Ok, so I need to build a crawler but there are a few twists involved. I need to be able to add takeitems/enable selected takeitems in a scene group in the sequencer up to 45 items. Because of this I cannot be using the Parent/Child Scene Method and I don’t think this method applies either(https://rossvideo.community/discussion/issues-with-crawl-animating-text-and-publishing-text#bmff56b994-8d4d-435f-813b-edd5ba885ad4).
But here’s the twist. I would still like to be able to mask out the crawl so that the items don’t run all the way out the side of the screen but keep within a masked area. So kind of a mix between the two. Basically the first time the crawler will be used it’s going to be 15 items, second time 25, third time 35 and forth time 45. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to add and adjust all the scenes. I have about 1 week until I’ll have to go looking for alternative solutions to this problem/adjust the design to comfort the limits.
Johannes,
should the crawll only play once or should it loop?
Will the scene be online when you are switching from 15 to 25 etc items?
Is all text data availble, before the scene comes online?
do you need also a seperator in between the items?
If you could share your base scene here, especially the masking part it would help finding a solution.
Robert
Hi Robert,
All very good questions. The Crawl should loop at the end. The scene will not be only when the amount of items in the rotation will be changing. Imagine it like this. From one game to the next the set of rules change and they should be displayed in a rotation. So in the first match there are 10 rules, in the second match there are 20 rules etc. But the scene will be offline in the mean time.
The text data is available a few minutes before the scene needs to go online. But each item from the rotation will have to be linked to an excel sheet so that the contents can be changed quickly. They don’t need to update on air.
I do need separators. There will always be 5 separators. So in the first match with 10 items it will be after every second item, at the end with 40 items it would be after every 8th item.
The crawler should look something like this:
The bottom line here should be the crawl. Each item consists of a single text box and an image. Like a icon and the name.
This is just a template to give an idea since the real version doesn’t exist yet. But this is what I would like to accomplish. The only problem I have, is the fact that I can’t mask the crawl using the group-crawl function in the sequencer. But using the scene group I can’t quickly change the amount of items in the crawl.
The easy solution would be to just have the design accommodate this and have the crawl run into the screen and off the screen instead of using a mask to border the content. Since this is not the first time I wanted to use a crawl this way I’m looking for solutions for future projects aswell.
3 options as I see it.
- easiest
You find a way to build it using the scene groups so you can mask.
If the string is empty turn off the object which will effectively skip those pages.
-
hardest
You build it all in one scene and use script to animate the crawl, I have done this is a few projects, it takes a good knowledge of scripting.
-
weirdest
route your live feed into your xpression, make a scene with your live put on and put on the highest layer and uses masks to cut a hole to show your graphics on the lower layers, this will hide the text where the cutouts are not.
You’ll need to trigger the animation cut outs in the top scene in line with your lower layer graphics.
Everything will be adding a delay into your system as well.
Hi Simon,
This could work with an eventmarker that jumps to the first frame of a scenedirector and some visual logic to disable the empty boxes and line them up one after another. That way the animation would run until the eventmarker comes on screen and then jumps back to the first frame. It wouldn’t be a clean loop but maybe worth a shot.
This sounds the most promising but unfortunately I don’t have enough knowledge in scripting to pull this off.
This one I would love to try out just for the sake of having it done once because it does sound funny but I also don’t think we have the technical options to consider this a viable option
Thanks for the quick help to both of you.
for 1 you can just use visual logic “isempty” block and link it to all the objects in the scene, if all are visibility off the scene essentially has no width.
Johannes,
I have tried to create a scene that I hope will help you. The scene currently contains 10 items, but you can copy it as many times as you need. In the logic tab (data), also copy the item logic with an increment. All text fields that are not filled in will disappear from the crawl.
Text has not been attached to an Excel file yet, but I assume you know how that part works.
Because it is a “regular” scene, you can do all your masking with the layer object as you are used to.
You could also make it so that the crawl automatically animates after, for example, 1 run.
attached you find my scene. just import it to your project to explore.
Hope it helps you. And for questions you know were to find me
Regards Robert
had to zip the scene because the file type .xpe is not supported to upload here, at least i got that notification here