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Transcript generated by rev.com

- Check, check. Appears to be working. Hey everybody I'm PhotoJoseph and I am going to be taking you on a tour today of the brand new Blackmagic ATEM Mini, one incredibly impressive piece of hardware. Now this show is going to be a little bit different than the last few months of edited shows because while this does appear and will appear to be an edited show, this is actually recorded live to tape. Not broadcast live but recorded live to my recording here. All switching, all camera angles switching that you see in the show today, will be performed live through the switcher itself. So this is very much proof in the pudding showing you exactly how this whole thing works. So, let's back up a little bit. What is the ATEM Mini? Well first of all, the Blackmagic ATEM hardware line is a very big, very expensive, line of hardware for doing live switching for broadcast. I own a ridiculously expensive one, that allows me to do the live shows the way that I've always done them and it has a whole bunch of inputs and has a lot of fancy features that this does not have, but this little guy here actually has features that my big, bad boy doesn't, which is a little bit disturbing to some degree, especially considering this is only $300. One of the main things that this has that my switcher does not, is a scaler on every input. So , let me back up a little bit even further to explain what I mean by this. First of all, as a switch of the whole point is you feed in multiple inputs into this, in this case, it's up to four inputs in different camera angles, computers, whatever you like, and then you choose which one goes out. You have a switching hardware to choose which one goes out. On a traditional ATEM, every piece of every camera, every input, everything coming in has to be exactly the same size and frequency. Meaning it has to be 1080p at 29.97 or whatever you choose, it all has to be the same coming in and that is also what goes out. You don't have to do that with this. This doesn't have that limitation. This will actually do it scaling in real time. In fact, what I've got right now, is this camera coming in at 1080p 29.97. This camera up here, and we'll go through all the inputs in a moment. This one up here is 1080p 24. That's 24.00, True 24p, This one over here is coming in at 59.94, and then the computer I think is set to 25 Hertz right now. I am outputting, a 30p file for recording. So it's completely scaling on input and then on output as well. It's kind of remarkable that it does that. Normally scalers are individual things you have to buy and they're quite expensive to get good ones. And these are now built in and from what I've seen so far, they look top notch. So, this is scaling all these inputs that are coming in, which is wonderful matching the frame rate doesn't matter. Just plug it in and away you go. The whole point of this thing as I said is switching. So, let's take a little tour of the hardware, while taking a tour of what is actually plugged into it right now. So let's get this out of the way. And here we go. This is my hardware box right here. I'm going to go from camera one to camera two. Camera two is this guy over here. Camera two is looking over my shoulder, and I can see the switcher on here and all the other gak that I've got going on. we'll come back and explain what everything is. Input number three, is going to be this camera right here. So if I go to three, that's this camera, close up of the switcher itself. And then input four is the computer screen, I've got my computer plugged in, so that we can take a tour of the software. Now, that software that you just saw, is the software for the ATEM switcher, but this is not required. You can actually do a lot of what, everything we're going to show in the beginning, you can do without touching the software at all. The software just allows you even more control. But everything that you need to use this as a switcher, is built into the box. So, I explained that I've got these different inputs coming in, camera one, two, three and then four as the source is my computer. The output now is going into a recorder and to this TV. So if we look at this angle here, you'll see one of these cables coming out is actually feeding into my Atomos Ninja, what is this thing, Ninja Inferno, you can see the red box this is actually recording right now that's recording the show, and then I'm feeding off from there into this monitor. And that is simply so that I have a picture here to see which I probably don't really need this because I can just look at it on the display there but, you know, I have it so set it up this way. This is so that you can see what is going out. You don't actually have to do this. Because the other way that this device outputs it's signal, not only over HDMI into devices like this or whatever you want. It'll also output over USB. And that USB signal goes out over USB into your computer and your computer, then sees this as a webcam. So what this means is that you could be using this switcher, for something like Skype, you can be using it for YouTube Live, you can use it through Open Broadcaster or Wirecast, or any software that would take

