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exsimdave  
#1 Posted : Tuesday, March 14, 2017 9:26:04 AM(UTC)
exsimdave

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Hi all,

First, just wanted to say I'm new to vMix and to digital TV production in general - trained in the early days of DV so while I'm not totally unfamiliar with the offline world, there's a lot that's new to me!

I just wanted to pop up a general question to you all... I'm trying to create a live leaderboard and league table feature, and while I see the scoreboard titles these are largely based around team sports. This would be for motor racing, so would be good to get some live updating leaderboards with deltas, as well as a league table that we could set to update based on current race positions etc.

While I'm reasonably happy with creating a spreadsheet that contains sufficient data to base this on, what I'm not sure about i how to get this to import into an appropriate title in vMix.

I should add that I only discovered vMix through working through how we would operate CasparCG via an NDI feed but I have not yet gone to the trouble to set up a Caspar machine as this seems both complicated and convoluted so if at all possible I'd rather keep everything in the same box, if this is possible....?

Here's hoping!

Thanks in advance for any suggestions / help folks.

Dave
doggy  
#2 Posted : Tuesday, March 14, 2017 9:47:54 AM(UTC)
doggy

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Hi Dave and welcome

Have a quick look at using datasources to fill your titles with http://www.vmix.com/help19/index.htm?DataSources.html

There are various ways but as you mention already using exel sources this might be a way to start getting familiar with the concept.
Then designing title to your liking to hold the appropriate data will be the next fun part

there is a little video tutorial too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9CcKd9GeSY
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exsimdave on 3/15/2017(UTC)
DWAM  
#3 Posted : Tuesday, March 14, 2017 9:55:30 AM(UTC)
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Hi Dave!

first welcome to the vMix community and live production universe!

Concerning your request, the first thing to know is whether the competitions you intend to broadcast/webcast have "official" timings, rankings, standings systems. As the case may be, what is it and is there an interface device that could feed your titles with "official" data.

Alternatively some websites provide realtime data that we can use sometimes. You have to search for this.

Usually we like XML or JSON data which are updated in realtime and pretty easy to exploit in titler softwares or vMix directly. In vMix we call this datasource as you may already know considering you're talking about spreadsheets which are an alternative to real database.

In case you have to create everything by yourself, some of it is quite easy (league rankings e.g.) but the timing part on motor racing is very complex and requires special equipments on the track but also in the cars. This is far beyond the simple titling problem so I have no advice for this. Again you must first check technical aspects with championship organizers.

To your question if it's possible to keep everything on the same machine, I will say technically yes but I wouldn't recommend it. I think it's better to spread the entire workflow for production over multiple computers with multiple oprators. It's difficult for a single operator to do everything on a single machine.

Take time to search the forum, you might find interesting information about other guys who do racing productions as well as titler softwares. vMix is very powerful for titles with datasource but as you already know CasparCG, there are interesting alternatives also.

Hope this helps a bit
Guillaume



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exsimdave on 3/15/2017(UTC)
exsimdave  
#4 Posted : Wednesday, March 15, 2017 8:23:09 AM(UTC)
exsimdave

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Hi guys,

Thanks for the advice! Interesting Guillaume that you say vMix can handle JSON data - our races run a web server that actually outputs JSON data over HTTP, so if I can get vMix to read this is cuts out a large amount of middleware... which is good! Is this JSON data capture part of the data manager? I'll give it a go now (though I'll have to work out how to send the data stream outside of the machine that hosts it... shouldn't be too difficult!) but any further info on this is greatly appreciated.

This will indeed be the "official" timings, rankings etc. - standings will come from a separate master spreadsheet which I can integrate using Google Sheets I suppose.

In terms of workflow / production, at the moment we are a small team so not really much option to separate workflow for the live timings - we can always add in additional info later, but for the live streams its really important that we capture as much of a TV-style broadcast as possible which is why I'm looking at automating as much as possible. I've been looking at using the UTC app for some of this which seems pretty powerful and we're also building up a library of bio sheets on all the drivers so we can bring those in as well.

Thanks again folks, will keep you posted as things progress!

Cheers,

Dave

**EDIT** found the JSONDataSource.dll file in the forums... Thanks!
DWAM  
#5 Posted : Wednesday, March 15, 2017 8:42:44 AM(UTC)
DWAM

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Dave

JSON implementation into vMix is not complete, so make sure to use JSON arrays.

Quote:
vMix can't read JSON as an object as that would require full Javascript integration, instead
it needs to rely on the JSON having some sort of table structure, and this means using an array.

JSON is included in the datasource manager by default.

Also it's important to understand that datasource can only read one row at a time. This is fine for most use cases but it complicates things when you want to build a ranking board for example.

So if you want to design a board with 10 first pilots with position # (column1), pilot name (col2) and timing (col3), you should not make a 10 row table with 3 columns but instead a 30 column row.
Second row with rankings from position 11 to 20 and so on.
This is confusing...
This was discussed in other topics. Search the forum to get more information.

Guillaume

PS : UTC is a good solution, I love it, but I use it on a remote computer with an operator. If you don't maybe you don't need it... Also there is no library for JSON in UTC. Only XML.
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