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Radiotvpat1982  
#1 Posted : Thursday, June 18, 2020 2:20:12 AM(UTC)
Radiotvpat1982

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Hi guys.

I am curious from hearing from people are currently building GT packages at a very high levels. I work on several different major graphics systems like Xpression, AJT and Viz RT.

I see what GT Titler can do in conjunction with the Universal Title Controler. Looks like from an animation point, GT Titler can do nearly everything they do. I am really curious to know if anyone has thought about or is attempting to go one step further and make some packages that are fully excel link based?

Excel is used in most higher end systems as the backbone of entering content. I like the UTC idea but currently it is a very manual process to go in and change out so many lines to switch from team to team. While a spreadsheet can just be saved over and easy updated. I know New Blue in their highest tier now uses spreadsheets to control many aspects of larger graphics packages. Does anyone know of a way to use the UTC controller and Excel together to speed up the process?

Any example is being able to make one change of a logo in Excel and have that logo change in every graphics that ties in to it. For example a road team. The game ends against "State" and now your are setting up for "A&M". Same thing with team colors, rosters, coaches, officials etc....

I have purchased a couple of the out the box packages but just find the process of updating info could be streamlined.
elgarf  
#2 Posted : Thursday, June 18, 2020 3:07:14 AM(UTC)
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@Radiotvpat1982,
You can use DataSources for that. I wanted to make something like this, when started UTC, but then DataSources appeared into vMix.

https://www.vmix.com/help23/DataSources.html
DWAM  
#3 Posted : Thursday, June 18, 2020 3:27:10 AM(UTC)
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As Elgarf said, datasources is the way to go... which means it's not limited to Excel. I have several projects where all titles content is fed from a MySQL database for example, others where I simply use a CSV file.
Radiotvpat1982  
#4 Posted : Thursday, June 18, 2020 8:05:43 AM(UTC)
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Good info guys. I did not mean to limit is just to Excel but that is just what I am used to working with in most large scale graphics providers.

I guess taking it one step out, would you guys link directly to a master linking source like Excel or would you just tie that in to something like the UTC already available?

I'm really talking about building and sorting hundreds of graphics. Just using sports as an example if you have a 2 American football teams you have 2 teams of 100 players. If each player has just a bio and stat graphics that is already 400 potential graphics. Being able to use something like excel to data link is very important at that point.

I'm curious if any of the guys building and selling GT packages have integrated anything like this already? I'm not much of a builder myself, but would be willing to pay a premium for some graphics packages if they would be usable on a larger scale. I need something though that can allow me to quickly turn around shows. Like on back to back days or even double headers or tournaments. Pretty common scenarios I run in to for sports production.

In a nutshell I would like to be able to do a lot of the things on my personal VMIX system that we do on the very large scale college shows we run with the $100,000 systems. I dont think GT Titler is limited at all in the look or animations it provides but may be limited in how to get dynamic info in to them.
thanks 1 user thanked Radiotvpat1982 for this useful post.
teran on 3/25/2021(UTC)
ZachSchuster  
#5 Posted : Thursday, June 18, 2020 2:15:35 PM(UTC)
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You may want to check out SuiteCG MultiSport Scoreboard at www.suitecg.com. It sounds like this could work exactly for what you want to achieve, with more features in the pipeline. You can create team profiles, with rosters, and save the profile for later use. You can select players from the roster to use in multiple player "slots" that populate key-value pairs in an XML file, including headshots, so you can use just a few templates and then select the player to populate the template at any given time.

It's really designed to be a central data management tool for many aspects of sports graphics. It includes some free graphics packages as well for it's built-in NDI CG, but it sounds like the XML output would be more your thing. I have a tutorial on vMix integration here: https://suitecg.com/integration-with-vmix/
Radiotvpat1982  
#6 Posted : Friday, June 19, 2020 1:33:26 AM(UTC)
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Thanks Zach. Yes, I am vary familiar with XML setup since that is what I use in Xpression graphics a lot.

I saw some of your recent things and it looks really nice.

The one thing about GT is that if I order some prebuilt graphics packages I can go in the back end to edit the look of those. Zach, are you able to edit graphics through your tool?

It normal simple things like adding a sponsor logo in the corner to go with a team logo and headshot. I may be asking too much at this point.......
DWAM  
#7 Posted : Friday, June 19, 2020 3:23:40 AM(UTC)
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IMHO the database part must be handled by vMix directly
UTC is helpful to trigger graphics playout and manage situations where scripts are involved

I started to develop a few years ago a graphics suite that was intended to be used for the french ice hockey championship.
All teams, visuals, clubs, games and so on were in a MySQL database
UTC was used to provide a crew member a complete interface for graphics playout in vMix independently of TD
Didn't get the market so never finalized but my work in progress which was a v1 draft is visible here. As you can see I was close to TV production with all sort of timings, rosters and so on. I could set a game by changing 2 team IDs, it took 5 seconds... It was 3 years ago so no GT here, only basic XAML, but same can be done with GT now and all its powerful features...

ZachSchuster  
#8 Posted : Friday, June 19, 2020 7:39:42 AM(UTC)
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Originally Posted by: Radiotvpat1982 Go to Quoted Post
Thanks Zach. Yes, I am vary familiar with XML setup since that is what I use in Xpression graphics a lot.

