in this one vmix production if you leave this unchecked it'll be a global shortcut and be available across all of your productions the other thing that you get here is you have the ability to say whether i just want to have my own my own default uh you know just whatever icon i have there or i want to use a thumbnail so vmix will send a thumbnail back to the buttons that are on uh that are basically on the stream deck here and that will let me see dynamically what's actually being displayed in this case we're just going to use the default we really don't need that uh and we're going to make this a local shortcut and so i click ok and now we've added that uh so one of the things uh you know both you know richard i think just uh mentioned which is very important we will come back to this is that inside of each button press there are actually two triggers that would take place for vmix one is when you press the button down and the other is when you release the button and that will let us do some interesting things which i'll show later on but richard's point is is is is very important so you can decide whether you want to do something on the button down or do something on the button up and that that can give you some flexibility for how you set things up in the future so we've actually set this up now and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to press this button and you'll see this happen in the background but now it actually goes and fades into the camera so we set that up and that's that's the first step that we want to do but now that we have the basic structure i want to go through some of these other things a little more quickly so the next thing we want to do is we want to be able to bring on the video clip which is where we were so we're going to do the same thing now we're going to do the find uh hold down the clip for the video clip the function we're going to want to do is we're just going to merge this because this will allow us to do a very smooth transition if we use this with other elements that are the same so i go over to the transition section and we look and we see merged is one of the options we have and we're going to do this for our video clips the way we have this set up uh we'll do we'll just come in here and say clips and again keep the same default for whatever icon we put on the stream deck and we'll click ok so that was the second step that we did so if i press this here you now see brought that video clip in so let me see i may want to just do that for right now as i go through the next thing so let me uh we'll just we'll just get to the next one quickly then so i i don't want to jump out of here so the next thing we want to do is we want to go to the two box so we're gonna come over here we're gonna press a button down for the two box click okay and for the two box again another transition i'm gonna do a merge this time we're gonna do it with uh two box of the news keep the default say two box here and make that local and click okay and now when we press that you'll see that in the background you see the two box just happened uh the follow-on to that is we want to be able to go to the person speaking so again another transition do merge we're going to set this for the let's see figure talking and just say [Music] and okay local and click ok [Applause] okay give me one second this is always good because now we can we can actually see what happens oh i didn't find the key i didn't i didn't set the right key so you set the key here go ahead and now when i hit that we've done the merge with the figures speaking completely and then the last thing that we actually want to do is we want to be able to take and put a lower third on and off screen so we're going to add that i will press the lower third key here so the function now we're going to go down to this will be an overlay function we're going to assign and we have different functions for each of the overlays and so you'll see we have overlay input one and we also have overlay input one in and off so the difference here is overlay input one will act as a toggle key when i press the button once it'll bring it on and when i press it again it'll bring it off and that's what we want to use but you could also set this up where if you just wanted one key to load the lower third and another key to take it off you could set it up that way as well so in this case we just have a little news update and we'll just say lower third set this as a local shortcut and now when we come here you can see the lower third can pop on and pop off so what we've effectively done is we set up now a set of shortcuts that will let us if we sort of go back to our start point here so we'll set this here and we'll get the anchor camera queued up so now if you look i'm just going to be working this in the stream deck i now press the desk clip i can now switch over to the video clip we had go to the toolbox bring the person full i can bring on the lower third and take off the lower third and then switch back to the news desk at which point i can just do a fade out so this now simplified a lot of what we had to do even though it wasn't challenging but if we had more complex things that we were doing in there where we maybe were switching between different lower thirds or rotating between different video segments having that automation in that could be uh would definitely be something that we could do so ken uh the oh can ken asked a couple of questions here so the there's a difference between the local and the global shortcut so in a local shortcut that will apply just to the vmix session that you have there so if you created a new session that shortcut would be gone a global shortcut would apply to any vmix sessions that you create so if you had certain things that you wanted to do for a show you're doing multiple times you can actually create those as global but if you have one time use things it would be something that you would just set up as local and when you create a new vmix session they'd be gone so that was a a an important question the other thing that that can uh mentioned was maybe we could lower the crowd