- - you can use it for a FaceTime call! – anything that will see a webcam , will see this and just think it's a webcam and then you just have all your control here. Now, I do want, I want to point something out. When you look at the box it says, streams to Facebook, YouTube, Facebook, twitch, Skype. It's a bit of a misnomer. This box doesn't stream to anything. This box is not streaming hardware, it is not an encoder. It is not streaming hardware, it is not going to get you onto the internet. You still need something else, between this box and the Internet to get there. For most people, that's going to be your computer. And it might be like I said, you're using Open Broadcaster , using Wirecast, or just using Skype, something along those lines. And that's great. Or you could use hardware. So, for example this right here is an Epiphan Webcaster X2. This is a low cost hardware streamer, that I could take the HDMI signal coming out of here directly or the recorder they did here, whatever you like, and then use this to stream online. And if this is something that you're interested in seeing the whole solution for, let me know that in the comments. I'll be happy to do a show on that. It's been a while since I've looked at this guy, It's a great great little hardware, hardware streamer, hardware encoder. And I've got a full setup of kit for it, like this tiny little keyboard so that you can control it and tiny little monitors, you can see what's going on, it's kind of fun. So if you want to know more about that, let me know I'll do a dedicated show on that. But anyway, the hardware itself is switching between all the inputs, and that output goes either to HDMI or USB. And actually, it goes to both simultaneously. So that you can use both an external recorder or monitor and feeding it into your software. So, now let's take a look at the layout of the buttons and what these things all do. So let me go into the close up, up here, looking at camera three. And essentially here's the breakdown. So obviously inputs one, two, three and four. Above these, above each input, you have six buttons that are related to audio. The audio is… well your options are levels up and down, volume up and down, audio of or on. Reset, which just resets everything back to it's default. And then this button that says AVF or sorry, AFV. AFV means Audio Follows Video, and so what that means is if I had audio follows video on multiple inputs as I switched inputs, that mic coming in or that audio coming in with that input, would be enabled. And then as soon as that camera was off, you wouldn't hear that anymore. So for example, let's say you've got like a wide crowd shot, and you want to, when you switch to that wide crowd shot, hear the crowd, but you don't normally want that. Or you've got a journalist on camera with a microphone stepped out, is outside somewhere, and they're feeding into your system and when you switch to them, of course, you want to hear them when you switch away from them you don't. So, couple of ideas of how you might use audio follows video. Or, as you saw in here, you could have the audio simply on and then that's on all the time. So the way that my audio is set up right now for this recording, is I am feeding through a wireless mic pack I'm wearing a Sennheiser AVX pack that is plugged, the receiver is plugged into that camera. So my audio is tied into that video coming in here. The device also has dedicated audio inputs. But here I'm going to tell you one of the problems, right away. If you use the dedicated audio inputs, and you have control over those right here. So there's your audio; see that's mic one and mic two, there's two little mic ports in the back on here. If you use those, there's no method that I found yet. And I've gone through the software and I've searched the manual, there doesn't seem to be any method to delay the audio. And you might think, well why would you want to delay the audio? The inputs on this device are all HDMI. HDMI video is always delayed, from real time, it's only a few frames, maybe three, four or five, six frames, just kind of depends on your hardware. But there is always an inherent delay. And so if I had audio plugged into the mic input here, and I have tested this, if I have an audio plugged into the mic, it is going to come in in real time. Audio feed into