Welcome to Podcast Answers, the show that I help you start and grow your podcast answering
any podcasting questions along the way. And that's right today we are doing that. We're
talking about podcasting because podcasting excites me.
If you can't tell podcasting excites me because you can get your message out there. Any single
person can get their message out there podcasting and it's relatively cheap. Back in the day,
you used to have to have a radio license. You have to use to have to be employed by a radio station
or do the pirate radio, but that's a whole different thing. But now you don't have to
do that anymore because you can do that with podcasting relatively simple, relatively cheap.
And now there is a new way to bring guests onto your show. So back in the day when I started,
I started podcasting back in 2007. And guess what? That was a long time ago.
And to bring guests on, we had to do really crappy telephone systems where it sounded like they were
in a bathroom and a hall. And it was sounded like they were on the telephone because they were.
And then throughout the years, thing of have progressed and my
suggestion now on how to bring guests in has changed. And so previously I had talked to you,
there has been an episode on this show and I'll link to it in the show notes. So if you just tap
away from where you're at right now, you can get into that. And you can see the show notes
for this episode where I will be talking about the how I will have linked the episode that I talked
about show notes on it, show notes on how to bring guests on. There we go. Can't get my words out
today. It's a little bit warm today in Indiana where I'm at. So that's the way it works is
before I had this other this other way to do it. And I still do that. So I use an application called
E cam live and it is a Mac only application. So sorry, Windows users, if you're a Windows user,
this does not apply to you. But this software called E cam live is the software that I use
to produce all of my streaming videos, all of my the way that I do everything. And so
it allows me to bring cameras in. And one of the cool things about it is it allows you to bring
guests in. They have what's called a guest mode. And with the guest mode on E cam, and that's not
actually what we're talking about today, because we're gonna be talking about zoom. But when I
first started this whole podcasting thing in the recent years, I had brought on my guests via zoom.
But I had to basically screen scrape that meaning that I had a screen share in my software production
that I was using OBS at the time, which is free and it's a cross platform. So it works well.
But you get what you pay for. And so I didn't like the support that I had with with OBS. So
I moved to E cam. And E cam allows you to have a link. So they give you a web URL. If you're on the
paid on the pro plan, sorry, the pro plan gives you this this link. And you can send it to your
guests and they can open it up in their browser and they can essentially just give their browser
access to their camera and they can see your show. And it works. It works. I've done this for
several years now. This is I'm on the season two of this episode, but on this podcast,
but on my other podcast, I was, I'm on season six. So I've been doing this for quite a while.
And, and it works, but it's something new for the guests to learn because they,
they're not necessarily used to it unless they've been on live with an E cam broadcast before.
It doesn't, it works, but it's just not that intuitive. So what E cam has done is they have
come up with an integration with zoom. And so the zoom client is actually now built in
to E cam. And let me warn you, if you're just listening to this as a podcast, you may actually
want to catch the YouTube replay because I'm going to show you some things on this integration
that are just going to be really, really hard to describe in an audio podcast. So I hope that you
will make the move and jump over to the YouTube replay if you want to see the integration on this.
But so let's start with this. So this right here is the mope. That's not right there. That's the
wrong screen that I just shared, but that's okay. This right here is the E cam interface.
And the way that it works now is zoom is built in. And so you have a whole copy of zoom right here
in E cam. And this window right here on this window, and I'll do my best to describe it for
our audio listeners, but this window right here allows you to click a new meeting, just like you
would if you were a, you know, if you were in the regular zoom client, just create a meeting,
just go live, just go to the meeting right now. You can join by an ID or link. So if it's somebody
else's meeting, you can join it. Or you can click on scheduled events. And so essentially, let me
talk a little bit about the way that this would work. So you can, you can just have a zoom meeting
that you're basically presenting into. So if you want to have a small audience and just want
to present into a zoom meeting, you can do that because all of your video from E cam comes into
zoom. And it allows you to see that and you could do that before because he cam has a is a virtual
camera has a virtual, a virtual camera. So in other words, anything that can take a camera
can take your, your E cam production and bring it into so you can always do that with zoom,
you could always present into zoom. The nice thing now about it, though, is if you comment,
if someone comments in zoom, those comments show up in your comments area for E cam.
And when they show up in E cam, you can just bring them right on screen. So if anyone comments in
zoom, you can bring their comment right up on screen. And you couldn't do that before,
before this integration. And so now you have this integration where I will go ahead and show you
exactly what happens with this. But the other way to use it is to bring your guests from zoom
into your E cam production as video. So whether that's being presenting something in zoom or
presenting something on a live stream that shows up and you can bring your zoom guests with there
is high quality audio, because you can turn the original sound for musicians on, you can bring
them in video into your production. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and start a
meeting. And you'll see exactly what happens. I'm clicking start meeting right now on that.
And you'll get the familiar thing that you normally see zoom workplace, it's connecting.
