Production Switchers

Hi Bill,

I suspect you were using XPression Designer to render images into the Carbonite's MediaStore. Unfortunately, this only works for stills and will not work for animations like a crawl.

To do a crawl with the same operation, you will need to use a higher-tiered XPression license, with hardware that can output SDI key and fill. The key and fill video are then sent to the Carbonite Solo as a physical input. However, this has a cost implication.

A less elegant (but zero cost) solution will be to configure XPression Designer to render to a Virtual Output. The Virtual Output can be sent via HDMI of the XPression Designer's machine to the Carbonite Solo, and use Self Key to key out the black areas of the crawl. This signal does not carry an alpha component, so the keying may not be as clean.

Good day, all. Aaron is correct; since Designer really only works with stills, a crawl would not work. And his suggestion of Self Keying out the black areas would likely work so long as there is a clear and clean difference between the black areas and the crawl text. Another thing you could try is creating the XPression graphic over green (or some other color that isn't contained in the text) and then using a Chroma-key instead of Self Key. Although the auto-setup system may work a bit better, it still might take some experimentation to get the settings just right. 

Good luck and let us know if we can assist further. 

Hi Bill,

I suspect you were using XPression Designer to render images into the Carbonite's MediaStore. Unfortunately, this only works for stills and will not work for animations like a crawl.

To do a crawl with the same operation, you will need to use a higher-tiered XPression license, with hardware that can output SDI key and fill. The key and fill video are then sent to the Carbonite Solo as a physical input. However, this has a cost implication.

A less elegant (but zero cost) solution will be to configure XPression Designer to render to a Virtual Output. The Virtual Output can be sent via HDMI of the XPression Designer's machine to the Carbonite Solo, and use Self Key to key out the black areas of the crawl. This signal does not carry an alpha component, so the keying may not be as clean.

Good day, all. Aaron is correct; since Designer really only works with stills, a crawl would not work. And his suggestion of Self Keying out the black areas would likely work so long as there is a clear and clean difference between the black areas and the crawl text. Another thing you could try is creating the XPression graphic over green (or some other color that isn't contained in the text) and then using a Chroma-key instead of Self Key. Although the auto-setup system may work a bit better, it still might take some experimentation to get the settings just right. 

Good luck and let us know if we can assist further. 

Hi Bill,

I suspect you were using XPression Designer to render images into the Carbonite's MediaStore. Unfortunately, this only works for stills and will not work for animations like a crawl.

To do a crawl with the same operation, you will need to use a higher-tiered XPression license, with hardware that can output SDI key and fill. The key and fill video are then sent to the Carbonite Solo as a physical input. However, this has a cost implication.

A less elegant (but zero cost) solution will be to configure XPression Designer to render to a Virtual Output. The Virtual Output can be sent via HDMI of the XPression Designer's machine to the Carbonite Solo, and use Self Key to key out the black areas of the crawl. This signal does not carry an alpha component, so the keying may not be as clean.