Hangouts on Air and How to Use Them - G+ Food Bloggers Community Education Series

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and tonight you're here with me and my guest Ronnie Binzer, the Hangout Helper, and we're going to talk about Hangouts and how to use them, and then some of the issues we also had during our last series of live cooking demos on Google+ when we did our Super Bowl Hangouts. So I'm going to hand you over to Ronnie right now, and if you do have any questions, please put them in the comment bar and we will try to get to them as soon as we can. Thanks a lot. Ronnie, it's all yours.

Thanks, Chef Dennis Littley. Hi guys out there, Ronnie Bincer here, the Hangout Helper. I have been around, some of you may have seen me inside the cooking environment here, the community, trying to help where I can. I've seen a lot of comments going on, questions and things like that, so I wanted to try to address some of those that I saw and congratulate you guys for using the Hangout tool. The Hangout on Air tool is a great way to communicate visually and show all the wonderful things you're doing with your cooking. So let's start out with the thing that we've been using to hold the Hangout on Air, which is called an event. And just as a quick reminder, or maybe new for some of you, the Google+ Event tool is a phenomenal place to advertise what's coming up and to allow what is being shown live to be encompassed in a place like an event, and then after the fact continue So you got a before, during, and after capability inside the event, and it's a phenomenal place to gather. Okay, what it does have built in as an option is called a Hangout. What it does not have built in as an option is what we want to use, which is called a Hangout on Air. And the difference again between the two— a Hangout is a video chat that can have up to 10 or maybe 15 people and that's it. Nobody else can see it. It's private in that sense. Whereas a Hangout On Air is the same video chat with 10, maybe up to 15 people, but it is broadcast live to the world on YouTube. That's the thing we're trying to do. We're basically having our own TV network when we use a Hangout On Air. However, there's no button to click on that says make this event have a Hangout On Air. But there's a common trick that we're using, and that is by starting a Hangout On Air as a separate thing, we grab the URL that's up on the very top where it says embed, and that's going to be a YouTube link basically, and we paste that link inside the event's special field which is called YouTube URL. And that's how you're seeing what we're doing right now. We're in an event, and the event itself is holding hangout on air. So just, you know, we talked about this before, but maybe this is the first time you've seen it. Just want to make sure everybody's clear: we're not making a hangout event, but we're making an event that is holding the video of a hangout on air. Does that make sense, Dennis?

That makes sense.

Okay, man. Alright, and then another thing that I noticed, um, to look at my notes here, when we create our event The first invitation of the event, when you first send it out, you first broadcast it, or you post the event, is very, very important that you do a certain thing in a certain order. So let me just give you the heads up. When you create your event, you're, you're basically saying, here's the date and the time when it's gonna start, when it's gonna end. You're gonna type a little bit of text about it. You have options to invite different people or different circles before you hit the send button or post button. I forget if it's send or post. The go, you know, make it go. You really, really, really need to do the following two things when you send out the first invitation, and that is invite the public circle and invite any communities that you want to be inside or invited to come to the event. If you don't do it the very first time you send it out, it will not let you do it later. Okay, public and your Google+ communities must be included in your very first invitation. After you send that out, you can freely add in circles and hundreds and thousands of people after the fact, but you've got to invite the public and the Google+ communities that you want to be involved in this thing the very first time you send it out. It does not forgive. You've got to do it the first time. So a few people ran into issues with that. Also, if you don't— let's see what happens if you don't invite the public. It will be a private event. So that's going to be the name up on the top. It says Private Event. You can— I see a question out there, how many people can you invite at once? It's a great question. I strongly suggest you invite the public circle and then the communities, as many of those as you want the first time. After that, feel free to invite a bunch. It'll warn you and say you can't invite that many if you run into problems. By then you can back up and try it again. I have found great success with my event invitation methodology by grouping circles that are 100 or less. Now I think others have found that they could invite more than 100 at a time. I just know for me it works 100% of the time if I invite a circle of 100 people, send it out, and then just invite another circle of 100 people and send it out and just keep doing them 100 at a time. I have always had it work for me. Jeff Dennis, did you, do you have any difference of experience with the numbers of people you can invite?

I send out the invitations to the community and I have 2 circles of 500. And I have never had a problem sending out to the 500, but you said it might have something to do with the amount of following too, or—

