Graphics

I have been putting together a crawl with election data in Xpression. I have a scene group in the Scene Manager, with multiple scenes in it. In the viewport, each scene has a group element with the text element for name of race (senate/rep/gov/etc.), a quad with a little graphical divider, anther text element with candidate1 name, percentage of votes with graphic box behind, another divider element, and then candidate2 name, percentage with graphic box behind it, and so forth for each candidate. You get the picture. Anyway, I have run into 2 issues.

1. I find it a pain in the neck to edit these scenes in the viewport. Often the text extends off the screen, especially with amendments, I cannot see what is there unless I run the crawl and wait for it or, the way I am doing it now, scrubbing the x-position to see it all, then putting it back when I'm done editing it. I have seen the Xpression U videos on using visual logic to do stuff like this with crawls, but it just seems so kludgy. Is there a way to see data that extends beyond the viewport or even arrange the data in a different way on the screen, but set it up to crawl all of these elements in the order I decide?
2. As election results start coming in, I want to be able to add scenes to the crawl. Right now, I cant find a way to do this on the fly. I keep having to start and stop the crawl to see what i have, or sometimes it cuts the crawl offline and restarts it updated, but that is just unacceptable. I've tried to add the scenes in the Scene Manager directly to the Scene Group, but that does not update on the fly. Nor does it update if I create a Group in the Sequencer set to Crawl and just add these take items into the group on the fly. Normally, you can do this in the Sequencer with other Group that are set to Timed, but if the Sequence Group is set to Crawl it does NOT work, nor does it show you which scene is online. it merely shows that the Sequence Group is Active.  Anyway, none of this updates it while it's live. Is there a way to do this?
3. Id also like to stop the crawl at any point, but I want the online scene to finish it's crawl before it stops. Anotherwords, I don't want a hard transition, such as any of my Scene Director/Animators to take the scene offline, and I also dont want to have to wait for the crawl to finish, bc there will be a lot of items in the crawl. Is there a way to do this?

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Roger Heyward
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Do you know how to script? 

You could put text objects in a layer object on the parents scene and type into those, when the child scenes come online the will read from the parent. See my attached project for exactly this. 

To be able to do what you want on top of that, so "live update" you can either connect those files to data or if you want to keep it internal to the project you could try updating those fields using data pages. This last option I haven't tried in conjunction with a crawl scene before so I'd be interested in the results. 

Here's how to use data pages. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfQiDRkxjCA

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Simon Redmile
Senior Graphic Programmer & Designer
Ross Video
Bristol United Kingdom
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-29-2022 15:04
From: Roger Heyward
Subject: Help with Crawl

I have been putting together a crawl with election data in Xpression. I have a scene group in the Scene Manager, with multiple scenes in it. In the viewport, each scene has a group element with the text element for name of race (senate/rep/gov/etc.), a quad with a little graphical divider, anther text element with candidate1 name, percentage of votes with graphic box behind, another divider element, and then candidate2 name, percentage with graphic box behind it, and so forth for each candidate. You get the picture. Anyway, I have run into 2 issues.

1. I find it a pain in the neck to edit these scenes in the viewport. Often the text extends off the screen, especially with amendments, I cannot see what is there unless I run the crawl and wait for it or, the way I am doing it now, scrubbing the x-position to see it all, then putting it back when I'm done editing it. I have seen the Xpression U videos on using visual logic to do stuff like this with crawls, but it just seems so kludgy. Is there a way to see data that extends beyond the viewport or even arrange the data in a different way on the screen, but set it up to crawl all of these elements in the order I decide?
2. As election results start coming in, I want to be able to add scenes to the crawl. Right now, I cant find a way to do this on the fly. I keep having to start and stop the crawl to see what i have, or sometimes it cuts the crawl offline and restarts it updated, but that is just unacceptable. I've tried to add the scenes in the Scene Manager directly to the Scene Group, but that does not update on the fly. Nor does it update if I create a Group in the Sequencer set to Crawl and just add these take items into the group on the fly. Normally, you can do this in the Sequencer with other Group that are set to Timed, but if the Sequence Group is set to Crawl it does NOT work, nor does it show you which scene is online. it merely shows that the Sequence Group is Active.  Anyway, none of this updates it while it's live. Is there a way to do this?
3. Id also like to stop the crawl at any point, but I want the online scene to finish it's crawl before it stops. Anotherwords, I don't want a hard transition, such as any of my Scene Director/Animators to take the scene offline, and I also dont want to have to wait for the crawl to finish, bc there will be a lot of items in the crawl. Is there a way to do this?

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Roger Heyward
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