CgElementsController

Description

This plugin allows basic CG video overlay with station logo, parental sign and information crawl. All these elements may be selected from multiple kinds, e.g. special logo for premiere shows. The plugin, if successfully loaded, will show on TVPlay's status bar like this:

Status bar controls allows to change presented items independently of current rundown. They may be used to correct mistakes, and always show current CG state. In normal rundown flow, changes are triggered with starting subsequent clips (or live items). If the plugin is active, the items have visible following properties on its details panel:

So we can enable or disable CG triggering for the item - if it's disabled, starting the item will not change the CG state at all. If enabled, the controller will set the state to specified for the item. The state set for an rundown element can be visible on main rundown panel like this:

Each CG element that is trigerred may be one of:

• A static image with transparency (e.g. PNG file),
• A movie, i.e. MOV file with transparent PNGs inside,
• A Flash animation, this allows dynamic content required for informational crawl.

Plugin files

The plugin consists of two files: TVPlay\Plugins\TAS.Server.CgElementsController.dll and its configuration TVPlay\Configuration\CgElementsControllers.xml.

Configuration

All plugin configuration is in the TVPlay\Configuration\CgElementsControllers.xml. There a some key settings that determines its work. First is EngineName, this must match actual engine name set up in TVPlay.config.exe, because the plugin can operate differently for multiple engines running on the machine. Elements and its names are self-explaining, but most important for operation is Command. This command will be executed on both (if you have redundant output) server channels. Let's look at the examples:

• PLAY CG3 EMPTY MIX 25 - this command will show empty (transparent) color, with 25-frames fade(-out) transition on CG3 layer (this is layer number 19).
• PLAY CG4 LOGO1 MIX 25 - this will play file LOGO1 on layer 20. The file may be static logo1.png or logo1.mov in CasparCG media directory, which will stop on last frame unless LOOP is added to the command.
• CG CG3 ADD 1 CRAWL_NORMAL 1 - this will show CRAWL_NORMAL.FT Flash animation from CaparCG templates directory.

There is also ImageFile property - it's a relative path to small icon that will be shown on rundown indicating that the element is set for particular rundown item.