Hey everyone and welcome to the Dan Show. We've got a bunch of great topics for you today.
We're going to go through the whole set here. We're going to go through VMIX,
cameras, everything today. We're also going to talk about
merch messages. We're going to talk a little bit about merch messages, how they work,
some record stats, and other interesting stuff about them.
Yeah, we've got a lot to cover today, so let's get into it.
All right, so we're going to start off by talking about the set here. We've got
this lovely table done by Nick Heavy, Callanan in Logistics. It's got some integrated lighting,
it's got everything that we need right here on the table. So I guess the first thing that we
got here is our laptops. They are all connected via HDMI. They go all the way back to the computer.
I get a lot of questions about the mic arms. I don't know the exact brand of them,
but I do know that they're from wheelchairs. So if you have a wheelchair or something like that,
and you need to hold something next to your mouth or like have an availability there,
this kind of clicks on, it's rotatable, it's got this nice little locking plug there,
and it's flexible and they're quite strong. So they're more non-traditional, they're kind of
non-standard, but they're really kind of nice for a nice solid mounting. They do have the tendency
to droop a little bit. These mics are very heavy, but that's probably about it for the mic stands.
They come in different kind of girths, I guess, and they've got a standard thread on the end,
and then this like ball detent. You can't rotate them, but you can pull them up if I can do this.
There we go. So you can see on the mounting attachment here there's a bunch of like individual
holes for these ball detents on the bottom. So you can kind of get them set in, and then they don't
rotate, and then they click in really nice like that. Our microphones here are the Electrovoice
RE20s. So these have less of a near field effect. So when you're getting close to it,
or you're kind of farther away, the sound doesn't change too much. It's a bit of a cross-up between
the SM7B and the RE20, and SM7B is basically just like a different brand of the SM57,
so these are kind of a bit nicer. Yeah, they're both a dynamic microphone, so they've got a little bit
of a lower output than something like a condenser. They don't pick up so much room noise or any
crosstalk between the two guys. Headphones here are the ATH M50X by Audio Technica.
They're kind of, they're okay, they're okay. They get a little bit tiring after you've been
wearing them for like five hours, but otherwise they sound fine, and the monitoring's like not too
bad. Yeah, a pair of stream decks here, so this is where Linus and Luke control everything. We'll
kind of go through what the buttons do a little bit later when we move into VMIX completely.
The lighting here on the table is RGB, and it's completely controlled over Bluetooth with an
iPad app. It's got a whole bunch of different modes. We can go like RGB puke, take up the brightness,
and we do that. There we go. Yeah, so they're pretty, they're pretty intense. We can increase
the speed too. There we go. That's, that's a WAN Show. I wish we did it all like this. Yeah,
that's great. Oh wow, that's, that's bright. Turn that down. Right, so we used to also use the iPad
to control a couple of Titan tubes that we had at the back, but they were kind of dark. If you look
at like last year or even like a few months ago before I installed these, the red and blue were
kind of dim. So we use these new, they're really bright. These are like outdoor, I guess 80 watt
or something like that rated LED lights, RGB, that we, I think we bought them for the whale land,
and I stole a couple, well I stole four to throw here. Due to the power outage we had,
I guess back in December everything now has jackeries supporting it. So there's a jackery just
for these back lights, and there's also a jackery up there for the china ball and aperture. This
background is eventually going to get replaced with some new products that we're developing. I'm
not entirely sure I'm supposed to talk about them, but you'll see that. Obviously they're
covered in wrinkles. I'm so sorry. We'll get that fixed eventually. Just the fabric is really
difficult to kind of, because it's foam, so it doesn't sit particularly well. What else we got?
We got our secret Labs chairs. This is something that we don't get to show off too often just
because they never use the side cameras. We've got a whole bunch of like weird set deck things
over here. These are some Philips Hue LED bulbs, which are controlled with a little controller
on the desk there. We'll go through. Wow, these look like some old school bulbs. Yeah, they've
kind of had a big resurgence with these like more aesthetic led things instead of just like
providing light. They provide a bit of ambience and set deck, that sort of thing. Behind we have
our halo lights. They're wasps. They're kind of more just stuff we had lying around. Wanshoe gets
the stuff that we have lying around, unfortunately. Let's dump under the desk and I'll show you the
sort of cable management. Oh wow. It's better than it was, but it's still
not as great as I think it could be. I've got this really nice eight-channel snake by Mogomi.
