Beginner’s Guide to Ecamm: Record Your First One-Take Talking Video

1. Welcome to Ecamm: Record Your First One-Take Video: Know what they like to say. If you stay ready, you don't have to get ready. And that's true for making videos, as well, but it doesn't need to be complicated. And after years of refining my workflow, I want to share with you my not so secret weapon. Most of my videos are made with a production software called ECAM. It is a MAC based program. Sorry, PC friends. That can be used for live streaming or recording. I primarily use it for recording. I've definitely used it for live streaming tons of times. I also use it to come into Zoom calls or meetings or as a podcast guest or to produce podcast. Like any kind of video stuff that you need, you can do it from your computer. And you can customize all sorts of things. You can shoot in vertical, you can shoot in landscape. You can add transitions. There's so much that you can do. The main reason I use it is because I set it up so I'm always ready. Camera is connected to my computer, my microphone is connected to the computer, ECAM sees all of those things, and whenever I need to, I am ready to press record. It's just always set up, ready to go. I use this workflow to make efficient one take videos that require little to no editing. And I'm going to show you the basics of what you need to know to get you set up to start recording your own videos using ECAM. By the end of this class, you will have your own one take video made in ECAM that will need minimal to no editing. It's pretty cool. 2. Ecamm Walkthrough: The Basics You Need to Know: When you first open ECAM, it can be a lot to look at. So let me walk you through it. I am showing you my screen using ECAM. This is a feature called live demo mode, and that's why you can actually see my screen, and I didn't have to use an outside program to do this. It's already in here. When you first open ECAM, there's going to be all of these floating windows that all do a little bit something different. And once you get going, you'll be able to rearrange these in a way that works for you. We're going to go one button at a time. If you prefer to see everything, we will head to window, and then you can go to arrange all windows, and then everything will pop up. This is the standard issue placement for the Windows. But remember, you can customize it later. First one we'll look at is our scenes window, which is a lot of where the magic of ECAM is. You can also find that by going to this dropdown here and you can go to Show Scenes window. So if this happens to disappear, you can go here, Show Scenes window, it will pop back up. A lot to talk about specifically with scenes, so we will come back to it. Our next window is the sound levels. This is where you can choose your microphone. My microphone here is a sure MB seven I, and you can see that. It says that right here. If you have other microphones connected to your computer, you can switch to those. If you want to use the microphone that is attached to your camera, you can choose that here. If you just want to use a microphone that's built into your computer, you can use that. If you just want to use your AirPods, you can select that here as well. Have a lot of other options here, too, to change the sound levels depending on if you're adding in any sound effects, any movie media, any guests. We're not going to mess with those in this course, know that they are there. Sound levels you can also find by clicking on the microphone in the program window. Next up, we have interview mode, which you can also find by clicking on the two people here. This is to show your interview interface. We're not going to get into the details of interview mode. And personally, at this point, if I'm ever needing to do a two person or multiple person interview recording, I will do that using the Zoom integration that ECAM has. People are just more familiar with that. Over here, we have our camera effects, which you can find by the little magic wand over here. In here, we can do a lot of different things. We can select different cameras that we have. Right now, I just have one camera selected, but I do have a camera effect on it. The one that I use all the time is the digital Zoom ten. If I turn this off, this is what my camera sees, but I don't want it to see all of that. So I can make this adjustment here in the recording and not have to worry about editing that out later. Continuing down and around our next window is comments and reactions, which you can find in this little dialogue image right here. We're in record mode, so we're not going to see any dialogue here, but if you were live streaming or if you're in a Zoom call, your comments can show up. Next up is our Zoom window where you can set up meetings. You can join meetings here. You can schedule events. You can do a lot of Zoom things, and you can either host the meeting or you can be a guest in the meeting and utilize ECAM. Now, remember we mentioned an interview situation. Using Zoom, when you have it set up correctly, you can add other people who are in the Zoom call as a camera source in ECAM so you can do recordings with multiple people. We're not going to get into that in this course, but it is a really key feature that is standout from other video production software. As we work our way back around, this down here is our camera switcher, which you can find by clicking on this button with the four squares on it. The camera switcher is where you will see your various camera sources. Right now, I just have one camera source, but I have it in two different configurations. So I can switch between these two. If I had more cameras plugged in, which I typically do, they would show up here as well, and then that's how you could switch to multi cam production. But in the spirit of keeping things simple, we are going to stick with just one camera. Now, working our way around, we have our sound effects window, which you can find by going to the music note button here. These are ones that are built in that you can use. You can also bring in music. You can bring in your own sound effects. You can bring in audio recordings. There's a lot that you can do with this. We're not going to utilize that today. Last of the features windows is the overlays. This one is super important as well, because this is how we can add text on screen. We can add videos. We can add other camera sources. We can do screen shares. This is where you can really customize what you are doing, so you don't have to add those things later. But for the purposes of this tutorial, we're not going to do any of that. For our Tutorial, we are going to close the interview window, comments and reactions, Zoom, sound effects, and overlays. The main ones we're going to need are the camera switcher and the sound levels because we can't record if we don't have visual and audio. So we need to have our camera set up and we need to have our microphone set up. Typically, when you plug these items into your computer, ECAM is going to automatically recognize it if it is indeed a camera and microphone that is meant to be used with the computer or with the correct adapters. Getting into the specific tech, there's a lot to consider. So if you are in a place where you are looking for recommendations as you're building out your studio, let me know in the comments, and we can continue that conversation. 