I think it might. This is an area of, how would you call it, a secret. Like, Google+ doesn't like to talk about this, so I'm just saying that I know 100 works. Chef Dennis is able to do 500. If you want to try it, go ahead, try 500. If it works for you, great, let us know. If it doesn't work for you, then chop your circles in half and, you know, set them up into smaller pieces until eventually you get down to 100 where, you know, it works. But if you can do them in larger circles, then it's probably more efficient for you. I'm just concerned potentially that because Dennis has so many thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers, that somehow Google+ is giving him more capability to invite more people at one time Whereas if you have just 1,000 followers or a couple hundred, you might run into issues. At least that's been my experience. Paulino Brenner out there saying that he's invited a circle with 4,500 people into it with no problems from a page. Alright, great. Maybe I need to test bigger circles, I don't know. I just know 100 works. So those are, those are couple things about inviting, there's something else that's relatively recently changed in the event tool. And I know we're talking about Hangouts, but remember the Hangout is being— Hangout On Air is being held inside this event thing. In the past, the event tool would show the start time and date based on the local time and date. In other words, if I'm in Colorado, which I am, and someone in Europe posts the event, I will see it trans— would have in the past seen it translated to my local time. They changed that relatively recently, so that means whoever creates the event, it's their local time which is what's displayed, and they say they're doing that on purpose. And I've complained, and so have a lot of other people complained. Whether it changes or not, I don't know, but what I would suggest, and I'll put it in the the links in the comment, is to use different third-party websites that do translations of time for you. There's one that I like to use right now which is called Time and Date. They have an event or fixed time function where I can go in and I type in the name of the event, I type in the start time, the end time, it figures out what my time zone is, and I hit create it, and then I make a short link of it and I bring that link back into my post for the event and I say, "If you want to see your local time, click here," because that'll help you get more people involved in your event live because otherwise they sometimes don't know how to translate the time properly to their local time. So, um, yeah, Paulino put the link out there, thank you Paulino. Um, then there was another thing Actually, there was a bunch of different questions, but I did— I wanted to bring something up. I got to play along with you guys this week. In other words, I did— my wife and I did chocolate-covered peanut butter footballs, okay? And just to sort of enjoy the event and the process as well as to really embrace the cooking thing. And I did something accidentally, but it worked out really well. And so I want to point out to you what I learned from my little boo-boo that worked out really well. It wasn't a boo-boo, actually. I had two cameras. They were both laptops. I had one pointing at the face of the chef and another one pointing down at the food. And I was able to bring that in because you can have as many— as long as you got space in your 10 little windows down there, you can bring in multiple cameras, which could be, in this sense, computers. I had one pointing down at the food, and what I did is we decided, because we did some testing ahead of time, that the microphone sounded better when it was on the food than on the one that was facing up, because maybe because it was further away, I'm not sure. Either way, it worked out really well, because what happens is the way that the Hangout, when it's public, the Hangout on Air changes screens, meaning what's in the big window, is based on sound.— and we'll talk about that in a minute, the bad thing. But the good thing there was whenever Dana, my wife, was talking, it would bring the camera automatically down and look at the food. So it was allowing the food to be the main window. And I was controlling the blue boxing, or what's called pinning, you know, click on the thumbnail. And so I could control it, but by default it would always go back to the food. And if that's primary in your show, then you're gonna wanna make sure the camera or the computer that's pointing at the primary thing, in this case food, is where the sound comes from, because you do not wanna have the sound on, the microphone on, in both computers, because you're gonna get nasty feedback. Some of you may have already seen that if you tried it. So if you have someone like me running the show, then we can blue box it. But if you are wanting to know what the default setting is, you can have it go right to the food if that's going to be important to you. I think that was kind of a neat discovery that I did when we did our show. Chef Dennis mentioned that some people, when they were first starting the show, were upended without— well, he didn't use these words, but they were upstaged by sound that was going on somewhere else. Like if someone does this, they're messing with their headset, it could grab the attention of the main window. So when you're first starting your show and you're doing the preamble saying, "Hi everyone, we're glad to have you here," make sure you blue box yourself so that no one accidentally pulls the camera away from you by making noise. And then when you want it to just flow from one person to the next, then you click on yourself again and you unblue box yourself. Sorry, I keep saying blue box. They officially termed it pinning. I just have to get used to the new terminology. I've even taught people the new words, I just keep forgetting. Let's see, Jeff, Dennis, do you want to ask any or answer any questions out here?

We did have one in there. Paul Vander Bosch wants to know, how do I invite people in Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube to events?

Okay, to events or to the Hangout on Air?

Well, the Hangout on Air, I guess, the Hangout on Air or maybe both.

You can actually, when you make an event inside Google+, if you look at the very top, there's a thing called a URL. The very top, you know, the web address, you can copy that and share that with people. I frequently will take that long nasty looking link and use a shortener, a URL shortener like Bitly or goo— I don't know how you say it— the goo— the Google one, the Google shortener. I will shorten those links and I share it that way, and people don't have to be inside Google+, meaning logged in or anything. They can go watch the event, but they may not be able to comment. That's going to be one of the drawbacks there. Or you can take the YouTube link, that very same link that you as the owner of the Hangout on Air can grab from the embed area, and you can not only paste it in the YouTube URL link for the event, but you can paste it on Twitter, you can paste it on Reddit, you can paste it on Facebook. Anywhere that can take a YouTube video will be able to receive that link, and you can type in some text saying, "We're gonna go live in 15 minutes," or "on the hour," kind of thing.— and then just paste it in there and people can watch that video from wherever they are. There are ways to track comments that might be happening in these various places, but that's probably for another show where we can go into further detail as we get more and more advanced. But hopefully you're getting a fair amount of comments inside your events and you can try to track them by watching what's going on. Chef Dennis, did you see— you watched a fair amount of these shows. Did you see people trying to bring the comments into the show when they were doing it?

I did see them, and they were asking questions too, but I think sometimes it's good to have a person dedicated just to doing that. If the comment tracker is not working, maybe someone watching the event page and looking at the questions and relaying them to you. So I did see that, and actually I heard it in a couple where someone was live on it and they were relaying the messages as they were talking. So it's a good idea. And also, if you have the extra person and they're there, they can also tweet things for you too, or put notices up other places. You know, anything you can do to get more out there is a good thing while you're doing it.

Yeah, I find one of the magic things about the Hangout on Air thing is when you can bring comments out from the real stream, what's going live, and integrate it into the show. It just seems to be a really cool way to bring value to everybody. And so I'm a Hangout nerd. I've been doing this for like a year and a half. Some of you are brand new, and what I would strongly encourage you to do is walk before you run. And part of the walking would be maybe getting someone to help you that's on the inside of your film strip down there. Have them watch while you're running the show and let them occasionally interrupt or interject into the show a comment that's going on out there. Eventually you move into the realm where I've been where I'm using things, tools like Comment Tracker that allows me to grab all these comments and I can run the show, I can moderate, I can help blue box or pin, all this stuff going on at the same time and potentially even cook or eat my bacon with my chocolate.

