How To Use The Interview Mode in Ecamm Live

Hi, I'm Adrian Salisbury and welcome to another video in this Ecamm Live series. In this video, we're going to unpack the highly anticipated interview mode feature. If you've been using Ecamm and have brought on guests to interview, you'll know that the only option has been to connect with the guest on Skype and then bring them into Ecamm. Well, now you don't need to use Skype, you can bring your guests straight into Ecamm. Now, understandably, this is a pro feature, but along with the virtual cam and other features, the pro plan is well worth the upgrade. So, no more having to have another app open and then juggling your screen to fit everything on. This is also super easy now for your guests to connect. They don't need to go looking for a Skype account. They get to watch their end, the live feed and the chat in real time, and they can join from any device that's connected to the internet. And the quality of this is unparalleled. And do remember, this isn't just for lives. You can record an interview this way without actually going live. I know a lot of people that do their podcast this way. So, let me show you how this has been integrated. Then I'm going to bring Owen in for an interview and see how this all works in practice. So, down the right hand side of your main window here, you've now got a new icon that says interview and your tab opens up. Now, like the other tabs, you can position this around on your window wherever you like and resize it. So, by default, it'll come in smaller than this, but you can drag this down. If you found that you've got several people that you're interviewing. So, right at the bottom here is my interview link. If I want to, I can change it, but otherwise it will stay as the same one. And all I do is click copy link. It tells me it's copied. And now I can just send that to my guest and we'll have a look at what happens there end. When Owen clicks his link, this is the window that appears for him. And at the top here, he gets two options. He can choose his camera at the top. And then his second one is the microphone. He can then change his name around on here, which is how it will be brought in. And then he clicks join. And as soon as Owen clicks that join button, I'm going to see him appear. There he is. Look, Owen is joining. So, it's brought the name in that he's typed and I can either refuse him, but we'll hit the green button and that brings Owen into the green room. Hello, Owen. So, we can actually talk at this point. I can chat away with Owen. In fact, we're not live yet. We're not recording. So, I can even bring him onto the screen and get that working anyway. And notice Owen's got a green screen behind him. We're going to use that in just a minute. I can add up to four guests this way and bring them in one at a time or all together and have them on the screen with me. Now, there's two ways to work with this. If you're not big into using scenes, you can very easily bring your guest in using the controls down here in this interview tab. So, if I want to bring Owen onto my live and notice that my name, his name are there. If I want to bring him on solo, then now Owen has just replaced me on the screen. And he is getting his end. As you can see here, he can see everything that's going on that I'm seeing. So, he's not seeing just a like on Skype. It used to be a conversation with me. He's actually now seeing the live feed as it were. If I wanted, let's go back to just me. Now, I can bring him in to be sitting on my left or I could bring him in on the right. And the assigned bit we'll come to in a minute. That's if we've set up scenes. Now, if I want names to appear, I've got the tab up here that ticks that on. And Owen and myself have got our names now on the screen. And if I jump around and I put now Owen in the center there, notice how the name is moving with it. If I change and I'm in the center. So, really clever how this works. And we can actually set this a swipe in as well. But I'm going to leave it for that right now. Now, I'm turning those names off right now. And if maybe I don't want to sit side by side with my guests, maybe I want to do a picture in picture. So, one of us at full screen and one of us down in a little picture in picture. So, I can click there instead. And look, I can move Owen around and if I want to. So, I could have a view like this. And if I hit this reset, it'll just switch over and it would change between one or the other. So, this is another way of doing that interview and having, you know, featuring your guest or yourself. And you're just sitting back up in the corner instead of them. I'll turn that picture in picture off. So, we're back side by side. I mentioned that I can adjust Owen's background from here. So, if I come into the camera effects, I need to make sure that I'm not selecting me, but I'm selecting Owen's camera. And look, I can tick green screen. And now, I am fully in control of Owen's background. I can adjust this fade level just to set it up a little bit. Get it a bit tight around Owen there. There it goes. And Owen, where would you like to go? Let's put him on a beach. Look, there he is. That's looking much better. Or actually, one fun thing that we can do here is if I were to change this around. And I don't want to confuse you or blow your mind too much here. But if I were to put Owen back picture in picture, I can change his background to transparent. And guess what we're going to do? Look, I can go for this classic crop here. And if I move over slightly, guess what I'm going to do with Owen? We're going to bring him up in size like that. And now, I can bring Owen into the room with me. Hi, how are you doing? Now, you've got to look the right way. So, some great things that we can do here. You know, so you don't actually need to be in the same room. You could co-host with somebody. Now, what a lot of fun you can have with that. Or you could just change the background around to whatever you want. So, I'm going to come back out of this picture in picture. And we'll put Owen back on his beach. Actually, no, it's going to be too distracting. Let's put you back in a nice home office. There you go. Okay, so