So this is just basically a single eight channels that go directly back to the computer.
Oh, cameras, cameras, cameras. These are the C200. Again, the three of these were just ones that
we had laying around. They're probably a little bit overkill for like a podcast set. I think the
bodies of these are like a few thousand dollars, but they're not quite as intense as some of our
Sony products that we have. Yes, we've got three of those. These are just kind of to prevent a
little bit of extra spill from the China Ball. They connect via HDMI back to the computer,
and I think that's about everything we've got here. We've got a grid up here that needs to be
a little bit more finished off, but that'll allow us to mount a whole bunch more stuff if we ever need
to. And on the ceiling, I guess we've got those Elgato sound panels, which don't really do much
in this room, unfortunately. Yeah, we've got Linus's head. This is all like the extra stuff that
we have. And this is my office, I guess. So I've got my stream decks. This is our audio system,
computers here. Don't look at the cable management under the desk. No. It was supposed to be some
extra work where we routed a whole bunch of cables through this fake wall, and unfortunately,
that didn't end up happening. So yeah, it's just going to sit down there and be ignored for as
long as we can. Here's the controller for the Phillips Hue. You just turn them on and off,
and they kind of set. However, they were before, which is useful. Coming and turning everything
on is basically push a couple buttons, and it's all done. This is my microphone, so it's similar
to those, but I have my inline preamp here. Because these are a dynamic microphone, the
output of them is a lot lower than something like a condenser. And so we can use an inline
preamp to bump that level up without introducing a whole bunch of noise. They're very, very similar
to a cloudlifter, but I think they're about half the cost. And they're also way smaller,
and so much so that you can kind of have it attached to your mic directly instead of having this
big box kind of somewhere else and having to use two cables. The two for the WANTA set are hidden
underneath, so we are using those kind of two cables. So go snake, inline preamp, and then
directly into the microphone. You can't use them with condensers because they need phantom power
48 volts to actually function. Okay, so our microphones come into the audio rack. Linus and
Luke go into this Apex Compeller, and what this is is it's an automatic gain leveling system.
So unlike a traditional gain control system, this one, if there's silence, it doesn't continue to
bring the level up to like incredible high volumes, and then they start talking and then it ducks,
so the noise floor stays where it needs to be. There's basically a gate on the voltage control
to amplifier that controls the level of the gain, and it's really, really fast because it's pretty
much completely analog. There's no plugins or anything you need. It's just kind of two channel
in, two channel out. That allows me to kind of prevent Linus from clipping because sometimes
he screams, and when we're about halfway through the WAN Show and people are tired, you know,
you're not on that extreme on style of existing that he kind of maybe is at the right at the
start of the show. Yeah, so that's two channels. So I've got Linus and Luke here. Conrad, if you
want to go tap one of the mics, maybe we can see it like functioning. There you go. So we've got our
input here, and we can sort of switch between that, and then also the gain reduction. So you can see
it's kind of holding that, and there's like an attack and delay and release,
and then you can also sort of adjust how much silence is required for that noise gate to trigger,
and then if you stop, you can see that has popped on, and now it's holding that amount of gain
reduction where it was at the last step, so that noise floor doesn't come up and go crazy,
and then that loops in through the rest of this rack. We've got this patch bay here,
and so all of our inputs and outputs are kind of normal together, so if I do have to make a change,
I can come in and patch it, but most of the time it just stays completely static.
We've got a bit of a map here at the top, so our microphone ties come in through the top left here,
and then they are completely brought through into the octopree here at the bottom.
So the microphones are in here, one through eight, and then the ties back down to the octopree
are underneath them, right, so they're always connected together. It's like a physical patch.
This is our octopree, so this is our, I'm using this as a preamp and inline compressor,
so the microphone comes through into the octopree, and then it's looped out
into the Apex, right, because we have to provide 48 volt phantom power to the inline preamps,
so it comes in through the octopree, out into the Apex for processing, and then it comes back
into the Scarlet, which is our interface, and then we've got some lineouts here,
which go into our headphone splitter, so our four channels of lineout
go into our headphone splitter, so I can have two mixes, so we have our main mix,
Luke Linus, and myself over here on channel eight, and then if I need to monitor directly
Vmix or the output to stream, I can simply hit one button, and now I'm on my submix,
which I can control completely digitally, and like route what I need to, so if we have a guest,
and I need to monitor that, but I don't want it in Linus and Luke's headphone mix,
because there's a whole bunch of delay. Channel A is pretty much just direct mic monitoring,
so there's no latency whatsoever, otherwise it makes it really difficult to like talk.
