Not long ago I made a video about how to do a holographic screen recording in Final Cut Pro
or other similar editing software.
It's a super easy technique, but the most common question I got after making
that video was whether or not it'd be possible to do that easily in
live streaming software so that you could do it on the fly while streaming.
And I'm happy to say that the answer is YES!
You can do that easily in streaming software.
So today we'll look at how to do it in both Ecamm Live and OBS.
And I've got my Ecamm pillow over here because it's so easy
you could do it in your sleep. 😴
So the first step in Ecamm Live is to create a new scene or
just rename the default scene.
In this case, we'll call it "Capture" because I'm going to
capture your attention with this super cool screen capture.
I always like when starting a new scene in Ecamm to make the source blank,
because that makes it easy to stack additional sources on top.
So now if I click the camera icon, I can add a source.
In this case, it's going to be my CamLink, which can-link my Sony a7SIII
to this computer right here because this is the way I like to do the overlay.
You can obviously do it however you'd like, but I like to have my main shot
here where I'm centered, and then when I do the overlay, I like to have it framed
where there's extra space over here.
Just ignore the microphone arm for this example.
So the next step is to get the screen capture from my phone onto this.
There are so many different ways to do that because there are so many
different phones and possibilities out there that I would go insane
if I tried to cover them all.
I'll just keep it short and say that you can either plug your phone in and
most phones will show up as a source.
Now I can add a camera.
I'm going to add "Tom's iPhone."
So what I'll do now, because this size is completely wrong, is I'll use a
two finger drag to scale this up or down, and the aspect ratio is still
not right, so I will click this pencil
and then do the shape and select "Custom," and that way I can select the edges
and change this until it looks right, like it's actually my phone screen
the way that it looks to me.
I can use a two finger drag on a track pad or just scroll a scroll wheel on a mouse,
and that way I can change the scale of this and position it wherever I want.
The other thing I like to use is NDI.
So if I open up the NDI Capture app on my phone,
there's a Camera app to use your phone's camera wirelessly, and there's a Capture
app to use your phone's screen wirelessly.
And then all I have to do now is go into my sources and select
"Tom's-iPhone [Display]," which is now coming in wirelessly from NDI.
But as I'm changing things here, there's no magic editing happening
where I'm syncing it up in Final Cut.
This is all live. (I promise)
I'm moving my phone and the thing's moving here.
It works really well and it's totally wireless.
Obviously, using a cable is going to be the more reliable way to make sure that
you never drop a signal or anything.
But I've had really good luck with the NDI app, at least on an iPhone.
So now I have my screen capture here next to me.
But it just looks like I've overlayed a screen capture.
So let's change some of those effects.
The same way that I can change the scale by using a two finger drag
on the track pad or by scrolling the scroll wheel on a mouse.
If I hold shift while doing that now I will change the opacity of whatever
element I'm using in Ecamm Live.
Same thing, two finger drag or scroll wheel on the mouse.
I'm going to change the opacity just a little bit.
This is all just personal preference.
What I like to do is make it opaque enough that you can see
through it, but I don't want to make it
so transparent that then you can't actually see what's on
the screen recording because I got too carried away with the effect.
That would be a negative affect of the effect.
Affect of the effect.
So just a little bit right there.
We can see through this, but we can also still see everything that's
on the screen recording, whatever I might want to show or share.
Now, the next step, which is really fun in Ecamm Live, is if I click
this little pencil icon, I can then change the corners and the border.
So I want to add a little border here.
I can change the color if I want.
In this case, I'd probably want it to be blue, maybe yellow.
I'll stick with the white border for now.
We can change the border size, and then in Ecamm you can change the
corner and the corner radius so you can kind of change how round
everything is or how square it is.
This is entirely personal preference. When using an iPhone
I like to have rounded corners because the iPhone screen naturally does have a
rounded display, so then I end up with a screen recording that looks like this.
Now, the only two things that I can't do here that I could do when editing
in Final Cut or another editing software is add in the perspective
effect and add in a drop shadow.
So in other editing software, I could actually distort this screen recording
instead of just scaling it up or down.
I could take these two corners here and squish them down.
And that's going to give the illusion of perspective.
So instead of just being plastered right here, it's going to look like
it's sort of at an angle, just like my computer looks like it's at an
angle right now and everything
has depth and leading lines to it.
You can do that in editing software.
You can't do that in any of the streaming software that I'm aware of.
The other thing I can't add in Ecamm Live is a little drop shadow.
Sometimes it's kind of fun.
See, I could make a shadow.
Look at that!
Look at that great example of what I'm talking about– without a
shadow below this, it just looks like a screen recording on screen.