I saw some of your recent things and it looks really nice.

The one thing about GT is that if I order some prebuilt graphics packages I can go in the back end to edit the look of those. Zach, are you able to edit graphics through your tool?

It normal simple things like adding a sponsor logo in the corner to go with a team logo and headshot. I may be asking too much at this point.......



At this time you cannot create your own graphics for SuiteCG. That is definitely on our road map, though. With third party options like vMix GT, LiveText, etc... we've just found it best to focus on the data management for the time being, and provide a few nice looking packages that would meet most needs for those who don't want to create their own content. I'm not opposed to the idea of custom projects, but it's fairly time consuming so I'm not sure it would be the most economical option for you when there are GT graphics that could work. In your case, you would use the pre-made GT graphics, modify the look as needed, then once imported in to vMix, link up the images and text fields to the proper SuiteCG XML elements, then use SuiteCG to manage what data you want to display in the headshot, the scorebug, or whatever. Adding a sponsor logo to, say, a headshot, could be done by piggybacking the sponsor carousel, or just a live read sponsor, into the headshot graphic.
Radiotvpat1982  
#9 Posted : Saturday, June 20, 2020 12:34:25 PM(UTC)
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Originally Posted by: DWAM Go to Quoted Post
IMHO the database part must be handled by vMix directly
UTC is helpful to trigger graphics playout and manage situations where scripts are involved

I started to develop a few years ago a graphics suite that was intended to be used for the french ice hockey championship.
All teams, visuals, clubs, games and so on were in a MySQL database
UTC was used to provide a crew member a complete interface for graphics playout in vMix independently of TD
Didn't get the market so never finalized but my work in progress which was a v1 draft is visible here. As you can see I was close to TV production with all sort of timings, rosters and so on. I could set a game by changing 2 team IDs, it took 5 seconds... It was 3 years ago so no GT here, only basic XAML, but same can be done with GT now and all its powerful features...



This is really the closest thing to what I am thinking. Very nice work! Graphics look really professional and the UTC acts as the "hot key" system you really need in place to operate on a high level.

I'd love any ideas of streamlining 5 things. Home Team Logo, Road Team Logo, Home Colors, Road Colors, League/Conference Logos

If you could just change those out with one single click and have the rest of the graphics assigned to the corresponding logos change as well, that would make things so much easier and efficient. This is how AJT Systems (by Daktronics) works their system vs using Excel. The define the stored team which has a primary logo, secondary logo, primary and secondary color set and it does the rest. Its real easy to add a team by saving the logos to the machine and entering in the correct color codes.

DWAM  
#10 Posted : Saturday, June 20, 2020 4:59:54 PM(UTC)
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Well thank you, nice to hear...

As I said it's only a version 1 draft, about 3 or 4 days days work including the database part, all from scratch, so obviously many things were to be improved, both graphically and functionnally.

For example, one of the constraint I had to deal with is that not all ice skating parks had a professional scoring board at that time, so they couldn't be interfaced to provide timings automatically so it had to be done as good as possible manually by the operator. Perfect sync was therefore impossible.
The other thing that is very difficult to manage with ice hockey is the powerplay/penalties. My video does not show it but I had it working both manually or semi automatically... The powerplay timers for each team could automatically trigger the fullstrength animation and graphics changes at the end of the penalty. I also add in mind to improve the scripting so that a single click is required for the powerplays.

I'm not sure what you mean by "have the rest of the graphics assigned to the corresponding logos change as well" 'cos it's not possible to have logos shown IN UTC which only handles "widgets" that you can label but changing colors and logos was 100% database driven. Here the graphical design was based on the championship design (grey and orange) and I was not trying to have graphics based on each team color but it could work this way obviously.

Anyway another company got the market. They only show score and period timer in a static way, I believe they use a soccer template (the simplest one)... No logos at all, no rosters, no cool stuff, just a crappy top left bug... ;o)
ZachSchuster  
#11 Posted : Sunday, June 21, 2020 3:09:50 AM(UTC)
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Originally Posted by: Radiotvpat1982 Go to Quoted Post

I'd love any ideas of streamlining 5 things. Home Team Logo, Road Team Logo, Home Colors, Road Colors, League/Conference Logos

If you could just change those out with one single click and have the rest of the graphics assigned to the corresponding logos change as well, that would make things so much easier and efficient. This is how AJT Systems (by Daktronics) works their system vs using Excel. The define the stored team which has a primary logo, secondary logo, primary and secondary color set and it does the rest. Its real easy to add a team by saving the logos to the machine and entering in the correct color codes.



If you haven't actually downloaded SuiteCG to evaluate it, you definitely should. It literally does all of this to XML. Actually, I don't know off-hand if it does team color to XML, but that would be easy to add. League name and logo are not supported, but could be added or handled with a workaround. But again, it comes down to you having the graphic layouts designed in GT and the fields linked to the XML. After that is done, load up the new team profile and everything changes on your graphics. And if there is something not supported that you'd need, we could look at adding it.

PM me or contact me through my website and I can discuss specifics with you.

And to be clear, I mean no disrespect to UTC. It's an awesome tool with a TON of flexibility! DWAM's hockey setup is really slick and nicely done! SuiteCG in contrast is really designed to be an out-of-the-box sports data tool without a lot of setup needed.
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