Yeah, so the headphone outputs are this side, and then they go to the headphone extensions,
which go to the table and also my side here on the floor, so that's kind of the audio thing.
These two are connected via ADAT, which is optical, so this can accept like eight
additional channels. Let's have a look at the computer next, I guess.
So focus right gives you control panel, so you can see our eight channels of ADAT here,
which are the those are the octopre inputs, and then analog one, two are the inputs from the
compiler, so I don't necessarily have to use the compiler, it's digitally routed into the chain
via analog, you know, and then my playback one through ten are at the bottom here, so
I have two submixes, monitor outputs one, two go to their headphone mixes, and then line output
three, four goes to the submix in the headphone splitter, and so if I need to adjust my submix
here, I can like mute different sections, or I can mute my microphones, all the microphones are
muted, and so I'm just kind of monitoring my playback that way, so that's our end through the
computer. After the focus right, it then goes into this really awesome little program called
ASIO LINK PRO. ASIO is an audio transport protocol that's like extremely low latency,
it does require some level of exclusivity, and so because we use three or four different programs,
I don't want them to take exclusive control over the focus right, so we use ASIO LINK PRO as like
a middleman, so ASIO gets full exclusivity, and then it can route it wherever it needs to be in
through like digital data channels, it's kind of like voice meter or voice meter banana, but like
a little bit more free in how you want to route it, so my ASIO routing layer is kind of a bit
more complicated, ASIO has like basically four microphone inputs, if you want to think about
it that way, or destinations that I can send to, so Reaper here, the output one, two is set to one
of the ASIO outputs, and so that kind of comes in here, one, two, which then I can route somewhere
else, and then the ones along the bottom are the outmixes, which because it's hooked into the
focus right are kind of like the focus right line outputs, this is where it gets really complicated,
I'm so sorry, and my submix B, I have the output from Reaper sending through main mix one, two,
up here into output three, four, and then that also goes into avid mix pros for
eight channel outputs, one, two, and one, two, probably just because I don't really use them,
I just, it's another destination they can go, if say I wanted to send it to a remote guest,
I can use one of these as a speaker destination, so I can set my microphone input on like,
say discord or something like that, into output one, two, so they can hear what I can hear on three,
four, and also hear what I'm outputting at the computer at the top of one, two, right, so it's
kind of, it's one destination, but it's also two destinations, and that's what ASIO link pro lets
me do, so this lineup here is my direct microphone inputs, and what I can do is I can send them into
the ASIO host mix, so now we're going from the Scarlet, which is here, into ASIO's kind of mic
inputs, so in Reaper, like digital inputs seven and eight would be digital input seven and eight
here, so I'm coming in analog one, two from the compiler, so a compiler to the Scarlet in analog
one, two, and then I'm routing one and two over to seven and eight, so that's now my
ASIO link microphone inputs, and so input seven and eight are arriving here, digital 10 is going
to be from the Octopree, which is my microphone, and that's just directly brought down, because it's
an ADAT input, it's like actually input 20, which can get really confusing when I'm like, whoa,
what is it, I don't know, I have the Avid Pro speaker out just basically directly routed all the way
down, so Reaper's output on channel one, two goes directly to playback one, two, I have that muted
in the Amex for Linus and Luke, but it's available for me to listen to if I want to in sort of
playback one, two, okay, so we've gone from analog into the Focusrite, so the computer in Focusrite
control, and then we're going from the Scarlet over ASIO into ASIO Link Pro, and then that goes
into Reaper, so Reaper kind of just has four channels at the moment, you can see here we've
got, this will be Linus's mic, we've got Luke's mic, and then we've got my mic over here, the
producer mic, and those are kind of just like raw from the computer, so analog one, two from the
Compeller, all of those go to our main channel, which has an output to one, two, which then goes
into Vmix, this has a bunch of different effects on it, so we'll come over here, I don't know if you
can see that, okay, so my chain is basically a master chain rather than doing any individual
tweaking, we start with a compressor, and then we have a slightly different compressor, this is just
some more free plugins, then we have this like trail dynamic system as well, so I didn't want to use
a gate because it can be a little bit harsh and a little bit difficult to like control the attack
timing, especially when you have two people talking over each other and some strange pauses,
and I wanted to keep the noise floor down as much as possible, so the nice thing about
Reaper's built-in like dynamic thing is you can set a custom roll-off, so as people stop talking,
it doesn't make it necessarily silent, but it just makes it a little bit quieter,
so when that noise floor comes up, and you can kind of hear more of the room tone, it's not as
offensive, right, and it's got a bit of decay you can see on there, and then we just basically go
into a limiter, so it keeps everything at negative one, which is kind of like your main standard,
I would like to implement some more real-time mastering stuff, or at least balance the levels
