Graphics

Hey!

Is there a way to hide and show whatever is on a framebuffer layer (toggle visibility), without clearing it or taking it offline?

My situation is;

• I am producing an interview between a studio and a live reporter.
• I am mixing between two sources on my Carbonite switcher: a 2-split DVE and the live source
• When the live source is on air, I want my live bug graphic to be visible, but when the 2-split DVE is online I want it to hide.
• I want my graphics operator to take the live bug online when the interview starts, and offline when it ends, but not have her to take it on and off every time I cut between the two sources during the interview.

I find it easy to take the bug off through RossTalk from the switcher, but hard to take the right element online again, as my workflow includes numerous takeIDs for different live bugs.

Any ideas? Thanks! :)

Not familiar as much with the switcher side, but our TD has set up a system of masks when it comes to locators or OTS templates. This way you can keep the layer online in the frame buffer but just mask out the section it lives in. This of course could be much trickier depending on how your graphics package is designed. This may be a better question for the carbonite community.

I could think of some ways that you could "toggle" the visbility rather than taking on/offline with a script of visual logic, but it would be a bit circuitous and the juice might probably wouldn't be worth the squeeze as they say.

Thats a great tip! Thanks! :)

You could script to find any graphics on a particular layer i.e (5) move it to another framebuffer that you're not using, even a virtual framebuffer for example, then script to move it back to the online framebuffer however I would say the masking solution above makes more sense. The only upside to this solution is you'd actually still be able to see the graphic somewhere. 

Hi Ole,

So I think that I have the script that you need to make this work.  You would need to use dashboard, or some form of keyboard shortcut in order to trigger this.  If you have a carbonite, it could trigger a GPI on the XPression as well and you would get your result.

Script:

dim fb as xpOutputFrameBuffer

engine.GetOutputFrameBuffer(0, fb)

fb.SetLayerVisibile (0, False)

That script is telling your system to get your main Frame Buffer, in Xpression world, 0 is 1 for Outputs, so that is the 0.  Then in Layer Visible, that 0 is actually zero, then the False turns that layer off.

I placed this script into the custom keyboard/GPI mapping.  I tied this script to a GPI trigger, and then I made a dashboard button that fired this GPI.

You would also need a 2nd GPI trigger that returns a value of (0, True) in order to turn that layer visible again.  Content will still go to and play on that layer, but in Xpression it will turn red showing that the layer is not visible.  If it is black then it will display the content on that layer.