Casparcg Flash

Those of you who know me will know I’m quite up for doing seemingly mad things if someone throws them at me and they involve some challenges of a technical nature. Back sometime in April, already planning to go along to BUCK – Europe’s largest brony convention, held in The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, UK – I asked their staff if they needed any technical people to help out on the day. “No, but we need a technical manager” was the response. How could I say no? Two weeks from the gig, and things are now settling down to the nitty-gritty of producing content for the live stream. The stream itself is fairly complex – four Sony PMW-200 cameras, two of them with Wevi HD-SDI senders, a Roland V-1600HD vision mixer and a boatload of computers feeding in video. Any decent multicam production needs a little bit of glamour in the form of lower thirds (the things that pop up to say who people are) and some title cards.

The first tutorial is how to make a simple lower third from a video file (that includes alpha) and convert it into a CasparCG flash template with the Template Generator plugin in Animate CC (2019 is tested). Dynamic media is played by the CasparCG Server’s Flash Producer, so everything that the Adobe FlashPlayer can handle can be played. This includes Flash animations SWF and Flash video FLV as well as audio, all via the FT file (which is just a SWF that has gone through TemplateGenerator.).

Of course, this being a quite low-budget production we wanted to do this on a budget. Enter, a superb open source playout system designed and developed by our friends at SVT, Sweden’s BBC equivalent. This is a bit of a rushed walkthrough of how I put some of the stuff together. CasparCG supports dynamic templates by way of Flash. This does rather saddle you with the Adobe stack for content creation but this isn’t a total deal-breaker now that Adobe have adopted a more sensible pricing model with Creative Cloud. The CasparCG guys tell me they’re working on making things easier but the Adobe toolset is incredibly capable anyway, so it’s not a total pain.

So what do we need to do to produce our template? Let’s examine a finished product. The above video was made using the x264 disk consumer in CasparCG on a heavily loaded machine, hence a few late frames. Ultraman fighting evolution 3 iso ps2 games. We’ve got two graphical elements and two lines of text, and we’d like to animate the graphical elements and have the text changeable so we don’t have to pre-render one of these movies for every person who might come up on the stream! So here’s the workflow I came up with. Making the stuff First up, let’s just actually lay this all out in Photoshop.

I have my bar, logo, and text elements on different layers, laid out as they should be. If you create a new Photoshop document using the Films and TV presets, you get safe area guides for free, so you can avoid areas likely to be hidden by player chrome or cropping. As this stream is HD, we’re doing production in 1920×1080 resolution, so use the appropriate format. Once this is done and you’ve got it looking like you want, export each layer on its own PNG at full resolution. But ignore the text – we’re not going to rejoin it until later. Just remember the position, font and styles – it’s time to get transitional. New Adventures in AE I’m not an After Effects, animation, or film production whiz.

So this part will likely get me shouted at – but it’s working! First up, make a new composition. We’re targeting 1080p25 (25 full frames a second; the mixer is actually working at 1080i50 for output but we’re using DVI inputs so this doesn’t matter) so set the composition up appropriately. Next, drag in the assets and layer them as you want. The text isn’t there and we won’t be adding this in AE, so make sure you don’t obscure the area you will put the text on or it’ll look odd. I then applied a couple of effects to be our “transition” effects; a CC Grid Wipe for the bar, and a CC Light Wipe for the logo. Tweak the effects as you please, and then use keyframes on the completion parameter to set them up to start as soon as the clip does and end a couple of seconds in. You can preview this and tweak it in AE as much as you like until it looks perfect.

Bear in mind the constraints of your keyer if appropriate – if you’re doing split key/fill on a synchronized pair of SDI outputs, then fantastic, but as we’re using DVI we’ll be using a luma keyer in the mixer. While you’re tweaking your keyframes, bear in mind you don’t need to export the full length movie with a pause – we’ll add that later. Make sure you’ve got half a second or so in the middle where nothing is happening and we’ll mark that as our outro pause. Add the composition to the render queue, export it as FLV with Alpha, and fire up Flash. Gordon’s Alive! Flash is doing the magic here. As a browser plugin it may be awful but it is rather handy for this.