now I'm on with my guest. We can change around between these views. And again, we're not actually using scenes. We're working completely in one scene. And I'm just using the controls up here. And if I want to go solo me, solo Owen, I'm cutting between the two of us like this. Do remember, though, that at the moment, when I'm moving around like this, it's not meaning that Owen is muted or I'm muted if I'm off camera. So, if I want to check out Owen's audio levels, I've got to just firstly look at my own sound levels, see where they're at. Typically, I have it. So, it's just touching into the yellow on there. And then when I bring Owen on, we're going to see what volume his is set to. And we can line it up accordingly. So, in comes Owen. Hi there, it's great to be on. And I can adjust his volume up like this. And that's how we organize that. Okay, if I want to mute Owen at any point, I can just click up here. And that's him muted. This is where if you're working in scenes, it can be really good because I can have it set so that on one scene, the guest is muted. The other place I can do it is down here. And I can mute my guest. And then on another scene, I can have him potentially, his microphones on and me muted. So, from Owen's side, not only does he get this simple layout that he's got, he can switch the little arrow up and down and it will change the feed. So, he's either looking at the camera feed coming through. Let me just demonstrate it by, we'll bring Owen on. So, he's either looking at this live feed, or he can just change that over and be looking just at himself on camera there. He also gets the ability on that window to be able to go into dark mode. And he gets the option to bring the chat up on the screen there as well. So, he can see all the conversation as it's going on. So, if Owen shares his screen now, let's see how that comes in from my end. He gets an option down there that says share your screen and he chooses which part of it he wants. And here we go. So, it's coming down here at the bottom. I can either choose to solo this. So, it sees it as another camera source, another interviewee in a sense. And if we hit solo, then it'll just be the desktop. Let's have a look at that. There it comes. We are on the screen now. If I just jump back a minute and we bring it in with PIP, then we get to choose down here. So, Owen's coming in first. Let's just turn the transparent bit off and we'll leave Owen up there. So, I could have Owen, if he were talking about this page that he's working through here, I can do as normal and set this picture in picture up and move him around on the screen wherever we want. Or what I like is actually if I go back to this wide view, look, I can click on myself down here as well. And now when I go back to picture in picture, this little icon down here, Owen and I are both sitting in this little picture in picture. I think that's a great way to work through that we can keep the conversation going. I haven't totally handed over to my guest. There might be a time when I want to, but it just allows us to chat while he's working away and doing a screen recording. Just scroll that window. Let's just see what you're doing there. So, this is Owen on our website here. And yeah, as he's going through, he could be talking through this page that he's looking at or demonstrating something. And we can just be positioned wherever we like. In fact, we can do this tall view as well, which can look quite nice. And that puts us kind of on top of each other like this. All right. So, I think that's a great way to work this. Thank you, Owen. Let's turn off the, I can just close off the screen share from here. And that puts us back in this view. And again, let's turn off. You might get a little bit lost in this. We turn off this picture in picture and now we're back side by side. And if I decide I want to be back over there on the left, I can click the add left and it's just moved us back over. Now, there might be a time as well. I've showed you how in the camera effects we can do the green screen, but there might also be times when you want to just change around this zoom on here. So, I could zoom in on my guest or not really back them off. But if you found that your guest was sitting off or they were down low and you wanted to just line it up so you look very similar, you can do the pan and zoom on here. I can adjust things like the brightness on here if I want to. Yeah. All different effects that we can do. Obviously, in this, I'm only affecting Owen rather than the photo that he's got behind on the green screen. But yeah, lots of controls. And I could mirror that if I wanted to as well. Probably turn him upside down as well, actually. But yeah. So, yeah, lots of things we can do there playing around with his camera. I've got full control. I really am in, you know, I am producing the show from this end. And I think that is super cool. If you wanted to bring your guest on, maybe you actually don't want to be the talent on here. Maybe you're at a church and your pastor wants to come on and you're not actually expecting to get on camera. You know, I can just bring him on solo like this. I have complete control over what's going on. I could make slides. I could make notes come up over the front of him. And I don't actually have to be in it myself. So super powerful. So we did briefly mention titles earlier. And as I say, I can bring these titles on and then from here. So if I hit the edit button up there, that's just purely changing the name. But if I come down here, let me move that switcher out of the way. I can hit the edit button here. And so I can either leave it as fixed position or I can set it to fly in. And I've got complete control over all of these fonts that are in here. And you can import fonts as well if you want to. I could decide to have the background on or off. Totally brand this how I want. So now when I, I've just set mine to fly in. So look what it does when I choose that to come on. There we go. It's going to slide in nicely like that. So titles. Now, so far, that's been everything that's designed for those who want to work on the fly. But for those of you who use scenes and I applaud you