So what happens then is you end up having a zoom meeting, and I'm actually going to switch right
right now you're seeing my whole production and you're seeing the the background, but I'm going
to actually switch it over to a different camera. That way you can see me. So in other words,
it's just like a zoom meeting. This is the zoom meeting that you're used to you have participants
panel that is off my screen right now. The participants panel, you have a chat panel
that is right off screen, all the stuff that you're normally used to in zoom shows up in
here because this is a copy of zoom, this is a copy of zoom. So what you saw there is there
is a participant showing up Chester, which is actually just my other machine. And I have him
in a waiting room. So if I bring him in, and admit him into this call, you now see just like your
normal zoom meeting, you have me, you have Chester, and that works great. So I'm actually going to go
ahead and minimize this zoom window, because I want to mostly focus on E cam right now because
E cam is what I'm chatting with here. So I'm gonna hide the meeting. So now, in E cam, in the zoom
panel in E cam, so this is just a regular E cam window, you see Chester's name here.
And you'll see all of the people that join their zoom meeting here.
If I click Add, a couple things are going to happen because zoom has to capture use a
capture mode, either live streaming or recording, it's going to notify the attendees that this
meeting is being live streamed. Now, even if you're not live streaming, this is important.
Even if you're not being live streamed right now, even if you're actually not live streaming the
call, and you're just on a zoom meeting, it's going to tell them that or it's going to tell
them it's going to be recorded or it is being recorded. Now, it's up to you how you want to
notify your audience, there's some technical thing differences and why you would want to do
one or the other, I usually use it, leave it on live streaming capture mode, because it's easier,
it does a banner, it doesn't automatically notify everybody when they join in the call.
But so now what you can see is I actually have a video of Chester. And if I say assigned to a
placeholder, I'm going to give them guest one. And then what I can do what I'm sorry,
I realized you were not seeing that I can click on the three dots here and I can assign them to
a placeholder guest one. Now what I can do is go to my camera switcher and assign him guest one,
assign that plant to that guest placeholder to camera one. And now when I go into my scene, it
just shows up like another camera and you can see you can see that it that it shows up like another
camera in here. And so you can bring your guests in via zoom because they're familiar with zoom.
Right? Your guests are familiar with zoom because they're used to it. You know, during that whole
global thing that we had, where everyone stayed at home. Everybody was on zoom. So everybody knows
zoom, right? So, again, now I have them in my production, they're showing up this is could be
anybody it's a it's a good quality video. But the one thing you can do, let's say that they're off
center or their cameras a little colored, you can use the same camera effects that you can in a cam
and adjust their camera. So if you wanted to pan and zoom, you could pan and zoom around a little
bit in their camera. If they weren't quite the same, you can bring their brightness up or down,
you can bring the temperature up or down the gamma up or down, you know, whatever you wanted to do
to adjust if they had a green screen behind them. You could add a an actual green screen in here.
You can mirror their video, you can make it black and white, you can do all sorts of stuff,
just like you can with any other camera in a cam. So that's the great thing. Again,
any other camera and he cam like you can, you can do the same things with the zoom guests.
And the cool thing about this is just like in zoom, I'm sorry, just like in normal cam
in the recording window, you have the option to do isolated video.
So as you can see, I can record my camera isolated video. But I can also include the interview guests
and zoom guests as isolated video and I can choose what audio I want on there right now I have it as
the program audio. But if I want to adjust their audio in there, I could say just the guest audio
and have a completely isolated track of just the guests audio. So that's really, really, really
cool. So again, this is one of the things that I think as as podcasters, it's a good way to bring
your guests on. And so I've been thinking a lot about how to use this. And again, you could bring
your guests in but you could also do like a behind the scenes for your paying members. Like if you
have a support for a your podcast, if you're having people that can pay you for your content
creation that you're making, you can easily bring them in because again, all of this is a zoom
meeting. And so you could easily just have everybody show up in here. And you can set any
of the settings that you normally would. So if you go into participants in the zoom meeting,
you can say, mute everybody on entry and don't let them unmute. And so when everybody comes into the
meeting, they dial in, they're going to be on mute. And then you can ask people to unmute. So
let's say you wanted to bring Chester in as a guest. What I would do is I would just go in here,
and I would ask him to unmute, he's actually not connected to the audio right now, but I could just
ask him to unmute. So, so, so you could have 35 people in there, all listening and kind of getting
behind the scenes. But then if they wanted to ask a question, you can easily bring them on,
because it would be super easy to just, when they raise their hand, you'll see them in this
zoom window, where all of the guests show up. And if they raise their hand, it shows up in there
as a hand raised. So sorry, I'm trying to mess with my other zoom meeting.
So if I raise my hand on the other zoom,
you see it in my zoom window. Oops, I keep clicking back and forth.