the device in real time. The video coming here is not real time it's a few frames delayed, which means you will have a mismatch between your audio and your video. That's no good. You can't do that. So what we do instead is we have audio going into the camera. So the audio is now delayed with the video. So by the time it hits the switcher, it's in sync. So whenever you're going to have anybody talking on camera, you need to have their mic fed into the camera. Or instead of plugging the mic directly into here, you can plug it into some type of hardware mixer that has built in delay. A lot of hardware mixers will have built in delays in that would allow you to do that. And then you just find the right amount to delay that in. But you cannot plug a mic directly into here, plug a camera into here and put the two together, they will not sync up. Super super important to know. You could now still use it though, as like a background music. Let's say maybe I want some music to fade in and out to background tracks, something like that, that'd be a perfectly good use for that input as well. Okay, so let's go back to the buttons on here. So again, levels up and down on or off, audio follows video and reset and you have these for each one of these inputs. So let me just do this. I'm going to set this to, on all of these and now as you can easily tell the audio switching so there's the good audio. This is now the built in mic, it points right this way, the mic that's on this camera. This is now we're listening to the mic on this camera here. And if I switched over to the computer, we wouldn't hear anything at all. So I'm going to go back over here and set that back on to this, and turn off all this other audio. so that audio is on, the rest of them are off, which is what I want for this show. Okay, next up over here on the right, you'll see two buttons still and black. Black simply takes the frame, to black, that's all there is to it pretty straightforward, and go back to whatever shot you want. So black just takes you to black and it's instant, it's just an instant cut to black on there, still, loads up the still frame. Now, the still frame from the still store is something you do have to use the software to do. The ATEM software is how you load your images into here. But the images are stored in the device. They're uploaded into the device and there is room for 20 stills on here. Let's take a look. There's room for 20 stills on here. Now I've loaded one on here. So what that means is if I go over here and I push the still button, we're going to see that one picture that I've loaded up there. Which is now a perfect opportunity for me to introduce to you, picture and picture modes. This is another feature we have in here. We'll come back to the buttons in a minute. I want to do this now because it's a great chance for me to tell you that… see this picture right here, that picture there, that's India. I did a workshop in India last year, I'm going back. I'm going back in November of 2020. [PhotoJoseph.com/india] If you're interested in an absolutely[PhotoJoseph.com/india] mind blowing photography tour through India, in late 2020, [PhotoJoseph.com/india] let me know in the comments, but more importantly, sign up for my newsletter, go to photo Photojoseph.com/india find the newsletter button. Tweet me, whatever, I'll let you know. We're going to start selling those tickets soon and we're only taking six people. [PhotoJoseph.com/india] And I've got five already interested. Those are kind of like my early early pre announcements. People who've been on workshops before with me, so there's not going to be very many seats, but it's going to be awesome. [PhotoJoseph.com/india] Anyway, let's get back to this. [PhotoJoseph.com/india] So back to this. That's what the still store is and again in the software here, you could load up to 20 of them. And then whichever one you want, you simply drag over and that's what loads it up. That's the first thing we seen where you have to use the software to do anything. But if you don't need the still image on there, then you don't have to use that and that's perfectly fine. Okay, let's get back into this. We have over here a button says cut. And you've noticed that every camera change that I've made has been a strict cut a hard cut. You can also do transitions. A transition is called auto. And an auto will transition and it could be anything from a simple crosses off, that's what mix is. Dip, a dip to color, by default it's white. And then you have a push, you have a squeeze and you have a left, left to right or a top to bottom wipe. The duration of that transition is set right here. You can set a half second, one second, one and a half or two second transition in there. So let's do a top to bottom. It's two, set to two