This short video, I'm going to give you a quick behind the scenes tour of how I did the
livestream where I brought Tommy Callaway in as a guest.
Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki.
I host a weekly livestream on YouTube, and I've started to bring in remote guests join me
on the stream for Q&A.
One of my goals with this is to try out different setups to bring in remote guests into
my studio here.
In today's stream, I brought in Tommy Callaway to share his experience with lighting.
First, I want to give you a quick overview of what I have in front of me here.
Most of the time I stream from an ATEM Mini Pro.
That's what I normally use with my setup on my desk.
Here I have my main camera here.
I sometimes have a side angle and then I bring in my computer screen and the chat and
things like that. I've talked plenty about my livestream set up here on my streams, but I
really feel like I've dialed it in now and I enjoy using it and I have it pretty easy to
configure. So in today's stream, I brought in Tommy Callaway through the software called
eCamm Live.
Now, they did hook me up with a one year pro account in order to let me try this out and
experiment with it. So thanks so much for that.
So I want to show you a little bit about how I integrated eCamm into my ATEM workflow.
Now, eCamm Live can be an all-in-one streaming solution running off of a computer.
Now, as you probably know, I don't like running a live stream off of a computer.
I prefer to have it done in hardware.
But one of the very cool new features of eCamm Live is it has a new guest interview mode
and that provides a very quick way to bring in guests in and have them show as a video
source in eCamm Live.
And that's what I used to bring in Tommy.
Now, I still didn't want to actually stream from eCamm Live.
I still want to stream from my ATEM so I can bring in the chat the same way and still
switch to my other angles in here.
And that was the trick with this setup.
So what I actually ended up doing was basically using eCamm for just the scenes where we
were talking to each other, where I could then send that out from eCamm into the ATEM.
So first, a quick overview of what I've got in front of me here.
So the main thing is plugged into my ATEM: I've got my camera on input 2, I've got chat
on input 2, and I've got my computer as input 3.
Don't worry about input 4, that's not really relevant to this setup.
Input 3 is my computer, which means my computer sees that as a monitor so I can drag
windows over there and I can just use it as an external display.
However, it's very small. That's not actually very practical to do that.
Now, also on my desk you'll notice I actually have a whole separate monitor for my
computer as well, and that's actually plugged into a second HDMI out from my computer.
So now let's go into eCamm Live.
This is what the software looks like.
This is eCamm Live.
Everything is a little floating window.
You might notice it's a bit confusing because you can always sort of see stuff that's not
eCamm Live because none of the windows are actually full screen.
It takes a little bit to get used to, but it's not that bad.
So this is what I'm looking at with eCamm Live.
And I basically have the main program screen here, which you'll notice is my camera.
Now, this is where it gets a little bit tricky.
So if you remember, my camera is plugged in to the ATEM, which means my ATEM sees it.
Now, I can't use the USB out of that ATEM to feed back into my computer, otherwise I
would get a feedback loop and it just wouldn't work.
So instead I actually have an HDMI splitter from my camera sending another copy of that
signal to a different ATEM.
Now, it doesn't have to be a separate ATEM.
It could just be a capture card.
But that second one is the one plugged into my computer.
I'll put up a diagram of this on the screen so that you're not totally confused, but
basically you just need to get your camera feed into your computer somehow.
I happen to be using an ATEM as a capture card in this case, but it could just as well be
a cheap capture card as well.
So once your camera is then in eCamm, you can now mix it with other sources in eCamm.
And this is where the guest mode comes in.
So I can go ahead and bring somebody in by sending them this link over here.
They will join from their browser with whatever webcam they have connected, and when they
join, they show up as a new source I can switch to an eCamm.
So for example, in this mode I can switch between me full screen or the guest in full
screen. You can also create different layouts using eCamm by doing things like making a
split screen.
And in split screen mode I have myself on the left and the guest on the right.
You can, of course, add in more guests.
If you have multiple callers, I think is up to four.
I made a couple of other layouts using the scenes tab over here, so I went and I made a
layout where the guest is small up in the corner and it's full screen on my video.
And I also made an opposite version where it's the guest full screen and I'm small up in
the corner. And that way when my guest is speaking, I can have them be full screen and I
can just sort of be sitting off to the side.
Or if we're both talking, answering questions, we can be side by side talking to each
other. Now, all of these are eCamm scenes that I'm switching to, so I am using it as a
software switcher here. But again, this is not where I'm actually streaming to YouTube
from. So this is where it gets cool.
