In this video, I will show you how to use your ATEM to automatically loop through all your
cameras without using any hands.
Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki.
I've been a huge fan of the A10 many ever since it launched last year.
One of the questions I often get is whether you can use the ATEM to get a multi angle
stream of yourself without pressing any buttons.
The idea would be that you would want to stream yourself doing a musical performance or
something else where your hands are already busy and you don't have your hands free to
actually press the buttons to switch camera angles.
It'd be nice if there was a way to just have it automatically switch camera angles on
some sort of time schedule so you could just get a multi-angle shot without having to
control it yourself. Before we get into this, I know what you're thinking.
My audio in here is not great right now.
You're right. And I know that.
And I'm doing this anyway because I want to make this video today and I don't yet have
enough stuff in my new studio space to properly do sound treatment.
So sorry, my audio is not great, but on the plus side, do you get to learn something
today? All right. So at first glance it looks like the ATEM does not have this feature
built in. Out of the box.
Some of the other hardware switchers I've used do have an automatic looping feature built
in with just a button press.
And it looks like the ATEM doesn't have that at first glance.
But I'm going to show you how you can actually recreate that feature in the Atim minute
using macros.
All right. First, I'm gonna give you a quick overview of what we're gonna do and then
we're going to dove deeper and actually go through it step by step.
So the high level overview is you're going to use the software control app on your
computer to program a macro.
That macro is going to switch between each camera in sequence and adding a pause in
between each. Then we're going to playback that macro on a loop.
Then we're gonna look at some advanced ways of tuning that macro to better control the
timing of each camera switch or to even make it look like the camera switching at random
intervals. All right.
Let's get started. So the first thing you do want to do is download the Black Magic
Software Control app for your ATEM.
Go to Blackmagic Design dot com and click on support.
Then click on ATEM live production switchers.
Now, first, it doesn't look like anything happened, but what it did is it filtered down
below so that the options you see are only for the ATEM.
So look for the one called ATEM Switchers.
Update and download the one for your computer.
All right. Now, you could launch the software control app on your computer if you're
ATEM is pluged in over USB it'll find it automatically if it's plugged in over the
network. You may have to enter the IP address or it might also be able to find it on the
network. Either way is fine.
It doesn't matter how it's connected to data.
Once you're in the software control app, it'll look like this.
These buttons give you controls over which input to switch to and your upstream and
downstream keyers and everything the area team can do can be controlled by this software
app. This is also how you can create macros.
So go up to the menu bar and click on macros.
This opens up this little window.
Click on the plus icon gives the macro a name and then click record when you see this red
border around the interface.
That means it is now recording a macro and anything you press in the software interface
will be recorded into that macro.
So we're now ready to create the macro that we're going to eventually play back on it.
So go to this top program section and click on the first camera that's going to record
that camera switch into the macro.
Then you go up the middle here and click, add, pause.
What we're gonna do is we're gonna add a pause, which will pause the macro for a few
seconds, which will sort of hold this angle before we then switch to the next camera.
The duration here is given in seconds and frames.
So go ahead and type in like three seconds and then click add pops.
Now click the second camera.
That's going to switch to the second camera angle.
Click, add, pause again.
Type in another three seconds and click.
Add pause. And now we'll just keep doing this for the rest of the camera angles that we
want to include in this loop.
If you have only three cameras, you just stop after the third.
If you have four cameras, you can make go through all four.
Make sure you press add pause after the last camera angle as well, because we can we want
to hold that camera for three seconds at the end of the loop.
Once you're done, click stop recording.
That saves the macro into the device.
So at this point, your macro is created and you can now run it.
Switch over to the run tab.
Press this recall on run button, which means that as soon as you tap one of the macros,
it'll start playing it immediately.
Then here's the key. This little circle icon means that it will play this macro on
repeat. So toggle that on.
And now you're ready to actually run the macro and you'll just keep looping.
So let's try it out now.
Go ahead and tap to macro and you should now see it switching to each camera, holding for
the three seconds and continuing on when it gets to the end.
