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(Transcript not yet available)

[00:00:13.13] The Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro comes pre-configured to live stream to YouTube, Facebook and Twitch along with precise encoding settings for each of those platforms. But did you know that you can alter those settings and you can even alter where you're streaming to?

[00:00:13.13] You can set up your ATEM by modifying an XML file to stream anywhere you want. In this video, sponsored by Restream, I'm going to show you how to configure your ATEM Mini Pro to stream anywhere you'd like, and of course in this example, I'll be using Restream.

[00:00:26.18] Once it's streaming to Restream, you can simultaneously stream to YouTube, Facebook and Twitch, along with LinkedIn, Periscope, DLive, Dailymotion, Mixer, Major League Gaming, VK Live, VLive, KakaoTV, Bilibili, Nimo TV… Yeah. There's a ton of them. Let's get into it.

[00:00:46.29] If you've ever caught my live show on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitch, you were actually watching a Restream of it. I'm always streaming to YouTube, but sometimes I stream to those other destinations as well. And whenever I do that, I've always been using Restream.io.

[00:00:59.18] Restream actually has a free tier of service. You can use the service completely for free, but they also have paid services, as you might imagine. If you decide to sign up for it, make sure you use my code PHOTOJOSEPH to get 20% off.

[00:01:10.08] Now, before we get into the Restream settings, let's take a look at the ATEM software itself. In the ATEM software control panel, go to the output tab and then click on “Live Stream” to get to your live stream settings. As we discussed in the intro, you have the option to stream to Facebook, Twitch or YouTube. And within each one of these, you have a variety of settings. You can choose the server, which for Facebook is just one choice, “Default” or on YouTube, you can choose to stream to the “Primary” or the “Secondary” server, or on Twitch, you actually have a huge list of servers to choose from.

[00:01:39.05] You also have a streaming quality choice; you can choose from High, Medium or Low. Even though there's no interface to change these settings, you can actually modify all of them by altering the XML.

[00:01:49.01] So, the first step is to find that XML file. Let me show you where it is. On macOS, go to the Finder, type Command-Shift-G. That will bring up the “Go to Folder” option and then start typing in the path, /Library, and by the way, this is your root library, not your home library. So, don't put that “home” tilde (~) in front of it.

[00:02:08.01] /Application support… /Blackmagic Design… /Switchers… and that's it. And as you see the path to this on both Mac and Windows is at the bottom of your screen.

[00:02:19.25] This Streaming.XML file is the one that we want. Before you do ANYTHING, make sure you make a copy of this. If you mess up this file, you won't be able to restore it without reinstalling the whole software, so make sure you have that backup.

[00:02:30.29] Also before I forget, once we've modified it, you're going to want to save a copy of that modified file because whenever you do a software update for your ATEM, it is going to replace this Streaming.XML file. So, once you make changes to it, don't forget to save a backup of that too.

[00:02:44.22] To edit the file, make sure you use a true text editor like BBEdit. If you use a document editor like Pages or Microsoft Word, you're going to add invisible characters to the document that aren't going to be read properly, so don't do that. Use something like BBEdit.

[00:02:58.22] At first glance, this may look like a lot of confusing stuff, but it's actually pretty straightforward… one of the things I like about BBEdit is that you can collapse groups of data with these triangles here. So, for example, that collapse is everything but in this case, I'm going to hold down the Option key and collapse all of these, to bring up the three different service lists. These three lists are YouTube, Twitch and Facebook.

[00:03:21.29] Now let's compare this to what's in the ATEM Mini Pro software to see what's what. Let's go back to Facebook here and we see we have the platform Facebook and the server that's called “Default”. If you look in the XML, you'll see this is the service called “Facebook” and the server called “Default”.

[00:03:37.05] Let's close this one and look at Twitch. Service; Twitch there's the platform, that's Twitch and then the server, remember we had that huge list of them… well, those were all listed here “Servers”… one after another, after another.

[00:03:51.06] Now let's look at YouTube. There's YouTube, the primary and the secondary server and then underneath that, you'll see our profiles. These are the streaming profiles. We have Streaming High, Streaming Medium and Streaming Low. If we go back over to the ATEM Software and choose YouTube and look at the settings in here, you'll see once again that we have the Streaming High, Medium and Low. And let's take a look at the bitrates in here… Streaming High is set to 6.0 megabits per second. If we look over here, we'll see the Streaming High actually has two settings; there's configuration for resolution 1080p at 60 frames per second and that's at 9 megabit — that's 9 million bits right there — and then there's the resolution 1080p for 30 frames per second which is 6 megabit and that's where we're at right now.

[00:04:35.10] By having multiple encoding settings in here, the ATEM software will choose the appropriate bitrate depending on your frame rate. So, in this case anything up to 30 frames per second will be set to 6 megabit, anything over 30 and up to 60 will be set to 9 megabit, but we can change all of this.

[00:04:50.08] So again we have in here a Streaming High, Streaming Medium and Streaming Low, and the Streaming Low, the lowest setting, is actually 3 megabit which is quite Low. The Medium is 4 1/2 megabit, but what if you wanted another setting in between? Let's say I want just straight-up 4 megabit. I can add another line in here.