volume and uh i always appreciate where people lead me to the next segment so ken thank you i'll get into that right now so the next thing that you can use for automation inside of vmix becomes something that's specific to individual clips that you have so to ken's point he wanted to find some way for lowering that crowd volume when we had it up now that could be good you know clearly because we're doing a demo and i'm trying to talk over that but this could be something you'd want to do in the show where you may want the crowd volume to be at a normal level when it's the video showing by itself but when i have somebody else that's talking with it i may want to lower that and so what we're going to do to make that happen is we're going to use the next automation tool inside of emix called triggers so let's actually go triggers uh i'm gonna put this here we're gonna use a trigger in our two box and that when i bring on the uh official from the olympic committee that's going to be talking that the volume of this video will be lowered so the way you do that is you click on the gear icon inside the input and you look at the side and something called triggers here in the side menu and what triggers will let you do is you can take different actions when different events happen to this specific input so it can start with something like on completion so if this were a video and when the video finished you'd want something to happen automatically but it also things like on transition in when this video launches or when this video uh moves out and it's no longer part of the transition uh you can have things when overlays come on and off uh you can have things based on audio level for different levels of audio and you can even have something on countdowns we're not going to get into that at all today but that's another thing that we will cover in a future show so for this case what we want to do is we want to do something on transition in and what we'd like to do is let's let's close to be an audio function so i believe it will be set volume to fade so we're going to tell when you transition in i want to fade the volume and what do we want to fade it on we want to fade it on our video clips and so which video clip it'll be the one of the crowds cheering since that's the one we're using now and so what it's going to let us do now is define uh what volume level we want to lower or raise the order level to and over what time period we want to actually do that on so in this case we're going to turn around and say i want to lower this to just 30 percent of the full volume and then we're going to do this over two and a half seconds so we're going to add this so now i have a trigger set up so ken is asking what's the difference between shortcuts and triggers so a shortcut assigns a function to a button press so it's a shortcut key basically a way i can press a button to make an action happen a trigger is going to be going to initiate a function based on the state of an input is the input just being loaded or is the input leaving or is the audio in the input at a certain audio level so it's going to allow you without having to manually take any step which you do with a shortcut you have to press a button somewhere along the line it's going to allow you to have some event happen so the first one we're doing this with is for having the audio volume change so we've already set this volume fade to go down to a level when this comes in and so what we'll probably do now is we'll create a corresponding one so that when we transition out uh we'll set the volume level on this back to normal so we'll set that up to 90 again and we can do that over two and a half seconds so we're going to add that now so let's take a look and see how that would work so if i have this video in here and will cut to this and i'll cue up the second video now if you look over here at the volume level i have for the video clip uh if i now do the merge you'll see that this video clip volume has now dropped all the way down automatically to just 30 percent and if i merge back you'll now see that the volume level is raising back up to where it was before so that's a a very simple way to uh to make an adjustment oh let me let me just fade this to black so we're not distracted uh to to do an adjustment to some attribute of that input just by virtue of entering it or leaving it so the other thing though is we could do things that sort of extend outside that input as well so for instance when i brought up the uh when i brought this up we also put a lower third over it so what would be great is if when i bring in the video segment here the video input here that lower third could trigger automatically so let's do that next and we'll add that in here so we'll turn around and say okay on transition in what we want to do this time is we want to do an overlay and we're going to say i want the overlay to go in and we're going to apply that to this little news update lower third we have and we're going to basically say i want to do this but i want to delay it coming on for two seconds so this now is going to wait for two seconds before that will come on and because we have transitions ins and outs what we'll also do is we'll probably move this up one level so it's now part of all our transition ins and what we're also going to want to do though is to say we want to do a transition out also so we have to figure out we can set this up for for overlay input 1 off now let's say we want to have the delay set to 7 7 seconds so actually i have this wrong here we want to do this on uh transition in so it'll all come off at the beginning time so the transition in it will wait two seconds bring up the lower third after that it will on this transition and wait seven seconds and take the lower third off so we're going to add that here and now let's take a look when i bring this in i will send this over so now you see without anything the lower third comes on then it's going to wait a number of seconds and then it'll just disappear so this now simplified that next step where i'm just triggering what i want to have happen but within that little segment that