That's just an added benefit.

Yeah, it takes a little while to get to that point, um, and let me just put a plug in for me. Chef Dennis, if you don't mind, just a quick one. Please do. I consult, I do training, I train people, I guide them through the process of this. This is what I do for a living. If this is something of interest to you, you can reach out to me. I've got multiple packages. My most common package is what we're kind of talking about, where it combines Hangouts On Air hosted inside of an event. And what I do is I help you build the event from the get-go and then eventually move into the realm of how do we run the Hangout, and I'll be on the inside of the Hangout with you if you like. And then we've got another package where after the fact I take your content and I help you optimize it, make sure it gets found to the best capability of all the search engines and stuff. So that's something I offer. I do, as you've seen, go around and give tips and tricks anyways, but if you want a full package where I'm walking you through all the steps to make sure you get it right the very first time, or third time or whatever it is, I'd be happy to help out.

Sounds good. Ronnie, we have another question here. Dreama Morris wants to know, if we post the link for events on Facebook or Twitter, does it have to be a public event? Also, she wants to know about the lower thirds, how to get your names to come up in the bottom of the screen.

I'm going to assume Dreama is talking about a Google+ event.

Yes.

And I believe it has to be a public event in order for the public to be able to gain access to it. Because just logically, if it's a private event, meaning not public, if you're not signed in, then Google+ has no idea if you're authorized to see it or not. So as a result, I'm going to say— I'm just using logic here because I don't know. I've never tried that. But I'm assuming you do need it to be a public event for people on Facebook that are not signed in to Google+ to be able to come watch it.

Right, I would think so.

And what was the other— oh, the lower thirds thing.

Lower thirds, yeah.

Yeah, there's a tool inside Hangouts, either Hangouts or Hangouts on Air, that is called the Hangout Toolbox, and it'll show up on your far left side. It's a little red toolbox thing, or you need to go grab it with the place where you go grab all your Hangout apps. It has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 different tools inside of it that all work well together. One is called the lower third, which is what I have down here. It's also what Chef Dennis Littley has on his. Mine's slightly different because, like I said, I've been around this for a while and I play— I make it look different. I have graphics stuff and I can make different things show up, but it's basically the lower third. I can turn on— let me get my normal one. I can make one look more like that, which is more the traditional thing. So basically it's free and it's a great tool. You can make custom overlays, which is what I'm doing when I do this kind of stuff. And I got, you know, I just go crazy with it because I do that. But as a point, this could be really handy right over there. You could put your main recipe items, your main items that are involved with what you're cooking, and have it up there the whole time. So that's a great idea for using Hangout lower third, not just for the lower third portion down here, but to show other stuff right here on the side.

Absolutely. We had a couple more questions too while we're at it. First of all, Brooks Walker wants to know if you'll work for bacon.

If I'll work for bacon? Let's talk. I don't know. I'd have to talk to my wife. Probably not, but unless it was a lot of bacon that I could resell, maybe.

Michael Daniels wants to know, uh, that you said when you make the event private, does that not mean the Hangout On Air is private though, or are both private?

Alright, good question. The event is the room, okay, think of it that it holds stuff inside of it. You can have a public Hangout On Air playing inside the room, but if you can't get into the room or you didn't know about the room, then you might not see that film going on. When you make a Hangout on— I'm sorry, when you make an event accidentally private, I'm just gonna assume it was done by accident, it doesn't mean you can't invite lots of people in. They can come in. However, the public is not gonna be able to find it, and so that's the dilemma when you create your event and it's not set to be public the very first time out. You do not have an option to invite the public after it's been initially created. So you can invite hundreds or thousands of people into it and they might see it, but the public never gets to see it.

Okay.

So I don't know if that answers the question. Yes, you can have a public Hangout On Air inside of a private event, and if they know about it, they can come watch it inside the event. Also, people can watch it inside YouTube. They don't have to watch inside the event, but the event is a phenomenal place, like I said before, because you can advertise before your show, talk to people during your show, and then continue to talk with them after the show. And then there's this phenomenal stuff that the event has which allows you to message the guests. So for example, last week you did a show for the Super Bowl and there was 50 people that came to it. You can automatically reinvite all 50 of those people to your next event relatively easily because the tool, the event tool, allows you to message guests based on their attendance status. So you could send a different message out to those that did attend versus those that said maybe versus those that said— that just didn't reply or those that said no. Those are the 4 categories of how you can respond, and that's one of the messaging options within the event tool. So it's definitely a good place to do your stuff.

So you're saying then that I can use that when I make my next event? Yeah. To invite certain people in?

Yes, because you go to your past event that, you know, you can scroll on your event page and scroll down to the past ones, open that up, and then you as the owner of the event click on that icon or that actions thing. It pulls down the menu and then it says message guests, and you click on that, it allows you to send out a message based on the checkbox, meaning whether they said yes, no, maybe, or didn't respond. I frequently use that. For example, here's my use case: if I'm gonna do a show next week and I make my event early enough, I can invite lots of people and they have time to figure out if it's going to fit into their schedule. Some people will come and say No, I'm not coming. Okay, others will say maybe, others have not responded. Sometimes they don't respond because they didn't know about it because somehow they missed it. So what I might do 2 days before the event's about to start, I will go in to the message options, choose the ones that said did not respond, and send them and them alone a note saying, I don't know if you missed this, but this is coming up in 2 days, just wanted to make sure you knew about it.. And that usually brings up a whole bunch more people that say, "Yes, I'd like to go," or "No," or "Maybe." At least it gets them aware of their options. And that way you're not bugging anybody that said yes, you're not bugging anybody that said no, you're just specifically messaging people based on their "did not respond" status.

