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 merge messages. We're going to talk a little bit about merge
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, Callinan 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 crossover
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 AT-HM50X 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.
Let me 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. Yeah, 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.
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. Well yeah, so we 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, I'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.
There 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 know, and 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 Wancho 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 like 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 a 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
than 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 you're about halfway through the Wancho 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 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 the 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 octopree inputs. And then
analog one, two are the inputs from the compiler. So we 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 10
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 sub mix 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 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 focus right. So the
computer in focus right 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 compiler. All of those go to our main channel, which has an output to one,
two, which then goes into V mix. 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 handled 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 and 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.
Simple enough for you. One of the reasons why it's so complicated is the versatility.
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 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 4000
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 on a 2080 Super. 2080 Super was my old card.
This computer has an i9 10980 XE which is a bunch of gibberish words. It's 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 touched 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 Merch 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 right 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 FlowPlane. So you could pick which camera you wanted to watch like live on FlowPlane.
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 right. 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 right. 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 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 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 three four 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 and 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
it all zip thing because it's kind of fun right um then what else what else we got we've got our
output clock yeah a lot of shows 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 and it turns on the secondary overlay so what it's actually
doing is it's putting the the it's putting the intro video over top of the the camera right so it
doesn't it doesn't like switch to it it just it just places it over top and then what it'll do
is it'll set the countdown timer back to its 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 our 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 we're right
we have these four sub mixes for 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 I 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 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 dream and 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 that they really do is just
play a video that loops it's not very complicated the first one it 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 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
in the corner brand seemed to like to see Linus's 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 you're 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 a hundred and eighty 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 WAN Show 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
hit me with three merch messages and he will read off three merch messages when he's reading the
merch messages he has this broadcast button so if I click this what it does is it will actually
display the message on the Kyron so it's there visible for when he's reading it also pauses the
queue so that any merch 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 merch 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
borough merch 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 merch message count and the most
merch messages we've ever gotten in a day is 1700 and that was after the hack happened and
we lost our youtube channel um you guys came through and just overwhelming support crashed
the merch message server it was amazing but we were receiving about 19 merch messages a second
at some points and we were maintaining around 40 merch 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 a 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 uh 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 vmix 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 hotkey script to
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
square bleep you can see it updating the the midi data there right so when you push the the
square 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 vmix with like
with no delay required so it's super robust everything else is kind of also midi shortcuts
and then they come into vmix through the vmix 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 up
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 whoops 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 out 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 timestamps 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
um the exact time of the recording plus my my custom uh wording for what the timestamp is
I also have this kind of production clock here um for the length of the WAN Show 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 um detailed understanding of where
I am in the show and where I need to push them um 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 um because I would be because of the pre-show the recording
time and the actual live time is slightly different um so it's very difficult to get an accurate picture
of of where all our time timestamps 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 all right