seconds, we're in auto. So now when I go to choose a new camera angle, you'll see that nice slow wipe. I'm going to set it to a side to side, go to one and we see that slow wipe over. I can speed that up. Let's go set that to half a second. And we'll do a squeeze on here, squeeze into another camera angle. The mix is a simple cross-fade. So nice simple cross dissolve in there. And then as I said, there's the dip, which is a dip to color, which by default is white. But this is something that we can control in the software. Now I prefer in general to just do straight cuts, I find them to be just a lot cleaner looking. And also the other thing about a cut is versus a dissolve, is if you're streaming, think about how when you're streaming, everything is compressed for streaming. And the way compression works is it's looking for pixels that are changing. And anything that's not changing, it doesn't have to re encode, when you do a cross dissolve every single pixel changes for the entire duration of that dissolve. So when you do a cut every pixel changes. But it's one frame everything's here and then the next frame everything's there and that's it. That's the end of it. If you do a dissolve, let's say you do a one second dissolve and you're doing a 30 frames per second broadcast, that's 30 frames, where every single pixel on that frame is changing. And what ends up happening is you can end up getting some compression artifacts, some macro blocking, some stuttering in the stream. So in general for streaming, I tend to not recommend doing any kind of dissolves, or any kind of transitions like that. But if you want to, you certainly can. Okay, so that's, that's the cut, that's auto, we've talked about, that there's fade to black. Fade to black is a simple, bring you down to black. Hit it again, and it brings you back up again, so it's a great way to end the show or start a show off. Now let's go to the picture and picture we talked about this, or I showed this briefly. What this allows me to do, if I hit on, is it puts, well, it puts a picture up there, it's well, pointed at the wrong place, it puts a picture here!… and you can change the position of it. So you've got a top right, top left, bottom left, bottom right corner for that, you can put it wherever you like, off and back on again. The image that is coming in over this picture in picture is input one. Now you can change that in the software but it is input one which of course in this case is this camera here. If I wanted to be doing a software demo and have a picture and picture of me in the corner there, I can do that. Now the size of this, you'll notice is quite small. And this is where we start to get into things that you can do in the software. You can change that. What I have not figured out yet, what I've not figured out, is how to reprogram these buttons so that they load the picture in picture in a different size. And I've looked at the XML code, I'll show you this in a moment. I don't think it's changeable. I think that's hard coded in there. But you could still change your picture in picture by doing it in software and building macros in software just not using these buttons to do it. So, I'm hoping that there is a way, if someone watching this knows how to reprogram the ATEM so that you can use, have your picture in pictures be different sizes than the default positioning. I'd love to know it. But yeah, right now I don't. Last button on here that I want to show you is up here, the key. Now this is really really special. So the key would be like a green screen blue screen keyer. The key that's built into this is apparently phenomenal. In fact, I didn't realize exactly how great it was. But a buddy of mine, Guy Cochran at the DVEStore called me today we're chatting, and I asked him to send me a little video recording of him doing this. So, um. Okay, I lied, not a complete unedited Show. I'm going to insert that here.

- So one of the things that people are talking about inside of the ATEM Mini is the keyer. So it actually has the advanced keyer inside of it. So I have one of the boxes right here. And on the box, you'll see that it says ATEM advanced keyer. What does this mean? It means that there's more processing power inside of this box and even in the older like $5,000 ATEM. So it's a tremendous value to be able to get this clean clarity. So if you wanted to feed in two HDMI devices, let's say your camera and a laptop, done. You don't have to go keying in post, it's composited, its composite, it's done right then and there. So if you're looking to get an ATEM just the keyer alone is worth a couple thousand dollars and Ultimatte DV used to cost two grand and now you're getting an Ultimatte for $295 inside this box. So hope you guys enjoyed Joseph's session and catch you guys later.

