General Improvements


Feature The How To's

Animated Effect Picons

You can hover over a picon with the mouse in a bin, eventually a tooltip text with the name and/or size of the file will be shown. If you have enabled "Animate Picons", continuing to hover over a picon that represents an effect file will start animating the picon. You will see a preview of the effect in the picon.

There are two methods to enable Animated Picons:

The first method is to right-click in the bin and select "Bin Properties" from the Bin Properties menu. In the Bin Properties panel, scroll down to the bottom of the Settings listbox. There are two options that you can check on or off:

  • Animate Picons - enable to allow picons to be animated
  • Animate Immediately - enable in order to skip the tooltip text and start animating right away
The second method is to right-click in the Bin and select "Animate Picons" from the Bin Properties menu. This menu item will enable both Animate Picons and Animate Immediately. If both are already turned on, selecting "Animate Picons" will turn them both off. Here is an example of two frames of the animated picon that represents the CityScape effect in \Bins\FX\Sampler.

Note that program and preview are represented by the same framestores that are used by Effects Generator.

Double Effects Size

Doubled the number of unique effects that can be loaded from 64 to 128 now that more Coordinator memory is required. Note: Each effect can have 255 different instances (e.g., different values for Fade In, Fade Out, Reversed, etc.)

Tab Order

There are a number of panels in Animator/Compositor & Effects Generator where you can use the Tab button to cycle throught the edit boxes. Use Shift+Tab to cycle through edit boxes in the opposite direction. This was added to improve the workflow of each application.

Input 8 Selection

Although there may be multiple input cards in the downstream slots, only one input card may be chosen as the 8th video input. The default has been to pick the card that is "most upstream". In version 3.1, you have the option of choosing which input card to use as the 8th video input. Do this by following these steps:

  • Click on the Configure button in the main application panel to bring up the Configure menu
  • Select "Input Settings" from the menu
  • Click on the Slot 8 button to pop-up the profiles menu; the input cards are now also listed and can be selected to choose which acts as the 8th input
  • Make sure that the 8th input has the desired profile

Configure Panel Accelerators

There are new accelerator keys that can be used to open the Configure panels without having to use the Configure button. They are listed as follows:

Configure Panel Accelerators
Ctrl+F1Digitize Settings
Ctrl+F2Installed Cards
Ctrl+F3Keyer Settings
Ctrl+F4Framestore Settings
Ctrl+F5Color Correction
Ctrl+F6Pro Color Correction
Ctrl+F7GPI Settings
Ctrl+F8Serial Devices
Ctrl+F9Input Settings
Ctrl+F10Advanced Input Settings
Ctrl+F11Output Settings
Ctrl+F12Global Settings

Timeline Improvement:

CTRL-Click to Expand All

The timeline's tree control on the left-hand side of a timeline window allows you to change how the child tracks of a timeline are displayed. When you click on a plus sign [+] of a track, the track's immediate children are displayed. This is much like right-clicking on the track and selecting the "Expand Tree" menu item. Now you can hold down the Control [CTRL] key while clicking on the plus sign [+] to display all descendants of the track (similar to selecting "Expand All" from the timeline right-click menu).

Currently, CTRL-Click to Expand is only available in Editor and Animator/Compositor.

Timeline Improvement:

Keyframe Selection/Editing

There have been two major improvements for editing Timeline Keyframes.The first is a multi-keyframe selection, and the second is being able to edit multiple keyframes in the Edit Keyframe Dialog box.

In order to select multiple keyframes in the timeline, hold down the Control [CTRL} key when you click-drag the mouse in order to create a "selection area" rectangle,which is displayed in blue. Any keyframes (or events) that are inside (or intersect) the blue selection area are selected.

If you hold down the Control [CTRL] and Alt [ALT] key when click-dragging the mouse to create the selection area, then any keyframe (or event) that is in (or intersects) the area will have its selection status toggled: selected objects are deselected, and unselected objects are selected.

You can modify multiple keyframes by doing the following:

  • Select the keyframes you wish to modify
  • Right-click on one of the selected keyframes to bring up the keyframe menu
  • Select "Edit Key" to open the Edit Keyframe Dialog box
  • Click on the "Edit All" button in the Edit Keyframe Dialog box
The value and timecode that is displayed corresponds to the Keyframe that was right-clicked upon. The range of its values (value & timecode) may now be constrained by all of the keyframes that are selected.

Currently, multiple keyframe editing is only available in Editor and Animator/Compositor.