for doing so, you can set these scenes up ahead of time. So if I want to bring a border like this and then put my name in, I probably wouldn't have it sliding in. Let's just turn that effect off. We'll stay with a fixed position. So this is me. And then what I can do is go to my scene. Now, bearing in mind that I haven't set Owen up yet. So imagine Owen's not in here yet. He's not in my green room. And I can set up a new scene and say what camera do I want it to be? I want it to be guest one. And now what happens is when Owen is in my green room, I can assign him to guest one. And the placeholder that is allocated over here will now bring Owen in against it. So it allows me ahead of an interview, ahead of a live to get all this set up. So I'm going to assign Owen to guest one. And there you go. It's just brought him in to guest one. And we'll have his name on there as well. So I've got this set up in advance with let's come back. That's me with this border on. And because when Owen comes in, and so far, imagine he hasn't come on to the live yet. I can bring him in partway through the live even. And as long as I know that I'm allocating him to guest one, I could have his name ready waiting. Or the fact that I've got this, it's bringing that feed of his name in. Now, if I go to number two, again, I've preset this in advance to say me on the left, guest one on the right. So hopefully what should happen now is it's going to populate Owen and drop him into that second window. And there it does. And again, I'm going to turn both of our names on this one. And then potentially, if there were a third guest, they would be coming in over there. So I've allocated in this scene here, it says guest two is in that window. So if now somebody joined us on the live, I would say assign to guest two and instantly they appear over there. Now, I do just want to point out that these are frames that I've made that sit over the front of this. That's how they would come in normally. But that was why we might want to play around with this and create some scenes ahead of time. So again, let's take that overlay off from that one. That's how Owen would normally come in. But again, it just gives me the opportunity to work through this and say, right, okay, so I know I'm on here. And on this one, I can mute my interviewee. So I can have my guest muted over here. When I go to that scene, then I mute myself and I unmute them. And then when I'm on this scene, we're both unmuted. It just gives us a lot of flexibility. And I can cut between these scenes quite easily or be using a stream deck or something like that. Yeah, so different ways that you can come at this. So as you've seen, we can return the guest to the green room at any time by either just clicking solo on my own one. And then if I want to get rid of them all together and say thank you and bye, all I've got to do is hit this red button here and they're gone. So goodbye, Owen. Thank you very much for being on with us. And he's gone. Okay, so I figured we ought to actually try going live with this. I'm not going out to an audience. I'm just using my personal profile. I'm going just on my timeline to myself. Rachel's got my phone, so he's going to come in with some comments. So I can hit go live over here and I can bring Owen on an interview with me. And then as we start getting comments, I'm going to see them coming up in my feed at the side of here. And then we're also recording Owen's screen. So we're going to be able to have a look and see how he's getting the chat come through there as well. So here we go. Look, it's Adrian that's come on. Hey, hey, Adrian. We can bring the chat onto the screen here. We can do all the things that you would do normally. And Owen is seeing not only this feed come through, where he can see that I've brought a comment on, but he can see that chat coming in down the side there. So yeah, this is how this works. Thank you very much, Rachel. This is how this works, guys. This is what it would be like in live. I could take Owen in and out. I can cut back to me. Remember that I would need to mute him. So it would make sense really to work in scenes so that I could cut between and I can say, right, so this is me in this scene. And my interviewee, my guest is muted when I'm on this one. Owen's on there. Actually, it doesn't matter in this recording. And I'm muted. And then remember when we come back side by side and if I want to bring that nice little frame in there, we can do that and come on. All right. So there we go. Lots of cool things going on here. I just wanted you to see that quickly what it's like live. I'm going to finish that one. Thank you, Rachel, for helping us. And we're back. Alternatively, he can click to leave from his end. So that's probably as much as you need to know. It's pretty sweet, right? One thing that I haven't mentioned is the time allowance. And in order to give us the best quality possible, Ecamm are using a premium service to bring the guests in. And it obviously comes with a cost. So if you're on the standard plan, you're going to get two hours of interview time that you can have a chance to have a play with it. And you also get those two hours if you're on a 14-day free trial. If you like it, which you're going to, if you want to do interviews, then you can upgrade to pro. And that gives you either 250 hours a year if you pay annually or 20 hours a month if you pay monthly. I feel that that's extremely generous and will be more than most of you need. I've been asked what happens if I run out of time. Don't worry. Right at the top there, as you can see, is a countdown of how many hours you've still got remaining. So at any point, you can just click and upgrade your plan to add some more time to it if need be. I think the Ecamm team have done an amazing job of this. And the guests that I've spoken to have found it very simple and easy as an interface. And the fact that they can see the whole show going on and the chat sitting at the side there is just perfect. Now, I'd love to hear what you think to this. Let us know in the comments and fire away if you've got any questions. And I look forward to seeing you in one of the other videos in this playlist.