Remember how I said my computer is plugged into the ATEM as another monitor?
Well, if you look at that computer slot on the multiview, I can just drag this window
over there just like it's another monitor, right.
But eCamm has a very cool feature where I can go up to this output menu, choose Video
Monitor, and change that to the external monitor.
And when I do this, it's going to send a copy of the program feed out to that monitor,
and now you'll see whatever I've mixed in eCamm is now showing up in the program feed on
the multiview. So now that I have eCamm using the HDMI for program, it's now brought into
the ATEM and the ATEM sees it just like any other input.
So as I switch between these different layouts, I can show my split screen, I can show
picture and picture or the other picture in picture, and that's just going to look like
any other input to the ATEM.
So on my ATEM I can now switch between my regular camera view or the eCamm layout, and
because I'm using the ATEM for streaming, I can now bring in the chat on top of the
eCamm layout, just like I would on top of my own video.
So when I start the stream, I can start with just a view of myself.
I can introduce the guest and then cut to the view where we're side by side.
Now the other piece of the puzzle is audio routing.
We talked about getting the video into the ATEM.
Let's talk now about audio.
It's a little bit of a trick to get the audio routed right.
Now again, my main ATEM here is doing the streaming.
So this is the one that needs to send the audio to YouTube.
My microphone is plugged into my camera.
So when I'm showing you camera one from the ATEM, that's the audio I want to send to
YouTube. However, when I cut to the view with the guest, I, of course, want to hear both
of our audio. Now, thankfully, eCamm is handling most of this for me because actually in
eCamm, what's set up is I have sound levels here where I've got the microphone that you
can see from me, which is Blackmagic Design.
And when I have a guest, they'll show up here.
And I just want to make sure they're both unmuted because we want both in eCamm's program
audio. That also means that the guests will be able to hear me through eCamm as well.
And this works because my camera is split, where one copy is going to my computer and one
copy is going to the ATEM.
So in eCamm, it's got the real audio for my camera and it's got the guest's audio.
It's mixing them together and sending that out through its program out.
So in eCamm, you go up to the output menu, Audio Monitor, and make sure your HDMI out
from the ATEM is selected here.
And that's going to send eCamm's audio through the HDMI port into the ATEM.
So now you'll notice if you look at my multiview, you'll see when I'm talking, I've got
audio from both the camera main as well as from the computer.
And if I, for example, play a sound effect from eCamm without me speaking, you'll see
that only the computer audio is bouncing up and down in that in the audio monitor.
So there you saw the sound levels coming from the computer, which is exactly what would
happen when the guest is speaking as well.
So on the ATEM, the way to make this work is to use the Audio-Follow-Video feature.
If we look at the sound configuration, we have AFV on both the camera input main as well
as the computer. That way, when I switch between the two, the audio follows.
So that was a quick overview of how this all works.
I think it worked pretty well. In the end, it felt perfectly natural to have a
conversation using eCamm Live with Tommy.
And when I look back at the recording, the recordings seem pretty natural as well.
I didn't do any switching on my streaming ATEM during our conversation, but I did use it
to be able to start the show like I normally do.
Where I start with my still graphic, introduce the show, show the map of all the viewers
and then cut to the angle including Tommy.
And again, I just want to point out that I happened to be using two ATEMs for this,
that's not necessary to make this work.
But you do need a way to split your camera output into one feed, into the streaming and
one feed into your eCamm software.
If you can't use a splitter with your camera, what you could do is make a solo layout in
eCamm where it's just you and then have that be just the only way that your video gets
into the ATEM itself.
So you might be wondering why I didn't just stream the entire show from eCamm.
I definitely could have, and it would have been a little bit simpler and certainly
required less wires.
But again, I just like having my setup here where I've got the chat overlay working right
and I can show my computer screen and everything else that I do in my normal streams.
I like having that set up in hardware and I also like offloading these streaming encoding
to hardware as well.
So this is an interesting hybrid approach of using both the ATEM and eCamm together.
So I hope this gives you some ideas for how to do this workflow in your own show.
Like I said, I will be experimenting with different workflows here.
I'm not saying this is the best solution, but I thought it was a really interesting
solution and it worked pretty well.
So happy to share it with you.
Thank you so much for watching.
And I will see you in the next one.