to kind of master for Spotify and the rest of the platforms in real-time, the problem with doing
like a live thing like this without writing faders or doing a proper master is the levels don't
really match, so Spotify maybe our podcast is a lot quieter than the other ones, most platforms
like YouTube and Spotify and all of those like iTunes music and that sort of thing have a mastering
standard of negative one decibels full-scale and then negative 14 loudness units full-scale
LUFS, which is kind of a measure over time about how loud an entire piece is, if you want to think
about it that way, so that'll happen sometime, another Future Dan problem. Okay, so now we're in
oh yeah, the bleep button as well, so there's another channel here which is the bleep sound,
that's channel four, which plays constantly, so it's constantly playing that bleep tone
in the background, but it's muted, so we'll talk about how that functions a little bit later,
and finally we're into Vmix here, the nice thing about doing it this way is
when we're in Vmix we only have two channels of audio that come in, so we don't have to do any
processing and we don't have to do any processing in Vmix, we don't have to worry about adding
plugins, we don't have to worry about you know making sure the levels are right because that's
all handle in Reaper and then we just send in our final mix, so it's kind of like a pre-mix and then
we have our final output, Vmix is nice because it allows for a secondary routing channel if we go
audio outputs, so my headphone output is speakers 03, which is what you can kind of see over here
on 34, so for me I have basically three choices for routing, I can monitor the direct microphone
inputs from Lucan Linus and myself, so no latency in hearing exactly what's being recorded,
my second choice is to monitor the direct output from Reaper, which allows me to make sure that my
plugins are working and then kind of all of that is just one output, and my third option is to
monitor what Vmix is outputting through that secondary headphone mix, and because I only have one mix
I have to use the second one here, so I just mute Reaper output and I can listen to Vmix's output
because you can see it adds a bit of latency there and so it becomes really difficult to like
monitor in real time if I'm just monitoring Vmix's output and then yeah I guess that's basically
the entire audio chain, is that simple enough for you? One of the reasons why it's so complicated
is the versatility, you know if we were just doing all of this in OBS or all of this in Vmix
internally, I wouldn't have the option to have so many places to monitor and for so many places
of like fine-tune adjustment or control, I mean this is pretty simple routing, it's just kind of
like two inputs into another two inputs into another two inputs, but it gives me a place
in the chain to like insert effects or like make modifications and the less plugins I can use, the
more the computer is stable and the more kind of fast and responsive it is and the more resources I
have to like deal with video processing or like actually doing the streaming because it's kind of
all one system, it's also nice having physical buttons like here so if Linus is a bit too loud
I can just tweak him down a bit, I haven't touched these in a long time, it's kind of
designed to be set and forget, so I don't have to be sitting here, somebody else who has very little
training can come down, they open Reaper, they open Vmix and then everything is good to go,
it's basically two programs and you're done, that's kind of the other reason why it's so
complicated in the back end to make it simple in the front end, you kind of have to go
more complicated to make it more simple, Vmix next I guess from the video side of things,
Vmix is pretty neat in that you can have like an obscene quantity of inputs, so in Vmix I have all
of these, so currently I think there's about 84, 84 simultaneous inputs and these are all handled
directly NVIDIA memory, so if I open up my task view here and see I'm running an RTX
A4000 which has 16 gigs of GPU memory, currently there's about four gigs of VRAM used in this
project when we were doing some more of the 4K stuff for Dennis's integrations,
it got up to like 10 or 11 gigs of VRAM and there wasn't like enough to do recording or
streaming at the same time so we're getting a bit of hiccups, like 4K MOV files uncompressed with
transparency, uses a lot of VRAM especially if they're held constantly, so if you're going to be
using Vmix it's really GPU intensive and unless your set is as complicated as this you probably
don't need an A4000, I used to run a 2080 Super, 2080 Super was my old card, this computer has an
i9 10, 980 XE which is a bunch of gibberish words, 36 core, completely absolutely unnecessary but it
runs 4 channel memory. Vmix is a fun beast, the nice thing about it is it has every single kind of
built-in function that you would need already in it, like you don't have to have any plugins that
might cause performance issues or crash, Vmix from the get go has always been focused on 100%
stability, so I have touch wood, I have never had a crash with Vmix and I've been using it for like
I guess nine years now and it's never it's never failed on me and I guess that's great even with
like hundreds of inputs, it supports a thousand inputs as well as a thousand simultaneous NDI
camera inputs which is nuts, I don't know who has the internet bandwidth to use that much but it's
pretty crazy, it can be a little bit difficult to get your head around how to structure a set like
this but it's also applicable to OBS, like you would do it, I would do it in the same way just to
kind of minimize work, so we kind of have our raw cams that come in here, so there's our raw cam from