[00:05:06.29] I'm just going to duplicate some of this text. I need to choose from <profile> to </profile>; so you can see the opening tag for profile and the closing tag for it. I'm just going to Command-C, copy that and then paste another group of that in.

[00:05:19.13] So, now I've got that in there twice. We're going to call this “Streaming Low Plus” and for 60fps, I'll bring this up to, let's say, 5 megabit and for 30fps, we're going to go with that 4 1/2, so 4,500,000. That has just added another quality option, but what we really want to do is add a whole other platform.

[00:05:38.28] So, to do that, I'll copy the entire platform of YouTube, duplicate that and then modify that one for Restream.io. Let's scroll back up and I'm going to select the entire service here, I collapse it and then just select that line and copy and paste that; that'll paste that whole thing in, makes it a little easy, and let's start by changing the service name. So we're going to change this to “Restream.io”.

[00:06:00.26] Now what am I going to put for my primary and secondary server? In fact, is there a primary and secondary server? To find this, log into your Restream.io account and on the streaming page, Restream.io/channel, you'll see over here your streaming settings.

[00:06:14.09] You have your RTMP URL and it looks like there's just one of them. So I'll go ahead and copy this; just click on that to copy it to the clipboard, and then go back to BBEdit or whatever editor you're using and I'm going to put that in here under the primary. We'll just select that and paste in the new URL.

[00:06:29.28] In fact, I'm also going to change the name; instead of calling it “Primary”, I'll call it what it's called here, “RTMP URL”. It doesn't matter but it's nice to be consistent. We only need one server, so I'll go ahead and select and delete that secondary server. Then we have our streaming profiles; Streaming High, Streaming Medium, the Streaming Low Plus that I made and Streaming Low… but what bitrates do I actually need?

[00:06:51.14] Every streaming service has their own custom settings and Restream of course is no different, although they're actually pretty flexible, you can send almost anything you want and it's just going work. But of course, they do have guidelines. So, I've dropped the URL to that down below and let's go take a look at that web page.

[00:07:07.29] On this “Best Settings” page, you'll see that you can stream any resolution up to 4k but of course, the ATEM Mini only does HD… frame rates of 30 or 60 frames per second, various codecs, modes, keyframe interval which is an important one to note because we can change that and then a maximum bitrate of 15 megabit or 15,000 kilobit per second and a minimum of 500, which is actually exceptionally low.

[00:07:29.26] So, let's go ahead and put some of these in. I'll go ahead and do a Streaming High at 1080-60 of 15 megabit. So, that's going to be 15 million bits. I'll set the one underneath that to just 10, let's say 10 megabit for that. Then for Medium, we're going to leave that at 7 and 45, Streaming Low Plus; why don't we call this just “Streaming Low” and we'll go with something a bit more moderate… how about 6 megabit and 4 megabit…. and then we're going to do another one called “Streaming Stupid Low” and we're going to make that one the absolute minimum of half a megabit and we'll set both of these to that number. So that's it.

[00:08:11.10] Next, we just need to save this document and then relaunch the ATEM software to reread it. I'll save that, head back over to the ATEM software control, quit that and relaunch it. We're starting in our YouTube platform and if we look at the qualities, will see that we now have Streaming High, Medium, Low Plus and Low and that Low Plus is set to that 4 1/2 megabit that I had chosen… but of course up here, we can change this to our new Restream.io.

[00:08:39.13] There's the RTMP URL and no other option because I didn't give it one and then under quality, there's Streaming High, Medium Low and Stupid Low, with Stupid Low at half a megabit. Let's go ahead and set this to Medium, 4 1/2 megabit.

[00:08:52.02] The only thing left to do is to get the Key in here. To do that, head back over to your streaming dashboard and copy your Key from here and paste that in. Now let's click “On Air” and make sure this is going to work.

[00:09:05.06] The ATEM Mini Pro starts streaming; let's jump over to Restream and we can see that it's already getting data and there we are already. We see our resolution, 1920 by 1080, the bitrate that I'm sending, about four and a half megabit, the frame rate of 30 frames per second and everything looks great.

[00:09:20.04] At this point, you're ready to start adding your platforms. To do that, simply go over here under the “Destinations” and click on “Add Channel” and then add whatever channel you want. Authorize that and you're ready to go.

[00:09:30.01] To take it live to your platform, just toggle the switch next to the name or click on “Toggle all; On”, and that's it, you'll be on the air.

[00:09:36.25] That's all there is to it, it's really easy to set up. Now, don't forget to back up that modified XML file and of course, you should already have a backup of the original as well.

[00:09:44.29] Remember, next time you run a software update on your ATEM, that customized XML file will get wiped out, so you're going to want to replace it. But that's the only thing you have to be aware of, everything else is pretty easy.

[00:09:54.06] So, I hope this helps, I hope you enjoy streaming all over the world, especially using restream.io and don't forget to use the discount code PHOTOJOSEPH to get 20% off if you decide to buy. Take care everybody. I'll see you next time. Bye bye.