Pictures and slides during live broadcasts.

H

hereatrainacomin

Carbonite Member
I am not too familiar with broadcasting, only the basics.

What is the standard way of putting slides, lower thirds, and pictures (including over-the-shoulder pics) onto the video feed?

Is there a program that works with that, and then puts it into the video mixer?

Any help is appreciated.
 
You use a computer called a "Character Generator" , or "CG" for short. It creates the graphics and outputs them, and as you summized, to a video mixer which then "keys" (overlays) them over a video signal.

The "poor" man's CG application is powerpoint where slides are made with a black background that is then keyed out with a video mixer. The catch is that you can't use Black in your graphics this way.

The above mentioned Chryon set the standard for CGers many years ago and they continue to lead the filed of many many CG vendors.


What is your application, what are you trying to do? And what do you allready have, and what's your budget?

- Mikko
 
I'm a trained TV graphics operator and I think I can answer your question:

There are three major systems used for graphics these days. They are Avid Deko, Inscriber and Chyron. Chyron used to be the top of the line but these days Decco is the standard. These programs are huge, complicated and requires trained personel (not to mention a proper studio with multikeying switchers etc). I myself am trained on Inscriber Inca 2.0 and use it every day.

The setup varies greatly from station to station. But here's a basic breakdown:

you have one system that displays graphics (photos, animated backgrounds etc) and a separate system that displays font. Therefore you'll usually see two people in the credits: Graphics and Font. Font literally means plotting text into a system that is then displayed by graphics. Some systems like the Inca and certain versions of the Decco do this in one system or at least reduce the operation to just one person but like I said it varies greatly.

If you look at more complicated setups like CNN you are actually seeing multiple different systems running at the same time. The animated logo on the left is one CG system, the scrolling headlines on the bottom is a downstream system (after the switcher, probably put in by master control), the keys are a separate system and all the fancy throws, stings and splashes are locked templates that are triggered directly from the switcher.

I could go into endless detail about this topic if you want to, but my show goes to air in 13 minutes so I have to stop for now.

mor10
 
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Looked at them all, they all seem nice.

We are currently using PowerPoint, but this is no longer acceptable because it is slow and unreliable.

What is the next cheapest way?
 
Again, what are you trying to do? .. What is your application?

And more information about your set up would be usefull. What video mixer are you using? SD? HD? 4:3? 16:9? Analog or digital video? etc, etc..


- Mikko
 
Same question here...
I'm shooting live video and want to add real-time subtitles (person's names) to video. By "real-time" I mean typing text on primary display and this text changes interactively on secondary display but hardest thing is...this text must crawl endlessly without interruption. Keying to video is not a problem because signal from S-Video is going through mixer (Pana MX20) to plasma screens. I'm using DVX100A, so SD quality is enough.
I guess Inscriber can do this but I want something simpler and cheaper. Just software for laptop.

For you heratrainacomin maybe BluffTitler: http://www.outerspace-software.com/blufftitler.html
It uses latest DirectX9 technology for realtime text and bitmaps. Great thing!
Unfortunately crawling must stop when typing text, so...not for me :-(
 
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I really don't think there are any "cheap" sollutions out there that do what you want simply because it's more complicated than it sounds.

when you display graphics that are not full screen you need to cut a hole in the video and display your graphics within that hole. this is called "keying". if you look at a graphics system you'll see it consists of a "key" feed and a "fill" feed. The Key contains the info on where the hole should be cut, the Fill is what's displayed inside it.

The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to alpha mattes when you are doing editing.

it seems easy enough, just display the graphics/text on top of the video but in reality it's the other way around.

That is unless you use a "downstream" system that puts the graphics on top of everything else. That's the norm when using bottom crawls and such. it requires a graphics system or a toaster that can take the video signal, put the graphics on top and output the combination.

regardless it's complicated and expensive. the cheap solutions are incredibly bad and frustrating to use. To my knowledge there is no "software only" system that will do this simply because the process of putting graphics underneath or on top of the video requires hardware.

mor10
 
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