That's good. We got another question over there. Robert Allen wants to know, when you make your custom lower thirds, are you doing them in Photoshop?

Yes, I am, and I'm looking at my notes here. 640 by 360. That should answer his question. That's the size, 640 by 360. You have to make them full size, make it as a PNG format that has levels of transparency, otherwise it's going to block out the screen. And as an example of what I do to block out the screen at times is— where did it go? You can save these, by the way, which is how I can grab them up easily. I can turn this on. So I can visually block out what I'm doing if I need to do something I don't want you to watch. I can turn that on, and this is not a PNG, this is just a JPEG. But when I want to have something like you've been seeing, I want some levels of transparency through it, I will use a PNG format. And transparent means this right here, my face, so it's not just blocking the whole screen like we saw earlier.

Okay, great. Claudia Lemoscolo wants to know, can we tell how many people are on right now?

You can. In other words, the owner of the Hangout On Air is the only person that has any kind of indicator as to how many people are watching. And I keep up with this stuff relatively quick— constantly, that's the right word. And I happen to know that sometimes that view counter has been giving people problems lately. Chef Dennis, do you see a number up on the very top near the word embed?

Uh, no, I do not.

Okay, well, you're supposed to. So it's been a little glitchy lately for some people. So along the top, you don't see any view count number, right, near the end broadcast button or near the embed or anything? You don't see that?

Nothing.

No. Okay, so it's been acting a little what I call wonky. You're supposed to be able to see it if you're the owner of the Hangout On Air. No one else can see it, and after the video is done, if you keep the video as it is on YouTube, no one else will be able to see the view count from that point on either unless you're the owner. And you as the owner can see the view count inside your YouTube— what's called the video manager area, or lots of different places, but that's the primary place most people see it. Now, if I were to take the video that is made automatically by this Hangout On Air— because when you are doing a Hangout On Air, it's streaming live to YouTube, and when you're done, it creates a video for you automatically that the public sees. If I were to download that video, which I can, and do any edits to it— I can add extra graphics, I can add all kinds of stuff to it if I'm a video nerd— and then I can upload it again and then the show starts again, that becomes a regular YouTube video. In other words, from that point on, everybody can see the view counts just like a normal YouTube video is. But if I just let the Hangout On Air end by hitting End Broadcast, it creates a video, but that video does not show the view count to people. That's one of the differences between how these things work.

Great. Robert Allen wants to know how you can do a Hangout On Air and put it behind a payment gateway? So I have a pay-per-view.

Phenomenal question. When you figure it out, let me know. Ha! I've actually— I played with a couple different companies that are trying to figure out how to do this, and none of them are quite ready yet. So I would hope that sometime in the near future we can. I've asked for community Hangouts that allow me to charge. In other words, maybe a private community for Ronni's best tips and tricks, and they're willing to spend money on a monthly basis just to be updated with the latest stuff. I think it's a phenomenal idea. I think what you have to do in that sense is use something like PayPal or some other kind of payment system, and then you invite just those people into that community that are in essence authorized to see that activity. But that's a regular Hangout, not a Hangout On Air. That's the big problem, Robert Allen, is Hangout on Air are automatically public and you can't hide that. Now what some people do, I'll just give you a tip and then we can move on to another question, is if you have multiple YouTube channels and people know you here but they don't know you over there, then do your Hangout on Air with that channel over there and most people won't know to go look at it over there and it's pretty much private even though it's technically public. Does that make sense? You kind of hide it. Yeah, and then just keep making new channels once they find you.

Okay, see, there's one— Paulino just put up another question that says sometimes G+ kicks him off the Hangout on Air before he starts a broadcast, and when he comes back he can still start the broadcast but it won't show the URL and embed code. For viewers.

Yeah, that is a bug known by the Google+ Hangout people, and they're working on it. It's a recent bug, meaning when I— if you accidentally or have to for some reason re-enter, end up re-entering or rejoining your Hangout On Air, the embed link is gone from the second or third or fourth time you come back. Strong suggestion: when you're creating your own Hangout On Air, you copy that URL not only for the YouTube video but also for the actual Hangout on the very top and paste that for your own benefit later to use if you were to ever need it to get back in. That's one way to get back into the Hangout on Air after the fact, but that YouTube URL, if you've copied it before, that embed link in essence, you'll be able to go grab that again later. Right now it seems to be a bit of a glitch and they know about it. Some people are saying that we've got 68 people watching right now.

That's just the attending.

Yeah, I was wondering how they got that number. Yeah, that attendance number for an event is totally different than how many are actually watching the live video. And when and if— let's put it this way— when that view counter shows up again, you're going to be able to see how many are watching it at that exact moment. And for example, if there was 50 people watching it, if one person stopped the YouTube video and they went and did something else, then it would show 49. If that same person came back, it would go back up to 50 again. So it's not based on were they there before, it's just based on how many are watching at that moment. And the view count starts over again from zero once you start looking at the counter on your YouTube channel because it's now technically a video rather than a live broadcast, and that's where the differences are. Okay.

All right, I don't have anything else here right now.

There was a few questions, remember, from earlier?

Yes, Melissa Clifford had asked about— she asked a bunch of different questions about equipment, basically. And I know over the weekend we did have some issues with cameras and Macs. I think it was the 9 C920 that wasn't compatible, some were saying.

