Graphics

I'm working on building a Scene Group in my Xpression Sequence which I would like to setup to playback a series of crawls. Each crawl contains anywhere between 5 and 47 scenes within. I'd like to have each crawl scene play out to end of it's own scenes before automatically going to the next crawl scene in the Scene Group, and when the final crawl scene reaches it's end, I need it to loop back to the top of the Scene Group and start at the first crawl scene.

What I'm ultimately trying to do is to take my main Crawl Group, which is made up of 12 location scenes, and a total of 190 individual child scenes, at be able to play back that crawl, and have control built in that would allow me to jump to one of the 12 locations within the crawl, as needed. The crawl plays back during our TV Bingo program, and because we take the crawl offline after each bingo game, it ends up started back at the beginning of the crawl each time, and never reaches the end of the list of vendors contained within the crawl.

I think I've make this sound way more complicated than it needs to be. Has anyone else found best practices for dealing with Bingo graphics and Xpression? Thanks

Bill

Hi Bill,

I'm not sure I have a simple solution to your issue of being able to restart the crawl at any point within it. If you are taking the crawl out on the switcher; you could potentially just pause the crawl on XPression, dissolve it out from the switcher; then when you are ready to bring it back in you resume it on XPression and dissolve it back it.

If you need to pause the crawl; you can attach a script to a keyboard hotkey. In the keyboard mapping menu; drag the script item into the project shortcuts and assign a keyboard stroke to it. The script event should be something like this (assuming the crawl is playing out on layer 5)

dim scene as xpSceneGroup
dim outfb as xpOutputFramebuffer

engine.GetOutputFramebuffer(0, outfb)
outfb.GetSceneOnLayer(5, scene)
scene.stop


If you are playing the scene out from the sequencer; after running this keyboard script; you will see the take item in the sequencer goes into the paused state. You can resume the crawl simply by double clicking on the take item again (or pressing Enter).

I know this isn't exactly how you asked for it to work, but this might be a good solution if you cant find a better way.


#XPression

Hi Brian,
This may work for the time being, as the initial concern was being able to get through the 190 individual messages in the crawl without having to restart after each game. With respect to the code that you've provided Brian, is that something that just needs to be copied and pasted into the CII window and compiled? Will I need to modify it in order to associate it to my specific scene? The crawl does come in on a different layer, and sits behind other full page graphics, between each of the games.

With respect to the other solution I was thinking about, if I were to create a separate crawl for each of the locations I'm looking to present, is there a easy method for getting the crawls to playback automatically within a scene group in my Sequence? With the playback options available, it doesn't seem to work well with crawl scenes. What am I missing?
#XPression

The script does not go in the CII window. It goes in the Keyboard Mapping menu. You might want to watch this if you've never used the keyboard mapping before:
http://www.rossvideo.com/graphics-system/xpression/xpression-u/video-tutorial-201.html

#XPression

Thanks Brian! I reviewed the tutorial, as it was one of the XPression U videos I hadn't seen yet - thanks for that! I've put the shortcut in place, and because it is being played back from the sequencer I've set my other graphics to a higher layer so that they appear over the crawl, which allows me to pause it in the background during my show break. I'll give this a try for the time being, as I think it will do the trick. If you have any ideas on how to setup a Scene Group with multiple crawls to play each crawl in sequence automatically, I'd like to pick you brain about that issue I'm looking to solve. Thanks again! Bill
#XPression