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Hey everybody. I'm PhotoJoseph and I want to clarify some misinformation that's going around out there about the new Blackmagic ATEM Mini specifically in regards to something called Preview or even Multi-view output. I've seen some videos where people are conflating the two and they are not actually the same thing at all. And so I want to clarify what these are and talk about what this device can and can't do.

Let's start off by defining PROGRAM, PREVIEW and MULTI-VIEW. Program is the main output that your audience sees. It is the “program”; the show that your audience is watching. That is being output by default on the ATEM Mini over both the HDMI port and over the USB-C port. This allows you to feed your program – your show – into a computer to go through OBS or Wirecast or Skype or whatever you're using to broadcast, or into an HDMI monitor, or an HDMI recorder, or both as the case may be; whatever you like. The point is, out of the box, you get the program out on both the HDMI and the USB-C port. Preview is the ability to preview an input before it goes on the air. It's the ability to look at one of your camera sources and prepare it for switching to. Maybe you want to make sure that your talent is ready;

maybe you want to build a lower thirds on top of it and you want to make sure that that's all set before you push that off to air. That is what the preview monitor does. Multi-view output is something that this device does not have. Multi-view is something you'll find on higher-end ATEM switches like my 2 M/E where it actually has dedicated outputs on the back of the device, giving you the multi-view out. And here's what multi-view looks like. It's the ability to preview up to eight different inputs at once, and on the top of those previews you'll see that there is two main screens. There is both the preview and the program. So again, in a normal broadcasting setup, using a device like a larger ATEM, you have the ability to see your input sources on the bottom and then on the top you can see your preview getting ready to take that to air and then the program; what's actually on the air.

So we can't do that multi-view out… right now, at least. There's nothing to say (at least that I know) that it couldn't be added through a firmware update to the Mini later. I'd love to see it added. I mean it's a really, really great feature to have and potentially it could be, but maybe the hardware is not built into this to handle it. I don't know, but the point is it isn't there today. But let's talk about what is there. By default, the ATEM Mini is set up to do program out on both the HDMI and the USB-C, and this is what that looks like. Over here, I've got the USB-C plugged into my laptop running OBS or open broadcaster and on the right you'll see a Desview five-inch monitor, which by the way is a really nice little economical monitor. I'm going to do a video on this eventually, but I'll put a link to it down below… and this is allowing me to see the program out of the HDMI port simultaneously.

So you can see here that I'm looking at the same image on both screens and as I switch from camera one to camera two to camera three we're seeing all three of those cameras coming in through both of these outputs. Both the USB and the HDMI. And by the way if you're wondering why I've set this camera to a very cold and blue, normal, and very warm, it's just to make it easier to see the differences between the camera angles as we move forward here. Okay, so this again is how this is set up out of the box. If you get this thing, you do nothing in software, you just plug it into an HDMI device, plug it into your computer, this is what's going to happen. But let's talk about how the preview works because you do have the ability to preview a shot using the ATEM Mini before it goes to air.

The first thing you have to do is load up the software and the software is not actually in the box. It's something you download and they don't really make it that clear where to get the software, so let's just start with that. I'm going to jump over to Safari and we're on the Blackmagic website, blackmagicdesign.com… click on SUPPORT and then here in the “search by model” type in “ATEM Mini”. Select that and at first it doesn't look like anything happened, but if you scroll down the window you'll see that all of the latest download support notes and latest news related to that product show up here. What you're looking for is right here; “ATEM switchers 8.1 Update”, so just click on the button for your platform and it'll download the software. Now it's worth pointing out that this same ATEM 8.1 software is what runs on any ATEM from the cheapest little ATEM Mini up to the big production M/Es; it's all the same software. Once you've installed this, this is what you're going to see. You'll see a variety of PDF manuals as well as the ATEM Setup app and the ATEM Software Control app. We're going to start with ATEM Software Control. Right away you'll notice that there is an extra row of buttons on the software that you don't have in the hardware. Up at the top here we have our program view and this allows us to switch between the camera angles that are going out through our program output and you can see that switching in the HDMI monitor as I click on the buttons here as well as automatically switching on the hardware as I choose the different program outputs. Down at the bottom you'll see the preview. And the preview, you'll notice, shows up in green. Preview is always green; program is always red.

Just something to keep in mind as you're starting to work with this. As I click these preview buttons, nothing's happening anywhere right now and that's because we haven't enabled previewing yet. Before I enabled previewing, let me just switch back to OBS and let's take a look at this setup so you can see how this is happening between the input to the computer, the monitor and the switcher in the software. So once again here, as I click on these different buttons, we're seeing the input change for both the HDMI out and the USB-C out. Now let's do the first stage of changing the output. Under the ATEM Software Control menu, you'll find one called OUTPUT that allows you to set your HDMI out. You can set it to “Camera One, Two, Three” or “Four” directly, which is kind of interesting. Now I'm not too sure exactly the use case for this, but if you ever wanted to have one of your inputs being output to the HDMI monitor, you could do that.