It will then hold that for three seconds and then start back at the beginning playing your
first camera again to stop the macro.
You have to actually press the stop button.
You can still be pressing anything else on the software control interface, but until you
press stop, it's just gonna keep running that macro.
Okay. So your macro is created, but you want to make sure that you can now get back to
this again. So the easiest way to do that is to go into the file menu and press save a
start up state. But that's going to do is actually baked all the settings of your current
state of the switcher into the ATEM.
And then when it reboots, it will restore all of those settings and you'll be back to the
current state. The only thing that's not saved in that is the actual media in the media.
So if you do have images loaded, those unfortunately don't get saved into the device.
So this is the easiest way to do it, because now you're all ready to go and the next time
you plug this in, it'll boot up and your macro will be there.
There's a slightly more flexible option that you have as well.
And that is the save these settings out as an XML file so you can restore them to other
ATEMs or have different states of macros and switch between these shows.
So to do that, you go to file, click save as.
And give this file a name and that's going to create an XML file on your computer.
This also does include the media in your media pool, which means when you restore from one
of these XML files, all your images do get restored back into the set.
All right. So that's the basics.
By now, you should understand how to create the macro, play it back on a loop, and you
can even now see how you would change the duration of each camera angle while you created
a macro. But I want to show you one more thing that gives you even more control over how
this works. And we can even make it look like the cameras are switching at random in case
you don't want it to look like just a sequence with a fixed timing.
So the idea is that we're gonna basically create a really long macro where the intervals
between the camera switches are randomized and the cameras may not even switch in the
same order. And that way, when we play it back, it'll just go for a really long time and
then eventually loop back.
Hopefully long enough where the viewer doesn't realize it's loop back.
So it would take a really long time to program this in by hand.
So I'm going to show you a little trick.
I used to speed up creating the macro and also being able to edit it a little bit easier.
So we're gonna start with the macro we already created, which is the sort of simple one
of just the four cameras in order with the fixed three seconds between them.
Remember, we saved this XML file.
So we're gonna go ahead and open that up and see what's inside.
Now, to do this, you're going to want to use a text editor, not something like Microsoft
Word. So Notepad on a P.C.
or text edit on a Mac.
Those are all fine. Any plain text editable work.
So let's open this up. This is an XML file.
It looks a little bit scary at first, but it's not that bad.
I promise you'll get the hang of it after working with it for a little bit.
This is where the macro is that we've created inside this macro section.
There's a bunch of these up lines offshore for operation.
And these are the individual actions that we took in the software control app that have
now been written into the XML file.
So you'll notice a pattern here.
This macro is alternating between program input and macro sleep operations.
That's because we chose a camera angle and then click add pops.
So what you can do now is just take these and copy and paste them a whole bunch of times
to make a really long macro.
And you can make it as long as you want.
You can copy paste it, know dozens of times, make a really long macros.
It'll last for minutes and then you can go in here and change the order of the cameras.
You can randomize it. You can change the durations for each one to make it look like it's
shuffling around and not just on a loop.
So if you make it long enough, probably like a minute or two and then change the durations
and change the camera angles in here.
People won't really notice it's on a loop because by the time they get to the end of it,
it's been a couple minutes and then it starts back over and it's just gonna keep looking
like it's random. So now when you play back this macro, it's going to look like it's
picking random camera angles for random amounts of time and it'll look like somebody else
is controlling the switching. And it's not just your one person show.
So there you have it.
That is how to create an infinite looping automatic camera switching macro on your ATEM
Mini. I hope this video has been helpful and I hope it gives you some new ideas of things
you can do with your ATEM.
Please give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it.
It helps more than you might think.
I've been doing weekly live streams about the ATEM, which have been a lot of fun.
It's a live Q&A session.
You just come in, ask questions and I answer them on the street.
So join me on the next livestream.
Make sure you subscribe and click the bell to be notified when I go live.
Thanks for watching. I will see you in the next one.
And hopefully next time I'll have a little bit better sound treatment in the studio
space. Alright!
Bye.