i triggered with a shortcut the triggers on the inputs will now let us do things like lower the volume and put up lower thirds and take them down and that can all happen through automation along this line so this hopefully gives you a good sense of some of the things you can do and this is incredibly powerful because you can assign these things to almost any input and almost any function there are some limitations but this allows you to really create automation workflows around different segments in your production that you can then just go to with single simple button pushes so the last thing i wanted to talk about in terms of automation is something called uh activators now an activator is a slightly different thing than any of the other functions we had unlike shortcuts and triggers activators are simply looking for a state inside of vmix to occur and then they're shooting off a uh you know they're triggering an event that is external to vmix usually like a light lighting up or a midi note to do some type of signaling so this is something i think that could be very very useful for operator feedback or for talent feedback if you need to know what's going on so what we're going to do is if you remember we set up the chris thank you for joining us great having you here uh we're gonna we had a lower third shortcut we set up so what we're gonna do is we're gonna set up an activator so that when the lower third is on the screen that button will change color and display red and when it goes off the screen it will go back and display a default color saying blue so if you want to take care of that this is in global settings so we're going to go over to activators which is the last leg and we're going to add a new activator so the first thing we're going to do is like before we're going to say what do i want to associate this activator with and that will be if we are on our stream deck we're going to click find and we're going to press the lower third key so this is the same button we used before that i'm holding down for lower thirds so you click ok and what event do i want uh i want to set up first the default event so what color do i want to make the key by default since we're working with a stream deck the type of activator we're going to use is a stream deck one on this key and we're just going to pick a color so we said blue so okay we're going to pick this color blue and we're going to say so by default this button that triggers the lower thirds that's a shortcut for the low thirds is going to be blue so now if you take a look at the stream deck this key now has just turned blue and that's that's how default state for it so what we want to do now is say if i actually have this lower third active i want to change the color of this so again we'll go find and press the same button up here but this time the event we want to have is it's going to be overlay 1. so if overlay 1 is on uh and we'll set this for again because this is stream deck we want to turn this button red so and we'll do it local so now with this button press and the way we have this set up in the activators if i put the lower third on oh i here we go i made a mistake so this is good we'll come back in here and fix it i didn't set it i didn't set it to uh the correct overlay so what we're overlaying is news update so now what was it as soon as i fixed this you will notice that the button turned red and if i press that button again the lower third goes off the screen and it turns back to blue but here's an interesting thing what i'm going to do is i'm going to just take the button under it which has no function involved with it and i'm going to say okay any time the we'll just say okay take this button over here any time that we have a an overlay one come on which which includes the news update i want you to turn purple let's see we got a purple here somewhere there we go so i just set this up now so now even though this button here has no function associated with it when i press this button here you'll notice that this lower this this activated button also turned purple and i don't have anything uh you know associated with it and when i removed it it shut off so this this hopefully gives you a clue that the activators don't necessarily have to be used specifically with button presses they can really be used uh with just indicators and that can be something that could be uh helpful if you need to notify talent or crew that certain things are in certain states like am i streaming am i are my mics unmuted is audiobus or certain audio buzzer all of those things you can now use so you could actually set up a stream deck where you don't touch a button but it's simply going to give you feedback on the state of everything that's going on in your production so michael uh let's see sorry do you use stream deck with without companion if not why so uh good question so right now we're using this just integrated with uh with vmix so it's just the standard uh stream deck software with the the vmax vmix component the download setup on it what we actually prefer uh and you know companion is great you can do incredible things we've been working a lot with something else over here which i'll just sort of hold up we actually are working with something called central control which allows us to do a lot of very cool things we will have a show that specifically uh dives into central control and that's something that joe dimax who's frequent on a lot of the facebook sites uh dealing with video production he's developed this and uh hopefully we'll get him on the show to talk a lot more about it but we love it and it's something that does a lot of things that would be similar to companion but we think the the design and execution on this is is really fantastic so uh this uh hopefully you know gives you a good sense of everything that we talked about the other thing which is interesting if you remember i set up the system here so that uh this uh act this uh two box that we have here when it comes on air would uh would basically allow you to automate the lower thirds coming on and off so let me just show we're gonna move this back and