- Okay, so that was Guy if you want to know more about Guy Cochran and his store go to the DVEstore.com they have generously loaned me green screen kit before if you've seen, I'll link to that show at the end of this one. We did a whole thing with the green screen stuff was pretty fun. But the keyer that is built into here is apparently phenomenal. So that is something I'll have to do in a whole other show. You can use that keyer, also to key out graphics. So you can load up graphics into the still store that have a green background that are then keyed out. You can also load up graphics that have alpha channels in them so you could have a lower third that sort of thing, on there. And that's all stuff that you can do in this. Now you cannot, from what I can see in the software, load up a series of frames to do an animation. So I don't think that you can do animations in here like an animated lower third graphic kind of a thing. But you can do static graphics with alpha channels in there. So that is the extent of everything on here. I think I forgot anything on the back, we got the two audio inputs, four HDMI inputs, HDMI out for this. One, two, three, four HDMI out to that. USB-C out, power port. There's also an Ethernet port on there, which would allow you to connect to this from anywhere on the network. Right now I'm connected over USB-C. But you could connect to it over the network as well, which is just, again, gives you control over the hardware from the software. Alright, let's dive into the software a little bit. So this is the interface for those of you who have watched my live shows before you may have seen the interface on here. Let's go put me up there in the corner. You may have seen the interface where there's usually a lot more buttons than this. This software is the same software but it just conforms to whatever hardware you're plugged into. So we're seeing fewer buttons on here than you would if we're plugged into my big switcher. But what you'll notice on here is that we have on here our four camera inputs and then all these buttons that are blanked out because there's no additional inputs in there. I can control the camera here just like I can on the hardware switcher. So if I switch over to, if I hit camera three, it loads up and now we're on three, on the software I'm going to hit two and on the software I'm going to hit three again. And on the software I'll hit four to go back to that. So I do have the ability to control that from there which is, which is pretty cool. I can do things like go to black, load up color bars. There you go, we'll load up color bars from there. There's a lot of other things and there's a lot of stuff that we'll get into in future videos again if you're interested in this let me know in the comments and I'll, I'll you know do some more videos on this thing if it's something you guys want to see more of. The picture in picture is handled through something called the Upstream Keyer. Again; stories for another day. We can get into all that, but all the controls on here so you have your mix and your dips and your wipes all those controls again are able to be controlled within the software as well as on the hardware itself. We go within the media tab, we see the media store, which we already saw. But here's something else that is incredible. The audio capabilities of this device, absolutely blow away the audio capabilities of my big ATEM. And now, this is partially in software. Well, no, I guess it's really all in hardware… I think it's called Fairlight. Probably should look that up. And I think… well, I don't know. If I'm going to get any of this capability in my ATEM when I upgraded it. There's a software update for it. I don't know if it can do this. But let me just show you what's in here. This is insane. So we are once again looking at my audio coming in on channel one right there. So we see it on there. You can see these other ones are all muted. I could turn them on here, so now you're hearing that other camera audio and so on. Not only do I have the ability to adjust levels on here, and by the way, let me just show you this real quick if I go back to this view. So, I have on here these little arrows, up and down for changing levels. Go back to this and I'm going to hit those arrows and you can see, you can hear of course, the levels changing on that if I hit the reset is going to take me back to the reset position. So that's kind of fun. It's always, I just find it kind of cute and amusing to make changes on a hardware device and see things happening over here in software like that. It's just kind of cool. Anyway. All right back to this, let's get that picture in picture back up as well. So all right, so you've got your levels, you got your on off, there's your AFV button and so on. But then there's these two new things; Dynamics and Equalizer. Let me start in Dynamics. Look at what we've got in here. You have an Expander. You have a Gate, Compressor, Limiter. An incredible amount of control over your audio. In fact, we're running the expander on here which I discovered is incredible. Let me just turn this off for a minute. This is my room without the expander on. This is my room normally so you're getting a little bit of background noise. I've turned off my heater. It's late so the neighbors aren't here. They're not… their fans aren't on, My humidifier is off. There's still highway noise. There's room tone. But when I turn the expander it just does a phenomenal job of cutting all that crap out. It's really amazing. Now the gate is, I found, to be a bit too aggressive. I think the gate is too harsh in it's default settings. But you do have complete control over that. As you can see in the software, when we go back to the Expander on there. There's a compressor, which playing with, like, this stuff, I don't fully understand exactly how the different settings, what the different settings effect in there. So if I just turn it on, it's… we're hearing I think the overall