the wide cam, we've got Linus's camera and then we've got Luke's camera, we've also got their laptops
and then Reaper audio and then merge message lower banner and then we have our first kind of like
combination, I want to keep this banner open all the time but I don't want to have to make
700 different versions of this with all my possible inputs right, so I want to have,
this is my broadcast image and then I want to be able to change things underneath it
which kind of makes everything easier down the road, so this has a few multi layers in it
so it's got a virtual mix which is kind of like another set of different cameras and then we have
the lower banner and then we have another browser source over here which we'll talk about a bit
later, so this is kind of our main thing and when I switch the cameras underneath, I'm switching
between wide Linus and Luke, the browser source and everything I've done to it stays right there,
that's kind of my favorite way to do it, this is done with a virtual camera mix,
so vMix allows for four sub stream mixes which can also all be output simultaneously,
so it's kind of obscenely powerful in that way, so the one that you're watching on stream is kind
of mix number one for video and then mix two and three can be either used for other things or
sent to other destinations, something that we wanted to plan or like play with would be multi
camera simultaneous streams to Floatplane, so you could pick which camera you wanted to watch
like live on Floatplane, I think that's been talked about a little bit, I don't know if that's
ever going to happen and so our our submix, what our buttons on the stream deck do here is they
actually change the input into mix two, they change the input into mix two
and then I use mix two in the camera only set so that I have one input into my kind of final
output, so it's this kind of live compositing, it's just the one but I can still change it
and it's a submix powering a final mix, so if I want to add something to the main output,
all I have to do is add another button to change it in the submix and then I don't have to touch
anything else, the other nice thing about using a submix is my color correction
is all done directly in the the final output, so instead of making a change say in the wide cam
right, I want to do color correction here, now I have to duplicate that color correction to this one
and this one but when you use submixes like this you can just apply color correction to like
every single camera simultaneously and then if you want to make a change it's in one place,
that's kind of the idea, make a change, you only have to do it once ever, it makes it faster,
I can do it live, I don't have to fuss about you know all that sort of stuff.
Ping is our kind of a software that we use to do like remote calls, so it's basically very
similar to Discord but the nice thing about Ping is you can get a direct link to your guest
as like a browser source and then we can add that directly to OBS or Vmix without having to like
screen record or screen capture, it's just you just throw it in there and it's great,
same with the audio, that's just basically that's another one in here, so our guest audio,
like you would set your speaker in Discord to one of these inputs like 3, 4 and then you can bring
that into Vmix by grabbing one of the digital outputs as well, the same thing you would kind of use
for voice meter or anything like that and then we have our pop-up banner, we've got our picture in
picture, so this is another thing that we can do is we can add our multi-view here of our like
camera thumbnail but then we can just move it somewhere else, so right it's down here in the
corner right, so that's our like complete submix there and then when we go to Linus's laptop the
whole main mix moves down there and I get rid of the banner because we don't need it and then I can
display their laptop there, so it's all extremely seamless when we go between the two and I made
it do an all zip thing because it's kind of fun right, then what else, what else we got, we've got
our output clock, yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of Wansho is always late, custom outputs, we've got our
intro, so if we go back to our main thing here, the intro is triggered with another shortcut here
but Conrad has implemented this really neat thing of browser sources which we'll talk about a bit
later, so if we roll our intro here, we've got play back there, you know we can still talk
over the intro if we want and then the WAN intro, let's see if it's over here, it has a timer
that counts down and then when the timer is finished it turns on a browser source which plays the
sponsors right, so the nice thing about vmix is you can do these like really advanced trigger
things with timers and you can trigger timers with other timers or like multiple timers simultaneously
if you want really advanced weird things to happen, so when I hit this it triggers a timer,
if I look at the triggers here, there we go, so on transition in it turns on the secondary overlay
so what it's actually doing is it's putting the intro video over top of the camera right, so it
doesn't like switch to it, it just places it over top and then what it'll do is it'll set the
countdown timer back to its start right, I want to play 18 seconds right, so it'll reset the countdown
to 18 seconds and start it playing and then when we leave it switches automatically back to our
or cam only and stops the countdown, now the countdown then has other triggers so when the
countdown finishes it then adds this as a secondary layer, so right we have these four
sub mixes for video production and in seven seconds five seconds something like that,
what this will do is it'll trigger this to turn on, there we go and then it'll trigger another