Yeah, I've seen— I'm on a Mac myself. I don't have the Logitech C920, which is what I'm assuming you're talking about for cameras. Yes. It's a very popular camera for Hangouts. I think you can get them for between $79 to $99. It's a good one. It's a high-definition camera. And when you are— sorry, someone's inviting me to join another Hangout. And by the way, you can only be in one Hangout at a time. So I'm going to just say no. Okay, so if I've got a C920 and I'm running it on a Mac, if it just doesn't automatically work, I strongly suggest you get a pretty cheap piece of software called Webcam Settings. Webcam Settings, webcam is one word, settings. You can find it at the i— or the Apple Store, and it's $8. And when you just turn that on, it just automatically makes your C920 work with your Hangouts. So it's just a very inexpensive piece of software to add to make sure that the C920— I've seen a lot of Macs work automatically with the C920, but if yours doesn't, buy the $8 piece of software called Webcam Settings and then it will.

Good to know.

Now, Earlier there were some questions about microphones. Does the host need to wear a microphone or a headset like I've got? Some haven't spotted the microphone. Can it be wireless? Okay, so a bunch of questions, actually, and that's just the beginning. Those are great questions. I personally wear a headset, and it's a wired headset, meaning I have a wire here that's connected to the computer. I know Chef Dennis prefers or needs to have a wireless one so he can move around more freely in the kitchen scenario. I like headsets. I know other people don't, and let me give you a reason why I like them and then explain why some people would prefer not to have them. Headsets will remove echo. That's the key thing. There is very little chance you can have an echo going on because of the sound. Here's what happens without a headset: your computer has a microphone and it has a speaker. And if the speaker and the microphone are a little too close to each other, the sound from the Hangout will circle right around and come back into the microphone and cause this little bit of an echo. And sometimes the echo gets really bad, other times it's just a little tiny bit and it's just a little bothersome. When you put on a headset, echoes are gone. Period. So if you can wear a headset, you're gonna have fewer problems with echo. If, however, you don't have that capability, you might consider getting a directional microphone. And that means something that doesn't get sound from the sides, but just from straight ahead. And that way you can be talking and not worrying about the speaker sounds, which might be on the side, somehow interfering with what's coming back into the microphone. And to give it the best capability, if you're not using a headset, is get a microphone and earbuds so that the speaker is really right in your ear and it's not going to come out and come back into the microphone. It's an echo thing, that's the reason why I suggest using headsets. Now the one I got is made by GE and it's marketed through Office Max or Office Depot or Staples and it's like $30. It's a very inexpensive piece of equipment. I will be spending— when I make more money, I'll be buying more— I'll have fun with equipment. So someone asked, can you pay me in bacon? How about paying me in headsets or something like that? And I can experiment and then tell you guys which I think are some of the better ones to work with. I have found myself, when I tried Bluetooth headsets, I did not like the results. The sound was either too tinny or it just wasn't consistent enough and it would break up. Off and on. So I voted with my pocketbook and just got the cheaper one. In fact, I have two of these because just in case one breaks. They're only $30. That's pretty cheap.

Okay, Paul Vanderbosch has said he's experienced sound problems when showing his screen in a Hangout On Air. Are there ways to avoid this? Is it the screen resolution the problem or the processor speed?

He said he's having sound problems.

Yeah, I would be.

Let me see if I can find that comment here.

It's two down. Paul Vander Bosch.

You know, I'm not— oh, there it is. Experienced sound problems when showing my screen. I'm gonna assume he was showing a video on his screen that had sound. In other words, I'm not sure Because a picture in and of itself shouldn't affect sound at all.

It will tunnel, though. We're having this tunneling problem still.

Well, you can do this repeated thing. That's going to be a problem, and there's no way around that if you're showing the inside of a Hangout. If you're just doing a screen share, you shouldn't have this, what I call visual echo problem. But if you're showing the inside of the Hangout interface, then you as the owner will start getting this repeated pattern that goes on and on into infinity. Infinity. But I don't know, honestly. Maybe after the show we can engage in more comments.

Well, he says a spreadsheet. It's a spreadsheet, not a video that he's sharing.

And it's causing sound problems. Maybe I'll join into a Hangout with you, and we can see it. And then I can try to report it to the people that need to know about it. But I've never seen or never heard a problem by looking at something like that. There was a question, someone was asking about Cameraman. There's an app that comes automatically if you are the owner of the Hangout On Air called Cameraman. And the Cameraman app is something that I use regularly. It allows the owner of the Hangout On Air to visually mute people when they first arrive, and it's something I strongly suggest. If you, you know, say you have a guest list of 5 people that are going to come into the show. If you set up the Cameraman app the way I suggest, is you can tell it to have people when they arrive be automatically muted. And that means they're visually muted as well as sound muted. And so that way, for example, I was doing my show, Larry Fournillier kindly came in at near the middle part of the show, and I didn't want him to interrupt the show. So while my wife's still talking about making these wonderful chocolate-covered peanut butter football things. I was chatting with Larry because I could see him, you get this sort of milky look over him on the inside. Everyone on the outside cannot see him. I could see he was there, I could chat with him in the chat window and say, "Larry, give me a couple minutes, I gotta find just the right time and then I'll bring you in." And then right before I was going to bring him in, I said, "Larry, you're about to come in, here we go." And then I'm talking and then as the owner of the Hangout On Air, I click the little visual camera thing underneath him, and now bam, he's visible to everybody. It's like he just showed up, but he's muted. So everybody that's been muted first has to unmute themselves. Now Larry's a professional, he's been doing this for a long time. He knew to click that little red microphone and then he could start talking. And then we introduced him, thanked him for coming into the show, and then we moved on. So that way you don't just get interrupted by people coming in willy-nilly, as they say. You can control who comes in at what time using that Cameraman app. You can also, if necessary, you can just boom, eject somebody out without any questions asked. You just hit the eject button and they're out of there. That's one of the other things the Cameraman app lets you do. Good deal. Hopefully you won't have to do that, but it's good to know you can do it. Which, by the way, let's just use a teachable moment. If somebody doesn't realize it and they've got the radio on in the background, the radio is playing music potentially, and that music is copyrighted. You might not know it, but the YouTube super secret bot, which is called Content ID, knows it, and it's listening. And if it can hear that there's copyrighted music, it might give you a warning saying, "You got some copyright violation, you better fix this pretty quick." And if you don't fix it quick, they're gonna shut down your ability to do Hangout On Air lickety-split. So if that's the case and you're having someone who's having fun with you and they're not gonna turn off their music even though you told them to, and you're trying to mute them and they keep unmuting themselves, then you eject them and they're out of there because it's your responsibility as the owner of the Hangout On Air to make sure that there's no copyright violations going on.