Maybe just one of your cameras you want to have on another screen at all times. You can do that there. You have “Program”, which is where we started and you also have something called “Camera One Direct”, which is a lower latency input for Camera One, specifically on the Camera One input. According to the ATEM manual, this is about gaming; it's to have a super low latency output for gaming and that would allow you to not switch outputs but only have that output going through. The one we want to look at though is “Preview”. When you set this to Preview, you'll notice that the monitor over here, the HDMI monitor has changed. This is now showing me camera three which we're seeing in the preview monitor here as a green button. If I go up here to the software and I switch between camera one two and three on the preview, we are seeing those different outputs coming out over here on the HDMI monitor. However, the output going out to the computer to OBS is not changing. That doesn't change until I hit the buttons up here, the actual program out. And as I change those, the preview monitor doesn't change. Okay, so how do we go about actually doing this? Well, I could go in here and choose a shot. Let's just say I'm on camera one for my output and then I'm trying to decide between camera two or camera three to go next and I decide that camera three is what I want. I can go ahead at this point, it just push the button on the controller and switch the program out to camera three. This is not a very efficient way to do it because you're swapping between devices, but that is kind of the simplest method of doing things, but let's look at the proper way of doing it.

Back over here, I'll once again switch my inputs on the preview and the program. So Preview is now at camera two and the Program is at camera three. Once I've made the decision of what I'm going to output, I would then go over here to the transition style dialogue and hit the CUT or the AUTO button. Cut is going to instantly cut between them and auto is going to run a dissolve or a DVE transition or whatever you previously had set in here. As I go back and I cut between them. You'll notice too if I keep toggling cut that the program and the preview monitors are just swapping, so if you're just swapping between two camera angles, just hitting cut, will swap you back and forth, but as you want to add a third or more angles in here, then again you can choose which one you want to preview and then cut to that.

So that's the second way to do this. The first one involved both software and hardware, which frankly is not really a good idea. The second way involves just the software, which is fine, but what if you want to do everything on the hardware? If you're using a setup like this to go out to OBS or Skype or something else, you probably don't want to be using that same computer to be switching up your controls. So you don't want to have to run the ATEM software on the computer. You want to do it all on here. To do that, you have to actually switch a preference that shows up in another piece of software. Let's go back over to that folder that was installed by the ATEM Switcher software and you'll find an app here called ATEM Setup. When you launch that and then click on this little button here, you'll see some new options for the switcher. First of all there's the network settings. You can actually assign an IP address to this device and then using the ethernet port on here, connect it To your network and access this from any system on the network, which is pretty cool, but what we want to look at here is under the panel settings. There is switching mode. There's Picture in Picture keyer and chroma keyer options. Switching mode is what we're talking about. Cut Bus is the default. Cut Bus is the standard default way that we just saw how things are working or you can switch over to Program Preview. Program preview is the mode that's gonna allow us to do the program and preview entirely from the hardware. While we're here just point out real quick that you have a Picture in Picture keyer and chromakeyer options in here.

The options by default are to drop with transition. And for those of you who saw my initial video on this, (which if you haven't seen, make sure you check that out; I'll link to it at the end) as you load up a Picture in Picture and then you switch to another camera angle, by default, that Picture in Picture gets dropped. You can have that Picture in Picture always stay on as long as you leave it on on here by switching this mode over to “Stay on with transition”. And the same thing goes for the chromakeyer, which is the green screens. But anyway, switching mode “Program Preview”, that's what we're concerned with. So I'll hit save on there and as soon as I did that, you may have noticed that we got a new colored button on the ATEM. We now have a red button and a green button.

Again, the green one is showing our preview; the red one is showing the program. So let's go back to Open Broadcaster and make this nice and big because I no longer need to view the software on there, and now as I push a button on the ATEM Mini, you're seeing each button changes green as I select it, unless I choose the input that's on air, then nothing goes green, but at that point you know that both your program and your preview are the same. But as I push through these, we're seeing a different preview monitor on my HDMI out, but my program out to OBS has not changed. So how do I go about changing that? Well once again, you use the cut or the auto button. So right now I've got blue camera one over here on OBS. I've got the GoPro on camera two on the preview and if I want to switch to that, I hit the cut button and now it cuts between those two angles. If I hit cut again, it's going to swap back.

Which camera do I want to go to next? Do I want to go to three or two, three or two? Let's go to three and we'll do an auto transition and it does that squeeze. If I want to change the transition. I can change that here. Let's change it to a mix. We'll do a one and a half second, and we'll hit auto, and it does that slow cross dissolve. So now we have the ability to do a complete preview and program output, just using the hardware. You have to set it up in the software first, but once it's configured, it will be there and you no longer have to run the ATEM software. And back to that whole idea of the multi-view out; this is something that, again, I hope gets added. It's a fantastic feature. It'd be very, very powerful to be able to see on the HDMI out your preview and see all of your inputs on the multi-view.

That'd be great. Today we don't have that, but maybe we'll get it in the future. Hey, if you liked this video, make sure you subscribe, hit that like button and all those good things and do stay tuned. I'm going to be doing a lot more videos about the ATEM Mini. It is a really, really cool product. I know I've got one coming up that people have asked for, where I'm going to show how you can use the Webcaster X2 in conjunction with this so that you can stream without using the computer, which is really awesome because you have a good hardware encoder in here. That'll probably be the next video that I do on the ATEM Mini. So again, be sure you're subscribed. Hit the little bell; you know, to do, see you next time.