countdown timer to set the length of how long that stays on screen, how long it displays the
sponsors and another reason why we do this is because I can make a change of that really easily
if some guy from the business team comes down and is like we'd really like you to show the sponsors
for a little bit longer on screen, all I have to do is right click title editor settings and then
like well now it's four seconds right, set that to four seconds and now this
they'll display for four seconds right, so instead of having to reauthor like an entire video or
anything like that I can just change one setting and it's done immediately, one place one setting
adjusts everything that's kind of the whole goal of being fast and efficient, it used to be more
complicated because they would produce these pictures and then we would have I would have to
individually display them on screen for a set amount of time so it was like
five to six timers and the beautiful tool that Conrad's developed to simplify that even more,
the outro is cool and more complicated but we'll talk about that a bit later, what else we got,
we've got the integrations for Dennis, I can't show one of them unfortunately but we can talk
about a couple of the other ones, so these are triggered with this stream at deck and basically
I get a script and then I read along with Linus and just push the buttons in order,
the green one here indicates the next integration so we have integration one,
integration two and integration three, I can do 32 and if he screws up and gives me more I can have
a little couple extra ones on that and all they really do is just play a video that loops,
it's not very complicated, the first one has some individual triggers so when I push this it plays
the first music and when I hit my next integration it'll stop the music and play the next piece of
music so it's a little bit more simplified, it also allows us to have a camera over camera so we
can do those layer things and like have Linus say in the corner, Bran seemed to like to see Linus
this face, I have no idea why, that's the integrations they're not super weird and then when I go back
to cam only there's another trigger that stops all the music and like makes it completely finished.
We've got our banner here which is another browser source which is integrated directly
with merge messages so we kind of have three different sections that are that are merge messages
that aren't just merge messages, this browser source and then as well as our sponsor integrations
and then also the top down banner at the top and then also the outro but I think I will let
Conrad take it from here and talk to you about merge messages. All right so let's talk a little
bit about merge messages, I am Conrad a developer at Flowplain and merge messages is my Magnum Opus
so where does merge messages come from? At Flowplain we have this thing called creative day
and so what that is is the last Friday of every month every developer gets to work on whatever
they want, it has to be work related and it's supposed to be so you can learn new things and
so that's where merge messages came from was I wanted to learn web sockets, Shopify web hooks
and OBS browser sources, I had also just gotten access to GitHub Co-Pilot and I wanted to play
with that as well. I created merge messages initially in a day just using GitHub Co-Pilot
and I would write little comments and then get it to generate code so the original version of
merge messages is actually entirely AI written but it has since been completely refactored
so how does merge messages work? So when an order is placed on Shopify in the cart stage of the
checkout you have a form that you can opt into and you can put a little piece of text and that
will be your merge message so we have a server this running and when this server starts up it
creates a web hook subscription over to Shopify on order create so when Shopify creates an order
it's going to send our server a request containing information from that order and we can extract
information from that such as your email, your name, and what your actual merge message is
we extract information from the order and we generate a merge message object that object
gets added into a backlog which stores more information about it such as the time remaining
until it displays, its order in the queue and so on. If we come here there's this little
stat in the control that's basically the time remaining so when a message comes in there's
180 seconds or three minutes for Dan to do something before it will just enter a queue when it enters
a queue it then in turn in order displays on the banner itself or various other browser sources
such as the pop-up if we're viewing someone's screen and whatnot so when a merge message comes
in Dan views it in the incoming table he has the message really big nice and center so he
can read it and then on the side he has various controls of what he can do to it so for example
he could say oh I hate this message I do not want this to display I'm going to archive this message
and then it goes away and gets tucked into a different table which you can view separately
so there's this follow-up button which will flag the message so that we will follow it up
with an email later in the week there's this support button which will send it to support
like it'll create a ticket in their ticketing system so they'll reply to it there's a potential
which is sort of a category I don't understand but they seem to use it so it's fine with me
potential curate this is what happens when Dan decides your message is great I want Luke and
Linus to answer this on screen so he curates it there's the show option so that just displays
your message and no response and then there's the reply option so when you click the reply option
