Concept: Stack moving and still graphic elements in VT[4]’s DDR and DSK and use the switcher to reveal them as a moving lower third
Module: CG Designer, Switcher, CG Player and DDR
Assets: Motion_Lower_Third_Assets.zip (3.5MB download)
Time: 5 minutes

With VT[4] LIVE!, NewTek delivers some of the most efficient and affordable live production available, at any price. One of its key attributes is integrated live switching and titling. Packing a live breaking headline onto a motion background lower third with a foreground logo bug is easy, using the compositing capabilities of the DDR and the DSK.

To get started we need to create or locate our graphic elements.

We need a motion background.

For this tutorial, five minutes work in LightWave 3D ® with three spotlights waving around on a flat rectangle yielded a one-second video clip that was loaded into VT Edit, where it was copied, mirrored and composited into a couple of cross-dissolving layers. This was rendered into a 10-second AVI looping motion background. It’s surprising how quickly and easily a single clip of almost any video can be slowed, blurred resized and re-colored with VT-Edit’s control tree and real-time production to provide a mellow motion background.

If starting from scratch is not your thing, it’s OK to shortcut here and use a ready-made motion background, like RedBG_10S.avi. provided in the link above.

Next, we need to make our CG pages. We could create a single CG page with all of our elements, some crawling and some still, but since we’re dealing with breaking news headlines, which change frequently, we are going to make two different CG pages – one with our common identifying elements, and one with the crawling headline itself.

We’ll start by launching CG Designer. If another project is already loaded, we can clear the slate by selecting the menu at the top File > New.

The first element we’ll create is the headline itself, and we’ll use it as a guide to align our remaining elements. We need to select our Page Type as Crawl using the Page Type drop down menu. Clicking the motion tab gives us the Motion Tools menu where we choose the left arrow, so our text will crawl right to left on the screen. Clicking the View Tab brings us the View options, where we can turn on the Safe Zones – since we want to make sure our crawl is in the text safe area of the screen that is a must.

Let’s get typing. The text tab lets us select the text cursor. Just click on the lower left corner of the text safe area (the innermost of the two rectangular guides) to position our headline crawl, and then start typing. This is our newsflash: “NewTek releases shocking new tutorial detailing how to take advantage of multiplayer lower thirds to make your productions POP!”

Click the Text tab at the bottom of the CG Designer window, to get access to the font our headline uses. For easy reading, let’s go with the Impact font in the default color of white. Setting the width and height of the text to 35 will size it up nicely for our purposes.

Now, it’s time to save this CG Project. Select File > Save As Project. To keep things tidy, lets save it in the CG pages bin, and name it Headline_tutorial.

Let’s spice things up a little more. Instead of the text just crawling, we’ll have it crawl out of a logo.

Dropping graphics into a CG page is drag and click simple. Just click on the filebin tab and find our NewTek logo – NewTek_Logo.png. Then drag it up onto the CG layout and drop it in. Drag and scale it so that it covers the right hand side of the crawl into our text safe area. When creating logo graphics specifically for this type of project, it is a good idea to save in the 24 bit .png format. While CG designer supports multiple formats, .png works especially well, and supports transparency.

Since we don’t want to logo to crawl along with the text, we need to tell it to stand still. That’s easy – with the logo selected, check Lock Item Position. Now, our text will seemingly generate from under the logo while the page is playing.

We can tackle our static elements page next. This is the rest of the text and graphics we want to appear in our lower third before the crawl starts and after it ends. In the right hand column of CG designer is a list of pages in our project. Just click the clone button and now we have two copies of our headline page. Click Page1, so we can make it into our static element page.

We don’t want this page to crawl, so we’ll change it to a still page, by choosing Still Page as our page type from the pull down menu in the upper left of the CG Designer window.

Lets break out that text cursor again, and use it to start a new line of text above the crawl line which says “Breaking Video News:”

Now, with our static elements done we need to get the crawl text off the page. Under the text tab, make sure the pointer tool is selected and click the crawling headline text to highlight it, then press the delete key.

We don’t want to delete the NewTek logo though. It is going to be onscreen before our crawl starts. When we bring in the crawl the NewTek logo on the crawl page will line up right over it. This prevents the logo from suddenly appearing when we turn on the DSK.

From the File menu, save the project. If you want to make additional crawling headlines, you can do so easily, just by cloning page 2 of the project, and editing the crawling text.

OK, our elements are ready, so let’s go to air.

In a live production environment, we’ll have the switcher running while we’re on the air, and our source video – a video camera, network feed, or program segment rolling on DDR will be selected on the main bus. For this tutorial, we’re using a video clip in a DDR, and have it on input 1 of the Switcher.

We’ll launch another DDR, and use that to build the composite of our background and common graphic elements.

In DDR 2, we’ll simply hit the Add Media button and select our animated background video clip. If we were to add more video clips, they would play in sequence with our background. Instead, we are going to add a CG page. After clicking the Add Media button, look in the CG_Pages bin and select Headline_Tutorial.cg. The DDR will take the first page from that CG project (our static elements page) and key it over the clip.

CG pages are automatically set to a duration of 10 seconds by the DDR – conveniently we’ve used a background loop of the same length, otherwise our graphics would disappear after the first ten seconds the loop was running. Turn on the Loop function of the DDR, and press play.

Now we need to ready our crawl. Launch the CG Player, and from its file menu, load Headline_Tutorial.cg out of the CG Pages bin. Use the selector at the top of the CG Player window to choose page 2, our headline crawl.

Since the speed of 1 is painfully slow, lets pep the speed up to 3. We’re going to overlay the crawl into our lower third using the switcher’s Downstream Keyer, or DSK. In the downstream keyer section of the switcher interface, use the pull-down menu to select CG as the source (if you have left the CG Designer open on another desktop, the CG Player may show up as CG2.)

We also need to ready the Switcher. To reveal just the lower third of the moving graphics in DDR2, we’ll use vertical wipe DVE, but only pull it part way. In the Switcher’s DVE’s tab, double click an empty DVE slot, and select 1058_Wipe2.dve from the 1000_Wipes folder, or simply type 1058 in the numeric entry input area. When this DVE is selected, it’s icon will eppear in the DVE Ready position.

Go Live!

OK, our graphics are layered and rolling in DDR2, our program is live on the main bus. Select DDR2 on the preview bus so we can use the DVE to reveal it. The crawl is loaded in CG player, the DSK has it selected, and we have an appropriate DVE loaded – we’re ready to put our headline on the air.

To reveal our motion lower third, pull the fader bar down just far enough to reveal the lower third of our graphic page. This means pulling the bar to about the 25% position. Watch the program out, so be sure you pull just a bit past out text which reads “Breaking News.”

Then hit play on the CG Player, and immediately punch the DSK button to overlay our crawl on the program out. When the crawl is finished turn the DSK off, and push the fader bar back up to its top position to wipe our lower third back off the screen.

Don’t forget you have to push the fader bar back to the top. Pulling it down, or pressing the space bar would complete the DVE and put DDR 2 on the main bus.

For an added visual impression, wipe the lower third off while the DSK is still on – this will keep the NewTek logo on screen as a corner logo bug until we hit the Fade DSK button to dissolve it out. Alternative DVEs such as side to side wipes, and compression DVEs can similarly be used to reveal motion background CG pages in other screen positions.

About the authors: Bill Mills and his wife Dawn own and operate Corinthian Media Services, producing multi-media content for their clients. They also produce specialty DVE sets for the VT[4], including DVEs built specifically to reveal graphic pages. The complete line of CMS Wipes DVEs can be found at http://www.corin.com/wipes