But so the nice thing about that is you can see that they have their hands raised. And so you
can go in there and say, Okay, if your hand is raised, I'm going to mute you and bring you on,
assign you to a camera and bring you on. And then you just have you have your guests in here,
you're paying supporters that want to ask questions can come right into zoom,
right into your production right into your recording right into your podcast. And it
and the thing about the cam guys is you don't have to live stream, you can just audio record,
or you can just record with it and then have the video file for later. You don't even have to do
anything with the video file. He can gives you audio of the production. It gives you audio,
isolated audio tracks of all of the guests and hosts and things. So you have all these things
you can produce. It is really, really cool. And so, so what what I'm finding here is, is that
he cam is just really leveled up the game to make bringing your guests on super, super simple.
Because again, zoom is something that people know. Zoom is something that people have done before
they know they know how to get into it. They know how to do it. They know what to expect.
So I would say definitely try it out. If you're going to if you're going to try this, this is on
the the pro plan of E cam. And if you've not checked out E cam, you can go to podcastanswers.com/ecam
and and get a trial of it. And yes, that is an affiliate link. But I really, really,
really, truly, truly believe that E cam is the best software for producing live video and recorded
video because it's just so simple to have all of your scenes set up and just being able to go
through them and being able to share and it doesn't have to be in like a window like this.
You can you can just bring them on to like a full camera like this. You can just it doesn't have to
be anything fancy. But it can be. It can be and you can bring in comments and you can bring in
guests. Now the one I would say definitely go ahead and check it out. Make sure that it's going
to work for you. So if you're if you're thinking about doing this, get a few friends together,
do a zoom call, kind of play with it and see how it is bringing guests into zoom.
The nice thing about the nice thing about using the zoom integration is again, it's easy for
people because they're used to doing it. But not only that, but they're there. You can just do it
and play around and there's no time limit. So on on the guest interview mode for E cam,
there is a time limit on it. So if you are a pro member, you get a certain amount of minutes.
And if you're I mean, I remember if you pay monthly, you get a certain amount. If you pay
yearly, you get a certain amount. And so there's a certain amount. So 250 hours, if you're playing
yearly is what you get. And so I mean, yes, that's a lot. You're probably not going to go over 250
hours of guest recording, but you may. So the nice thing about zoom though, is you're not limited,
if especially if you have now there is any limits on your zoom plan are gonna limit the quality that
you can get in interior cam. So if you're on a free zoom plan, it does work, you are able to
bring in your zoom guests, but you're limited to that 45 minutes. So your interview would have to
be 45 minutes or less. And you don't get high definition, high definition 720 or 1080 p video
being brought in because they limit that. If you are on the pro plan, you can email zoom,
that's the paid plan. You can email zoom and ask them to bring high definition into your
account. Once they've done that, you can go into your settings and enable it. But on a pro plan,
it's only 720. It's not 1080. But in the EKM interview mode, that's only 720 also.
So you still get great video with it. It really does. You still get great video.
If you have a business plan, which is a little bit harder to acquire, because it requires 10
licenses, 10 seats to have, and it's more expensive, you can request to have up to 1080p.
So there's, there's your limitations. The other limitation is with, with the interview mode,
the normal interview mode in EKM, you can bring up to 10 guests in, in the zoom, you can bring up to
eight guests in now, that may be confusing. That does not limit your meeting to only 10 guests.
Really, it does not limit your meeting to only 10 guests. You can have 100 in there,
if that's what your account actually actually has, is you can, you can have 100 in there.
So really, again, it's not limited. The limit is bringing the video on. And so what that does is
you could again, if you have 100 people in here, they're going to show up in this EKM window.
With all of your guests, you won't see their video, you'll only see the one video that you've
brought on, but it's easy to switch that out. So if you have eight guests on, it won't let you add
any more. But let's say you want to add something, the ninth person, the ninth person is actually
gonna make a comment, you could drop one of your eight people. And again, after a few people,
it's really hard to have a conversation that makes sense with that many people.
So what you can easily do is click on the three dots and say remove from cameras. And as soon as
you do that, you can add a different person in. So once you reach your limitation, so it's again,
only limitation for active people in at one time. But that is a lot of people. And so then you can
actually to like if you had a guest that asked a question, call in and ask a question once they
got on, you could actually just kick them right off, click here, click the dots, say remove from
zoom meeting, and they're removed from the meeting, and they are gone. So guys, definitely check this
out. Really, podcastanswers.com/ecamm. And again, I'm a huge believer in this. It's what I've been
the software is what I've been using for several years now. I think this I'm on my third year using
EKM. And it's just really cool because you can do live production live videos, super simple.
That makes it super professional. And now you can bring in guests via zoom.
And zoom is something that everybody knows. And so it makes it really easy to just have
a guest on bring your guest on to say, "Hey, join this zoom meeting."
And they're on. They're on your production. So guys, definitely check that out. And if you
haven't yet, if you have any questions about this or any of the else podcasting like I do
consulting one-on-one consulting for podcasting, and I love to help people get their podcast
started. I love to edit podcasts for people. If you have any podcasting needs at all,
feel free to contact me and you can do that at podcastanswers.com/contact. And I would love to
do a one-on-one meeting with you. I'd love to help you get your podcast up and growing.
So guys, with that, have a safe week. Happy podcasting and keep it up.
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