levels are quieter, which obviously we can compensate for. I think it's kind of it's bringing the floor and the ceiling down a little bit too close to each other. I don't like the way this sounds. So I left that off but again, maybe with the right settings it would be better. And then you have a limiter. I don't have a limiter turned on because my mic has a built in limiter and it wasn't making any difference but if you're using a mic without a built in limiter as most are, then you probably want to have that on. So that's pretty incredible right? Now, let's go back to this. Now we run into the thing, I've done this, I've done this mistake on live shows before where I was showing you the software but you weren't looking at the software, you were looking at me. That's okay. You saw, you know what you needed to see. There's a compressor, there's the limiter. But let's just turn all that off. Now let's go into the other fantastic feature in here. A full equalizer. You can go in here and control, you know, whatever you want. Add a little bit more bass in your voice in there. I'm not listening right now to myself. So I'm not sure how exactly this is affecting me. But you have a full EQ in here that you can adjust for each individual input, just remarkable. I'm going to reset it because I don't know what I just did it myself there. But this is absolutely, absolutely incredible. All of this built into this tiny little $300 piece of hardware. So, I am going to wrap up the show with that. Four inputs, with scalers built into them. That again, that's the mind blowing part of this. You can feed anything into this. I plugged in my iPad, I plugged in a bunch of different cameras. And, everything worked flawlessly. Four inputs, one output, of course, for your program out. Incidentally, I should show you this let's go back into here. If I go into the settings by default, it is outputting when you get it out of the box 1080p60. But you can change that as you see here to any of these settings. So 1080p 23.98, 24, 25, 29.97 blah blah blah. So I set it to 30 because that's what we wanted to record at. So you just make that change in there and hit the set button and it will change but not going to do that there. You have additional controls in here in the preferences we don't need to get into right now but I just wanted to show you that you could change the output if you want to. I think that's everything I need to show you. So, there you go. That was the show live to tape minus the one insert of Guy's message for us. And that's, I could have loaded on the computer. But I completely forgot to do that before I started recording. And, and that's about it. It's a remarkable device, absolutely remarkable. I think combining this with one of these to have a totally portable, very obviously very lightweight very portable streaming solution where you can bring in multiple inputs like this is just absolutely incredible. If you don't want to use dedicated hardware, obviously you can use your software you can use OBS or whatever. And I was going to show you one more thing I was going to show in Skype, how the input… Okay, so there's the Skype input. And you can see that the video is set to the Blackmagic Design. We're not seeing me on here because we're basically seeing an infinite loop of me. So let me just do this. I'm going to do a screenshot and then switch back to it. So this is what it looked like before. So there was me coming in. So you've got me on video coming in through the, through the Skype input so that you can, again, switch for Skype or switch for anything that sees a webcam. That's a lot of talking. Pretty cool hardware. Pretty cool hardware for 300 bucks, absolutely a steal. It really is remarkable. And yeah, I guess we're going to leave it at that. So once again, if there's anything specific you want to see about this let me know in the comments. If you want to see a demo, a full show about using the Webcaster with this, let me know in the comments. If you want to come to India with me, let me know in the comments. And I guess we'll just leave it at that. Whatever you specific you want to see next, let me know and I'll dive in. See you later. Bye bye. I forgot to show you something. I said that I was going to show you the code part of this the XML part of it. So from the switcher itself, you can go up here and choose Save As, and you can choose whatever components of the software you want saved out to an XML file. So this is all the different things that it can do. So if we just hit select all, turn everything on and then hit save, what that is going to do is output an XML file that looks like this. This XML is totally editable. And then you can re-upload that back into the device. So you can go in here and hit restore and load that back into the hardware. This allows you to have total control including doing macros you can have, you can script multiple things together, multiple events to happen together when you hit one button. And that is something that I do in my regular show, my regular live show through the big ATEM all the time, all of my camera angles, switches are actually controlled through macros, partially because I don't have hardware like this in front of me. But also because with a macro, I can trigger a lot of things to happen at once or the series of chain of events. That's all entirely possible in here as well. The, to do a macro, it is as simple as hitting record doing the actions and then hitting stop. However, what I found is that for most of them, you end up wanting to go in and tweak the XML. And that sounds a lot harder than it is once you start to look at it you kind of start to understand what it is and you kind of do a little bit of reverse engineering you figure things out, figure out how to write your own lines of code in there too if you want to, but you don't have to. You don't have to do that. You can just hit record and go. Okay, I had said I'd show that you and I forgot to So right now I'm out, bye.