Good advice.

Brooks Walter is asking, please confirm Cameraman app is within the Hangout interface. Yes, if and only if you happen to be the owner of the Hangout On Air. It's one of those apps that automatically shows up and only for the Hangout On Air owner or originator. No one else sees it. Someone's saying— choppy sound static. That was talking about the spreadsheet?

Yes, that he's getting from the spreadsheet.

Paul, you and I need to do a Hangout when we're done here, and you gotta show it to me so I can see it. I'll record it off my screen because I use third-party software to do that, and I'll show it to the powers that be if that's something you want to do.

We did have a question earlier too that was on I saw one of the early comments and it was from Dion Baldwin. She had a problem when she recorded her video. Everything looked great. It looked wonderful. Then when she went to play it, it was blurry. Any thoughts on that?

It looked great on the inside, meaning what she saw looked fine, but the video itself was blurry? Yes. I think that's what that means. Yeah. Well, I got one thought. I don't know for sure, but Here's my thought. When you are looking at your video, you are— you're not necessarily seeing what the public is seeing. And so that was obviously the case when it was blurry there and it wasn't for you. I'm gonna guess that your upload speed was not sufficient for it to be able to keep up properly, and so as a result, what was being broadcast was not as crisp and clean as your download speed, which is based on what you were seeing. So the upload is actually where the real big problem is for most people. You can have phenomenal download speed, but your upload speed needs to be at least 1— or in my mind, 1.5 megabits or faster to give a good quality video by the time you're done. So that's my guess. There could have been loads of other things going on, but if it looked clean for you on the inside then I'm gonna guess it has something to do with the upload speed of your internet connection. And one way to help with that is, let's say you can't change your upload speed internet, what you might be able to change is your wire versus wired wireless situation. So if you are running your laptops or things wireless, try plugging in a wire, meaning an Ethernet-type cable, and then you may end up having better quality by the time you're done.. That's another potential as to why you were seeing that differentiation there.

Yeah, I think anytime that's possible, you really want to be wired in there. You don't want to run, especially as the owner of the Hangout. You want to have that, the Hangout on Air, you want to be wired in just to prevent things that could happen if you were not. I mean, you'll get kicked off, you'll lose, your voice won't match what your face is doing. There's just all kinds of things that can happen. Because of the speed. So you're always better. I know I've been telling people that, and a lot of times people don't believe you until they go through it and they experience all these problems.

Now, I was stressing my network a little bit the other— on Saturday when we did it because I had one computer upstairs, I had two more downstairs. Two were running wireless doing the actual show, and then mine upstairs was wired. I had tried three before all wireless, and it was having a real hard time with it. So I was— I plugged in one wire as best I could. Paulino asked another question, which is a good one, about tips about rebooting your computer before running a Hangout On Air. That's one of my checklists of things that I strongly encourage people to do is right before you're going to actually get on your show is to restart your computer. But not just restart your computer, but take and quit those other programs first. For example, if you're a graphics person like I am, you might have Photoshop running. Quit Photoshop before you restart your computer. In other words, quit it, let the computer have a chance to reclaim that memory, then do a full restart, and when it comes back on, it should not automatically launch Photoshop. If it does, quit it again and make sure it stops launching. Restart so that you have as much memory available for this, 'cause honestly, most people are taking this for granted, but video on a computer eats up a lot of the memory and processing power. Live video, multiply that by 10. Okay, so we're really stressing our computers a bit when we're doing this wonderful thing called Hangouts on Air when we don't even realize it. So the more you can restart and clear out everything, the better. If you have lots of tabs open— I'm very guilty of that, I have many, many tabs open on my browser— if you can shut down a lot of those tabs before you restart your computer you're gonna have a better success rate as well. So that could have caused some fuzziness as well. What I do— remember this thing down on the bottom, the lower third? I have another nickname for that. I call it the canary because back in the mining days, they used to have canaries. You know, if there was some gas that came into the mine, they— the canary would lose it or pass out before other people would. This is your canary. If your lower third looks fuzzy, then there's a good chance you need to restart. That's the bottom line. That's what I use as a quick, easy test. The guy that made this program told me about that. He says it's a great indicator to know if the speed and all your stuff's going on, it's got a little bit too much, it can't handle it. That means the lower third's gonna look fuzzy. So if it's crisp and clean, you're probably in good shape.

Okay, uh, Robert Allen wants to know if you have any comments on ProStudio for Hangouts.