then when i bring this back i think the lower third should come on and now if you look over here at the stream deck uh you'll see that it lit up when the automation happened and as soon as the automation pulled it off screen it went away so this can also when you're using automation this can let you know when certain things have completed so if you had different lower thirds that were all going on screen and you wanted to to know when they finished so you could do the next segment you can use this the activators as a way to to see that uh so uh michael's uh central control actually uh very very it's a very complex uh workflow model but you are allowed to create basically attached all different devices across your network and with those attached devices you then can send commands between them so the stream deck is one attached device and there are button pushes on it uh they have things like two state buttons where if i push a button on the stream deck you can change the state of a two-state button and then from that two-state button i can tell it to change things on a tricaster and on an obs system which is controlling signage so you can do these types of things as full featured workflows that you know basically very very cool stuff you can do with k with with companion in different ways but the whole layout of central control is is really great and works around the way we think about these types of tools now there's one more thing that i wanted to to touch on because uh richard had mentioned it about the button presses being up and down uh so there are two button presses for everything so if you let me just switch back to the stream deck over here for a second i don't know if you can see this but i had another button here called cough so something that you'd often use for uh productions especially if you're self-hosting is if you have to call for sneeze it'd be nice if you could just reach over press a button and you didn't have to to share the the sound of that core for sneeze with your entire viewing audience so that basically is a simple way to mute your live mic and then when you release it it will uh put the mic back on again so this is a perfect way that you can leverage this up and down states for shortcuts inside of dmx so let me just show this here uh if i go back into shortcuts what i can do is we're going to add another shortcut so chris just mentioned he bought a stream deck i mean that's a great choice i you will have no regrets and once you really start to integrate stream deck into your productions it'll be you won't believe how uh you ever survive without having it there they're absolutely fantastic devices uh so let's let's activate this cough button so what i would do here is i would go and i would press the cough button down for the down stroke so when that key is pressed in the function i'd want to use so in this case we'll do audio and i could turn uh audio so we'll just do turn audio off yeah so audio off and we'll do that if i had a mic input that's what i'd use this for we could say we'll just do it on the news desk for now and what i would do though correspondingly is i would now go and add basically the same thing except when i press the cough button i would press this down then release it and so now it's looking at that upward stroke and saying that cough button now is released so i would do essentially the the same thing here so i return audio back on i would do that for the news desk and just make that local so now what will happen is when i press this down it is activating the audio off and let's see if we have the news desk if you look here on the news desk let me get out of this if you look here on the news desk where you have the toggle for the mute over here uh when i hold this down it mutes and when i release my finger it unmutes so you have the audio back so this is a great way to do things like that but it could also be if you wanted to if you wanted to put something up on screen for a quick call-in number or to you know to trigger something that was an on and off type event you can do that you can do that here it can also be used for you know sound effects or other things that you may want to use so very simple way using the two states the down button push and the up button push with shortcuts to create these types of functions so that's everything that we wanted to cover here hopefully you found this useful there's a lot more uh automation capabilities inside of vmix that we we really haven't gotten into especially things around scripting uh so that's something where we look forward to doing in a in a future show but i think with just these three key tools shortcuts uh triggers and activators you can go a long way to automating your full production so that's it for the show thank you everyone for joining us we will be hanging around right after this to answer any questions anybody has uh and so please if you'd like stick around and we'll have a more informal chat about whatever topics you'd like uh so let's uh let's end the show now we'll see you all next week at the same time same social channels and uh have a great week look forward to seeing you all next week all right everyone welcome back so uh hopefully this was something that uh you all found useful uh there was you know a lot of a lot of fun stuff uh in the show so uh you know this is this is the sort of stuff where once you get used to automation uh you your productions you start to get your ambitions up uh from for for you know how you'd like to start to structure things and the types of ambitions you have around what you actually want to put on air uh so it's it's definitely worth any investment in time you make to to sort of get a good feel around the uh the the tools you have at your disposal to automate uh but the other thing is this you start to you can start to think outside the box and let me just share something with everyone that somebody had mentioned you know they were struggling with and i thought of how you could use automation to do this there was a a church and they have licenses for uh all the music they use but they didn't have rights to stream that and as they