But if I add a shadow in this case, it's just a shadow from my hand,
it does give it a little bit more depth that makes it look like it's
part of the scene and not just something that's plastered on top.
Fortunately there is
kind of a simple workaround.
I just made a drop shadow PNG image, which I will link in the description
if you just want to download this one. It's very easy to make a drop shadow,
but if you don't want to do that and you just want this one, go ahead and take it.
And then I can just drag this into my scene in Ecamm Live.
And now I can do what I did before and scale this down
using the two finger scroll.
Put this where I want it.
I want the effect to be pretty subtle, but it's way too noticeable.
So I'll hold down shift and scroll a little bit.
Change the opacity.
There we go.
Now it looks like this screen recording is actually taking up space kind of in the
physical world and casting a shadow on the desk here, and I can still use this live
while doing a stream.
And then I could, in Ecamm, create another scene that we'll just call "Main."
And I guess for now it'll just be the MacBook camera, which I can talk and
say, man, this is going to be amazing.
Let me show you how to use this app right here because it's app-solutely awesome.
And then I can go over here and talk about the app and have it right here.
And now I've got this super awesome screen capture effect happening
while streaming, or even if I were just using Ecammm to record this
would work perfectly also. Now that we've done that in Ecamm Live,
let's talk about how to do that in OBS, and there is NO-BS in saying that
OBS has gotten so much more user-friendly with recent updates. And the biggest
benefits to OBS are that it's free and it's also Mac and PC compatible.
I much prefer E cammfor many, many reasons, but it is Mac only
and it's not free.
So OBS is an amazing option that's only gotten better and better.
For this specific effect,
there are a few more limitations in OBS than there are in Ecamm, but you can
still pretty much achieve the same result.
So here we go.
This is OBS.
We have nothing happening yet.
We have one scene.
I'm going to add a source to this scene, a video capture device.
We'll call this "Camera" and we will use the CamLink.
So just as before with Ecamm Live
now I've got my camera as my source, so I can add my screen capture over here.
I need to add in my phone.
Now we'll add in another video source.
You can use NDI wirelessly with OBS the same way that you could before,
ND-I don't know how to do it as easily
as with Ecamm, you have to kind of add in some plug-ins and things.
So I'm just going to plug in my phone.
So now same thing as before.
I need to scale this down in OBS you can just drag your pointers and they have
this really cool way to help you position things– actually like this quite a bit.
So now just like before I've got my phone here, my screen recording here, we
want to change the opacity, To do that,
the way that you do that in OBS–
I don't know which camera to look at– is to click on "Filters," and then we're
going to add a "Color Correction Filter."
We can call this "Opacity" if we want, and then down here we're not going to touch any
of these other ones unless you wanted to.
We're just going to change the opacity a little bit.
Usually something like 90-95%.
And now we have sort of that same effect right here.
The areas where OBS is more limited than Ecamm is with borders and corners.
I don't have a way to easily round the edges like I did in
Ecamm Live, and I also don't have a way to easily add a border.
There are tons of tutorials on how to add borders in OBS, but they're
kind of convoluted workarounds and they get a little weird when you have
something that has transparency to it.
But we can add a drop shadow the same way that we did in Ecamm Live.
I can go and add another source.
In this case, it's going to just be an image.
We're going to select the drop shadow for my computer.
Oh, it's really big.
Whoa.
It OVERSHADOWS everything else. So we're going to make that
smaller, put it under the desk.
I can do the same thing by adding a color correction filter, change
the opacity a bit, and now I've got my drop shadow effect in OBS.
By adding that PNG I can totally get rid of the phone and the
shadow's still going to be there.
So those effects are very dependent on one another to work well. As long as
I save this scene, which I would just rename this scene, as you know, "Capture,"
then I could create another scene that is my main camera or scene that doesn't
have this and transition between the two while streaming or recording or
even using the virtual camera for Zoom or Teams or something like that.
So that's all there is to it for adding this super simple and awesome
effect in Ecamm Live and OBS.
And speaking of things that are simply awesome,
thank you to everyone who helps support my channel through Patreon
and YouTube Channel Memberships!
And before the video wraps up, I should remind you that you don't
have to do this with just a phone.
I'm using the phone because the tall, skinny display just tends to fit really
well in the side of something. Because if you just do a full screen phone recording
there's a lot of just empty space there, whereas this at least makes
it a little more interesting.
But you could do this with any other camera source.
You could do this with any other device, screen capture, another
computer– anything you want!
The sky is the limit in terms of creativity with this.
But these are the basics of how to achieve this effect.
And of course, I do have my other video that explains how to do this
in editing software where you do have quite a bit more control over fine
tuning everything, which is fine-to-me.