Pro Studio, yeah, there's a, there's a bunch of different Hangout apps that allow you to do special things with your Hangout. One we're using right now is the lower third. Another one is called Pro Studio, and Pro Studio is a great program. It allows you, for example, if you— Chef Dennis owns the show because he started it. He can share that ownership with me if he wants to, if he uses that program called Pro Studio. So Chef Dennis could start it, he could ask me to come in and help him run it, and it gives me the ability to do the pinning or the blue boxing or doing the same thing as if I was the owner of the show. It gives me some of those capabilities. That's a special app called Pro Studio, and I do recommend it. I think it's done well. Very good. Let's see, it says if everyone started doing these on Google+, can they accommodate all the data? Or at one point we have to make appointments? That's a good question from Claudia. Let me explain from what I've heard is that they, current they meaning Google+, they have decades, meaning I'm going to translate that into 20 years of video going on with Hangouts every single day, and they're fine with that. So it's Google. I'm not going to worry too much about them not having enough bandwidth. I think it's OK. Love the tip about the lower third being clear or fuzzy. Yes, thank you. Glad it was helpful. All right, so we're getting close. Let me give a heads up as to something I'm going to be doing coming up in March. For you foodie people— you guys call each other foodies? Or is it just on the outside we call you foodies?

Foodies works. Some people don't like the term, but foodies works. Oops. That's okay.

I'm going to be— there's a thing going on in Austin, Texas in March, the beginning of March, called South by Southwest. I've been invited to be a speaker, not at South by Southwest, but at a food gathering, a food bloggers gathering next to South by Southwest. It's going to be on the 10th of March, and I'm going to be interviewing other food bloggers there using Hangouts On Air as well as presenting and talking about how Hangouts On Air can really help you with your food blogging stuff. It's with a place called TechMunch, and if Chef Dennis is okay with it, I'll put a link to it in the comment area of the event so you could see what's going on. And if that's something you do or you're in Austin, Texas, or you think you might be there during South by Southwest, please find me and come say hi. I'd love to meet you guys.

Absolutely. If you're near any city that has a TechMunch, you definitely want to go to it. The people that run it are just fabulous. Babette is really good, and they run a really good show. Each city is a little bit different with who they bring in. They bring locals in as much as they can. It's just a good experience. I think if you're going to be around Austin, you definitely want to be there. When is that date again, Ronnie?

That's March 10th, and it's actually taking place physically in the Whole Foods headquarters building, which is on Lamar, if you know where that is. So the Whole Foods headquarters is where we're going to be doing it. I'm trying to work it out with them where we can do some live Hangouts as part of it, where I can show how you can use your cell phone as a remote reporter. In essence, we can be talking about how you're— what's the best way to create this wonderful food dish, and by the way, you need this special pepper. Well, how do you know this is the right kind of pepper? We're gonna bring in the person down there at Whole Foods right now, and we're gonna look at a good pepper and a bad pepper. Here's how you know it's a good pepper. Don't buy this one. That kind of thing could be really, really cool in bringing value to your Hangout on Airs. At least I think it is.

Very good.

Um, any other summaries? Oh, someone was asking about Tablets, PC or Mac type tablets. Tablets are great, however it's not what I would suggest you run a Hangout On Air from. First off, you can't. That's, that's a problem. But you could join in. Let's back up. There's Macintosh or iOS operating systems, you know, like the iPad.. And then there's Android operating systems. The Android phones or Android mobile is allowed to join in to a Hangout On Air. So that's how you could do this mobile reporting, choosing the proper Pepper. You cannot do it right now with an iOS, an iPhone or an iPad. It's just not allowed. On a regular Hangout, it works. No matter what your mobile environment, you can bring in mobile stuff.. But if you're on a Hangout On Air, you can only use Android, and you are not allowed to start the Hangout On Air from the mobile device. You have to have sort of like a home computer running it, and then you can bring in those mobile reporters through their mobile device. Hopefully that makes sense.

Maybe they're using Apple Maps to guide them into the Hangouts. That could be it. They should have stuck with their Google ones.

A little bit of stab there, okay. "Mentioning communities related to Hang On Air." How about mentioning your communities related to— oh, that's another plug for me, I guess. Okay, thanks, Paulino. There's actually 3 or 4 different Hangout communities that I'm involved with on Google+. So if you want more— I mean, I'm trying to stay within this Google+ food blogger community to help in that sense, but if you want other things more specific to Hangouts, there's Hangout Helpers, there's Hangout Help, and there's Hangout On Air are three of the main places that I'm involved when it comes to Hangout communities inside Google+. And I can put links to those in our event area as well. Just gotta remember to do all this stuff. GPC links. Okay, and then just one last plug for me. Remember, I'm available I'd be happy to help you. I do discovery hangouts with you first to make sure that what I have to offer is going to meet what you need, and then if that's the case, then we figure out what's the right pricing structure and the time commitment to do it, and then we can go through and get you all good to go. Because some people, even though I've been doing this for a year and a half, some people are just arriving and they need to know the information and move on it quicker rather than going through all my posts that are already out there for the last year and a half. Weeding through it all. They want specific answers for specific situations. I'd be happy to help. And thank you for the opportunity.