this form comes up and you can come here and type a response and then click enter and it will
splice this message directly after the initial message in the queue if the initial message
has not displayed yet it will actually append the original message and the reply message to the end
of the queue there's also these template responses which we sort of need to rework none of these are
really useful but you can just click this and it will just add it to the end of whatever you've
typed and then you can hit enter or click submit and the response will be set after the incoming
table there's the potential table so what the potential table is is during the when after dark
Dan decides that a message goes into the potential table that means he wants Luke and Linus to deal
with it during the wancho after hours you know when they dim the lights and just read merch messages
so there's a couple options they can curate it so that Dan will read it oh now I need to
potentiate a couple more they can curate it they can reject it because they hate the message and
they think Dan should not have potentiated it they can reply to the message themselves and they'll
sign it ls or ll if they reply to it or they can just archive it straight from here if they
don't want to do anything with it the curated table is pretty simple it's just for Dan to
come here hey Dan hey me with three merge messages and he will read off three merge messages
when he's reading the merge messages he has this broadcast button so if I click this what it does
is it will actually display the message on the chyron so it's there visible
for when he's reading it also pauses the queue so that any merge messages that might be displaying
during this time they won't so that you actually have an opportunity to have your messages displayed
and that's what these really obnoxious buttons are for you can see nice RGB
but what this does is it's just a nice reminder to resume the queue so it doesn't stay paused
so if I click this it'll go away and now the queue is resumed and it's going to keep cycling
through the merge messages that are queued up to display on screen there are two more tables which
are fairly boring just a push to stream table which includes you know just a message and if it's
response if it got one and the archive table so this one's kind of fun if we think you're doing
some egregious advertising or you somehow broke merge messages and your message couldn't be there
we can purge it entirely from the queue and the backlog and it won't show up in any data exports
we have all sorts of cool stats that can be displayed to luke Linus and Dan so they can keep
a track of what's going on so we have the stream duration obviously important merge message count
and the most merge messages we've ever gotten in a day is 1700 and that was after the hack happened
and we lost our youtube channel you guys came through and just overwhelming support
crashed the merge message server it was amazing but we were receiving about 19 merge messages a
second at some points and we were maintaining around 40 merge messages a minute consistently
throughout the show and that was just too much for the server to handle and a race condition happened
and the server came down but that's actually being patched so it's not even possible for
that to happen now when Linus leaks the dashboard i get a lot of comments that this is a very ugly
ui and to some degree they're right because you're not supposed to care about how internal tools
look they're just supposed to be functional and this is the most functional thing i've ever made
row of buttons at the top a bunch of detail summaries with information that doesn't really
have to look nice you can however set the color to be whatever you want it's nice and
customizable i mean compared to something like LTT Store Floatplane like it's not
client facing so we really don't have to worry about making it actually look nice it just has
to look functional over everything else but what a browser source is is in v mix or obs or
whatever broadcasting software you use you can usually create an element that you can put in a
frame and you just give it a url that url will be an actual website that just decides what displays
in that element so if i switch over if it create a little sponsor here and i click show this sponsor
thing will come up so this would be if Dan is not streaming a WAN Show but we still need sponsors
to display on screen he can use this element and it will display a sponsor on screen when he wants
to there's also the pop-up element so what this is is if Linus and luke are sharing their screen
they can use the pop-up browser source and this will just display a little square from the top of
the screen and that way it's less obtrusive we don't have the whole wan banner obstructing
half of their screen and they can see this is the banner the chyren as i like to call it because
that's what it is and as you can see it's just a web page you can just go to it displays your
messages nice and fun we have the sponsor spots for the intro as Dan was talking about earlier
where after that intro sequence is played it will show this on screen briefly and that way he
doesn't have to have it generated as an image every time instead he can just insert some sponsors
into the merge message dashboard and they'll just be appended to this list or he can remove
sponsors or whatever he wants to do and finally we have the outro browser source we use merge
messages for the outro for a couple reasons first of all switching to an outro scene through vmix
is kind of tedious and not easy to do so using a browser source that just displays on top of
everything is very simple to do it's basically just a web page that sits there and we can also have
