Production Switchers

I'm trying to come up with an easier way for our producers to be able to change from one full screen background to a different background. Currently, if they make a full screen with our normal generic background and they want to change to our election background, for example, they have to select a different template and remake the full screen from scratch. My thought was to make a drop down menu of the different background materials they could choose from in the MOS editor. This way if they wanted a different background they could easily make that change without having to remake the full screen from scratch. Does anyone know if doing something like this is possible and if so how I would go about doing this? Thank you in advance for any help.

I don't know that a drop-down menu is possible (afaik), but we do something similar.

We have a store of "generic" images for our OTS scenes, and the producers just navigate to the one image they want to use for each story. The image is just a published object that can be edited in iNews through the MOS plugin. Our creative services and production team manages the generic images, so they have what they need 90% of the time.

As for video materials, that's a different beast (that may have been fixed in newer versions). We cannot currently set videos in a published material. I've been toying with the idea of scripting video changes, so that the producers need only input a character or word into a non-visible field, which will then set the image in the background.

For example:

dim ElectionBK as xpMaterial

dim UrgentBK as xpMaterial

dim GenericBK as xpMaterial

dim BKG as xpBaseObject

dim TxtFlag as xpTextObject

Engine.GetMaterialByName("Election BKG Video", ElectionBK)

Engine.GetMaterialByName("Urgent BKG Video", UrgentBK)

Engine.GetMaterialByName("Generic BKG Video", GenericBK)

Self.GetObjectByName("BKG Video", BKG)

Self.GetObjectByName("Background Type", TxtFlag)

If InStr(Ucase(TxtFlag.Text, "ELECTION")) = 1 then

BKG.SetMaterial(0, ElectionBK)

ElseIf

InStr(Ucase(TxtFlag.Text, "URGENT")) = 1 then

BKG.SetMaterial(0, UrgentBK)

Else

BKG.SetMaterial(0, GenericBK)

End If

Just a thought, I haven't tried it out ever, but don't see why that wouldn't work. There would just be a text field to enter "election" or "urgent" or anything else you might want, then the scene would change the background video for you.

#Carbonite

Something that has worked well for me is using the visibility option in template links. Make your standard background constant and furthest back. Then create other backgrounds in front of that one with the visibility off in your scene but checked in template links.

#Carbonite