started streaming services over the past year they were really struggling with just sort of muting things and not having any type of meaningful sound experience for the people that were joining the services remotely so it got me thinking that this would be a great thing for doing things with triggers uh if you john welcome yes uh i i have i have multiple stream decks and nobody's going to take them away from me uh but what we were thinking is uh the [Music] if you actually used automation so that when i would switch over to audio that would be for the choir or the orchestra if instead of streaming out the master audio i had an audio bus b and anytime i switched audio for what i was doing you know in the the church itself it actually triggered audio switches for open source uh uh music that may be available and stream that out channel b so you could if you were in the church you could switch the service just like you would normally but as you switch for something in the church you'd also be creating a switch for something that would be taking place in the stream so there are really interesting ways you can start to use automation that are you know are clearly not you know sort of the norm but definitely you know stuff that would be uh great tools when you get stuck in a situation where you won't necessarily be able to do it any other way so richard was saying he was using uh shortcuts and activators but it didn't provide a three color status companion work well now i i believe that's correct and i think that's that's that's definitely something where uh you know you you you want to use tools your companion definitely is a good tool so you know in setting this up i didn't uh you know talking about central control uh i didn't mean to somehow dismiss companion companion is incredibly powerful and there's a lot of work being invested in in both of those solutions so whichever one does the types of things you need definitely the way to go uh yeah 99 pages yes so uh it is incredible i mean having pages in stream that uh something else that from an automation side is great because if you have say you were doing a live event where you had a panel uh you could actually have different pages set up for different segments of the event so if there were speakers and then there were panel discussions you could have all that set up to work just with that uh as pages but the other thing is you know as you start to to work with automation the other piece we didn't talk much about here is using data to automation and data where you can you know basically pull in different sets of data based on where you are in a production so things like that also come into play when you're you're doing some of these like setting up pages with panels every time you have a new panel you'd want to be able to load all the right data for lower thirds and topics and other things for that panel so uh we'll also dive into that in a future show but chris uh he's still using wirecast so uh wirecast uh i'm i'm sorry if i'm i'm not exactly sure how you could set that up in wirecast but wirecast has fairly limited automation capabilities uh it's uh it's not something that if if i were to to to work with people uh i would typically steer them to wirecast if they're going to be doing manual production because it is a very simple interface for you know just easily switching and i believe it works a touch screen so it's almost like a push button interface for uh running productions but if you wanted to do more complex things more automation vmix would probably be a better choice because it gives you a lot more uh depth in in that space the other thing in wirecast is the audio routing outside is fairly limited they have sort of a monitor audio mix and a live stream main audio mix but you don't have other audio mixes so also if you're going to do a lot more with audio that probably is something that would be you know probably a little challenging uh under wirecast but definitely uh definitely you know you things you can make work if wirecast is what you're comfortable with and and ultimately the way we always feel is use the tool that you know you can be successful and and you're comfortable operating especially because in live things happen and if you don't really know the tool it can put you in a difficult position so uh michael is asking can central uh control make the same three state on the stream deck uh i'll i'll be honest with you i don't know for sure there's there's a lot of depth in central control and we haven't actually set that up uh there may be ways to to do that i just haven't investigated that but uh that's something i i'll definitely forward out to to joe to max and see you know if if he would chime in on that i know he's uh he's constantly updating it so if it isn't there now it would definitely be something uh something i think they would consider using because tri-states are are things that that definitely are are very useful so uh can you use stream deck to page through data sources for lower thirds uh you you have the ability to uh to trigger all different things using stream deck and so when you set up uh the data sources for lower thirds you can you can absolutely do that with with your stream deck we did a show last season on uh an award show that used data sources we generated it all from from stream deck and it used automation inside of vmix so uh michael if you uh look back in last season shows uh that may give you a lot more detail on how you could set that up and use that but you definitely can you know combine the two to make it all work so uh i really didn't have anything else to add to this uh uh glad everybody joined me this is this has been you know great engagement and i love i love this uh sort of conversation we get to have on fridays so so thank you all but uh if there are any other questions we'll uh wait around a few otherwise we'll we'll wrap things up and uh see everybody next week

Channel: The Streaming Alchemy Show

Views: 3,699

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Id: 6CgTkHpi6OI

Length: 46min 6sec (2766 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021