the outro sit there for as long as we want all right that is all for merge messages i am working
on a blog post for the newsletter that will go up in a few months hopefully but let's throw it back
to Dan so the last thing we kind of have to go over is the stream deck integration and stream deck
has some implementations directly with obs but with vmix and kind of also reaper i went a little bit
of a different route our stream deck integration actually uses midi i have this secondary program
called loop midi which is like virtual midi ports and then all of these are like another free plugin
that is just midi control so each of the buttons here instead of sending direct messages it just
sends midi controls and there's lots and lots of different uh there's lots of different data sources
that you can use for these and we're just using the the cc messages i spent ages trying to figure
out how to get the bleep button working and i if you remember there was always problems with it
that integration was in obs and that was kind of like a toggle mute so the bleep button was
playing constantly in obs and then the stream deck triggered a toggle mute in obs when you're
trying to bleep yourself in obs it triggers the push to mute uh instantly right and that doesn't
work with the delay from the audio and the camera so what i had to do is i had to write an auto hot
key script to um press the shortcut after like 144 milliseconds so that it would be timed properly
and then because it also triggers the push to mute instantly i had to program a second one
that when you release the button it kept it held for another 140 milliseconds or something like
that so it was it was very very difficult to like time properly and it was also very difficult to
like get it working consistently so what we do now is we use this midi control so when i push the
the swear bleep you can see it updating the the midi data there right so when you push the the
swear bleep it triggers midi and then what that does is we have a midi control in reaper and what
that does is it just solos this bleep thing here because the other thing that we want to do is we
want to mute the output so you can't hear the swears underneath the bleep and this allows it to be
absolutely perfectly real time with the audio because they're all kind of married in the pre-mix
and it's incredibly robust like the midi doesn't fail ever it's really fast it's really responsive
because you're manually pulling a keyboard there's no latency anything like that so
love that aspect of it and then that gets fed directly into v-mix with like
with no delay required so it's super robust everything else is kind of also
midi shortcuts and then they come into v-mix through the v-mix shortcut system so we have
all of these different shortcuts for all of the different inputs and outputs and they're
they're really easy you kind of just you come here you go find you push your your button it finds
the midi control immediately and those are those are done instantly if we bring the stream deck back
yeah these are pretty easy you just put in a control change you can pick your channel
you can pick your command so we have all of these we have 127 for 16 different channels so that's
kind of a few you can also set your button type so hold push toggle for all of these so for example
the producer is a toggle so what my producer live button does is it mutes and unmutes my
microphone here and the nice thing about doing it with the midi is these are always in sync so
if I close down the stream deck or I close down the or close down reaper it's not backwards so I
can have it green and I know that green is always unmuted right because it's a you're pushing a note
or you're not pushing a note so the toggle works really really well for that cam only is you know
switch why cam we have independent control over the various cameras or I can come down and go to
like Luke's laptop and then in the bottom oops let's close that in the bottom left here so we
can switch down to Luke laptop and still have control over the various cameras in the picture
and picture so that's kind of really nice and simple what else is there yeah we can trigger our
intro our outro we can turn on my producer cam hello there we are looking here turn my producer
cam on and off that sort of thing and then we've also yeah it's the same thing that works for
Dennis's integrations and then over here this is a new thing that we're experimenting with
so this is the add-on deck for like other extra things v-max allows you to have output logs to
file so for our editors it works really nice if we have time stamps right so when we start the show
I can hit a various timestamp here and what that'll do is write to the log file that is generated
along with every single recording the exact time of the recording plus my my custom wording for
what the timestamp is I also have this kind of production clock here for the length of the
wanshow because we're trying to keep it to to about three to three and a half hours now
and so when we go live on youtube what this will do is it'll start this timer so I have a very
detailed understanding of where I am in the show and where I need to push them
I made some I made some little cards here two or three more topics right which just keeps
Linus and Luke on track and I just I just plop them there and they can see exactly when when that's
supposed to happen and I can keep an eye on the time because I would be because of the pre-show
the recording time and the actual live time is slightly different so it's very difficult to
get an accurate picture of of where all our time stamps are thanks so much for tuning in that's
about it for the Dan show tune in next time same bad time same bad channel bye
okay so now I just need a quick quick pickup talking are you still recording