3. Setting Up Your Camera and Microphone: Now that you have your camera and microphone connected, there's a couple of things I want you to look at before we start recording. With your audio, you can slide this back and forth in order to adjust your audio levels. The thing you want to keep an eye out for is the yellow. If we get into the red, if I talk really loud, we'll get into the red here. Don't want that. We want it to just be a little bit yellow. That's fine. We can work with that. If it gets into the red, it messes up the audio, and then we can't even fix it. The other thing we want to look at is to make sure our camera is positioned well. Once you have your camera selected, we're going to look inside of our camera effects, and you might have a situation like mine, where you just see too much and you need to reposition things. I pretty much always have the digital Zoom and pan, so I can have a framing in the way that I want because I can't set up my camera to frame it. If you can do it in the room, that's much better, but ECAM has an option for you to do, as well. You totally can come in here and play with the various settings if you need to change your brightness, you need to change the temperature. Your image, you want to do any tint saturation. There's a lot that you can do. I suggest getting it as good as you can get it straight from the camera so you don't have to mess with those things because you can make a preset, so it will remember that, but I'd just rather not risk it. I'd rather you make it look good in the camera. Call it a day. You have the option to mirror your video here. So if you for some reason, need to flip something around, maybe you have something with text on it. I used to have a calendar in my background, and it would show up backwards, so I would need to mirror the image so the words would come up correctly. And something that's really cool that is surprisingly useful is the rotate option. So if you need to rotate your camera, say, for some reason, you need to install your camera upside down. It's something that I've had to do before. You can easily rotate your image, so it's upright. So you can place your camera however you need to. And the last thing I want to show you in this setup is in our options. You can change the stream size. All of this is great out because I am recording right now. You can't change these once you're recording, but you have your stream size and your stream shape. So if you wanted to film in vertical for the vertical video platforms, you can do that here as well. Also, in options is the vertical safe zone, and you can see this grayish overlay has shown up so I can see what would be safe and vertical, but this is not part of the recording. This is just so you can record the whole thing, but you know what it's going to look like if you were to record vertical. If I wanted a vertical video that was framed appropriately for how I like it, I would turn off the digital Zoom, and this is all that would be shown, which I think is just a much better image for a vertical video. But because we are shooting landscape, I will keep this on, and I will turn off my vertical safe zone. You have your audio and your camera looking and sounding the way that you want it, we can move on to building our scenes and then getting to recording. 4. Record Your First One-Take Talking Video: Before we move forward, I want to urge you and challenge you to keep it simple here as we get started. There are so much that you can customize, but I want you to get to a point where you can record a video right away. And then once you get used to that, then you can start adding customizations. But I do want to show you what is possible. With our scenes window here, we have one default scene. So the scene is what our image looks like right now. If we want to do another scene, we can press this plus button, and then it brings us back to the default. Now we're building from scratch. Let me show you what we could build. I could do my digital Zoo. I could put myself here on the side. And then in overlays, which is the text and image button right here, we open that back up. I can do text, and that's going to open this window, and you can add some texts. You can change the font. You can change the colors. There's a lot of things you can customize in here, and then you can add that. This is now an overlay that I can place wherever I want in the scene. We can turn it on and we can turn it off. Now, if you are building multiple scenes, this is what will look like. We have our default scene. This is the first one that we built. You can go in here and change the name of these. So once you get a little bit more used to the program and you have scenes that you know you love and you want to lock them in, then I do suggest you change the names for those. But switching between the scenes looks like this. So I've got some options. You can as many of these as you need. And then you can make them into folders, and then you can save it as a profile. Then you can build a different profile. So if you have different types of projects, different kind of branding, different businesses or clients or channels, whatever you need to do, you can make multiples. But for now, we're going to keep it simple. Hopefully, now you have enough information to know what could be possible in ECAM, but I want you to do a recording with just what you need. The bare bones basics, which is a way to record from your camera and your microphone into your computer where you can see everything. You can see what you look like without having to run behind the camera and see what it looks like over there with a little visual customization, with a little audio customization. And then we can record. When you are recording, it looks like this. I am recording currently. I can pause, I can finish. When you are about to record, there will be a record button, as you see here, and then there will be a little countdown that you can toggle on and off in the preferences. I tend to just keep it on and then it will record. That is what I want you to do. I want you to record one take talking about your favorite food or tell me about a pet or introducing yourself. Doesn't need to be more than 60 seconds, just to get a feel of pressing record and stopping the recording in ECAM. If you can do it without any pauses or filler words, amazing. If you can't fine. We are going to take this footage that we are going to record here and edit that in another class if that's something you want to do. But you totally don't have to. If you can get it in one take and it looks great, then that's all you need, and then you're good to go. Once you're finished, you will press Finish. Once your video is complete, you will get this gray window that will pop up and you can click on Show Me the file. That will open up the folder where the recording is saved on your computer. When you're ready to customize that, if there's a different place you want it to save, you can change that in your preferences. 5. Wrap-Up and Next Steps: Hope that was helpful, and now you have enough information to get a simple video recorded in ECAM so you can be set up and ready to go whenever inspiration hits. Because if you stay ready, you don't have to get ready. Share your videos with us here, and I look forward to seeing them.