You always get a lot more involvement when you're one-on-one with people too. You can really relate more to them, and they can better understand what you're saying. Reading a post sometimes just— it's great to have as a tool, but this one-on-one— and what we're doing is even the same thing. You're going to learn more just from seeing someone, but when you're in the same room with them and you're talking to them, which is what we were doing before we got together and started this Hangout, was Ronnie and I were in the room just chatting for a while. It's great. You really get to talk to people. Someone had made a comment earlier. I forget who it was. I don't know if it was Claudia or not, that it was so neat to have us be in different areas of the country and doing this at the same time together, just how it works. It's pretty cool. While Ronnie was doing his plugs for his business, which I think is a very good thing. Please call him if you need him. I want to talk about our food bloggers community, too. We're also running another series of Hangout on Airs doing our cooking demos for Valentine's Day. They actually start tomorrow, but they run through next Wednesday. You have plenty of time if you want to join in. Drop a note to one of us and let us know that you want to in the community, but you want to participate. If you're not in the community and you want to join the community, by all means, look for an invite, too. You just have to be a food blogger, a vlogger, or someone who's really done some videos before and has some experience. We'll let you in for that.

Yeah, they even let me in.

I was very happy to have you come in. I would have begged.

Well, we've learned some wonderful things in our cooking environment, and then we learned that I don't know how to cook certain things. Like, I tried making a peanut brittle thing that didn't work out, so we threw out a bunch of stuff. Has it ever happened to any of you chefs out there that you made a boo-boo and had to chuck it?

All the time. When I was first learning to bake, Ronnie, I had been a restaurant chef for years and had no problems with cooking everything that was necessary for the main plate, appetizers, salads, you name it. The restaurant was sold, and I was kind of sold along with it. I asked about desserts, and the owner said, "Oh, Chef, that's up to you." I had not baked one thing up to that point. I'd go in early, and if it didn't come out, it never happened, and I'd start again.

Dr. Pompa: Yeah. I was surprised how many ingredients just had to get dumbed. But it happens, I guess.

It happens.

So here's, here's the thing. I've learned Hangouts for a long time. You guys know cooking for a long time. Between the two of us, we can make a phenomenal show.

That's right. So don't be afraid, don't be intimidated. You know, it's not rocket science, and it's not gonna, you know, change the world, but it's gonna be a lot of fun, and you're gonna see yourself on a video and you'll have it recorded. I mean, I can't believe that I'm doing these and how many I've done already. You know, if you had told me this 5 years ago, I would have just laughed at you. So, you know, come in and give it a try. There's a lot of people try it for the first time. You can use your laptop if you don't have an extra camera. You can get by with that fine. Ronnie showed you that with his video he used to. So it's not like you need to run out and get extra equipment for it. You know, you can use what you have to start and decide if it's something you want to keep doing. You can go from there. But give it a shot. We have Valentine's. The next time will probably won't be until St. Patrick's Day, so we're gonna have a nice breather in between for people to regroup a little bit. That's having back-to-back weeks like this was a lot.

And Chef Dennis, one, one other thing just for those that are brand new and are a little bit timid or not sure you want to do this. If you were to do a Hangout on Air, it will make a video. When that video is done, you can delete it. It does not need to exist any longer. For maybe the 3 or 5 people that were watching it, if even that, they— it never happened. If you decide that it's just so bad you don't want to keep it around, you can always delete it. It's really not that hard to get rid of them if you need to.

While we're talking about that, it's also a very good idea not to wait until the day of your Hangout to go out and start it, your Hangout On Air. You want to go in ahead of time, create one, go live, do everything that we're doing, create an event, and see if it works. Then you can go in and delete everything afterwards. You don't want to just go in there without having tried it before. Get somebody to go in with you, but do it ahead of time so you practice it, you know where everything goes, because you're still going to be scrambling until you've done it enough times, it will become second nature that you're gonna be trying to figure out how to grab that YouTube URL and where to put it. I don't remember where to put it. Why didn't I invite this? And what did I do? So, you know, practice, practice. Grab someone.

One of my clients wanted to do a test with me with him, and so we did. And basically we brought in some of his friends as audience so we could try to see how do we track the comments And basically we went through a whole dry run and then he felt much more comfortable and then when he did his first show it worked out a lot better after that. So there's different ways to do your testing. Just try it out on your own if nothing else and realize this also, you can enter a Hangout On Air without going live. You don't have to click the Go Live button. When you first start the Hangout On Air you're in what I call the green room area where you have all the tools, you have all the stuff but you don't have to click the start the broadcast button, and you can play around with it, see what it looks like, and you can even look at the video while it's— before it starts, because you and you alone as the owner get to see the live video. So you can— there's a lot of things you can do before you ever press the start broadcast button, and you might even just close. You don't even need to start the broadcast just to be part of the testing. Someone's saying bloopers. Yeah, we should make bloopers.

It'd be a long, long video.

Yeah, it's good stuff. I am enjoying it. I hope you guys are as well.

Absolutely. Well, Ronnie, I think that's going to pretty much wrap it up. We don't have any other questions out there. We covered a lot of information, and all you can do is just try it. Until you try it, you'll never know. What you could do or what it could be. Give it a try, don't be afraid. There's a lot of people to help you. We have— actually, we're going to start a group of people mentoring also for the next event coming up for St. Patrick's Day. We'll give you somebody that will work with you too. We'll give you all the help you need to be successful. Google+, Hangouts on Air, if you're not there, you should be because it's the future. It's the future, baby, I'm telling you. Alright, thanks for stopping by, Ronnie. Thanks so much for being here.

Been a pleasure, thanks for having me.

And we'll see you next time when we have our next Community Education Hangout. I think we have coming up on the 12th, I'm pretty sure we're going to have Adam Barnes from Picture Perfect Meals, and he's going to show us how he takes his photographs, setting up in the studio and positioning lights and positioning yourself. Get a good shot. So that's something we have to look forward to. Alright, well, thanks again for coming tonight. I'm Chef Dennis Littley. My guest was Ronnie Binzer, the Hangout Helper, and we're very happy you could come with us tonight. Have a great night.