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markusk90069483
markusk90069483
Inspiring
October 26, 2020
Question

trigger lower third animation from keyboard

  • October 26, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 965 views

Hi,

please could you help me out. I'm trying to create several lower thirds for a live produktion. I managed to send this animations over NDI to OBS. But what I cant figure out is how I can trigger this animations by pressing a key on my keyboard or even better by  ELGATO 10GAT9901 Stream Deck XL. It should work everytime even when After Effect is not in focus by Windows. I searched the internet for hours but I cant find anything like this. Please, give me a hint for a tutorial or anything that helps. Thanks in advance!

 

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1 reply

Mylenium
Mylenium
Brainiac
October 26, 2020

No such thing. AE isn't an on-air graphics system like Chyron or VizRT. You're completely looking in the wrong place. All AE can do is create the graphics, but overlaying and mixing them is a whole other discipline even if it's just for streaming.

 

Mylenium

markusk90069483
markusk90069483Author
Inspiring
October 26, 2020

Thanks  Mylenium for your replay, but I guess you misunderstood what my issue is. 

I knwo that overlaying and mixing hase to be done in my broadcast software. Which aktualy works already. What I'm looking for is a way to tell AE to start the animation by using a key on my keyboard or by using an external key pad. 

A script in AE wich is doing something like this:

If key "F1" is pressed {

    goto Keyframe 50 

    start animation

}

I'm sure there is such a possibiltiy to do somethning like this. I can not imagige that the "professionals" are opening the AE Window, use the mouse to put the cursor on keyframe 50 and hit "spacebar" to run the animation. I even found a tutorial where a guy is using an external MIDI source, a drumpad in his case, to trigger AE animations. This is far more advanced than what I'm searching for. 

Hope it's more clear now what my concern is. 

Thanks!

markusk90069483
markusk90069483Author
Inspiring
October 27, 2020

Well, to put it directly, and no offense: You seem to be operating on a whole lot of wrong assumptions. You are simply assuming that a lot of stuff is "live" when it isn't (nor is there a requirement) and on top of it you need to work on your understanding of how AE actually works plus things like broadcast standards and procedures. A lot of it seems to be driven by your gaming/ streaming experiences and the "realtimeness", but even that could be argued, given how games use tons of pre-baked content as well. In any case, you are looking in the wrong place if you think AE is a tool to generate realtime graphics overlays. The rest makes no sense, to be honest. Why should people not buy lower thirds even if they need to render them to be used elsewhere? Why should AE not have JSON support to pull e.g. data lists of sports events from a server, even if the actual content still needs a few minutes to be rendered? People do it all the time, including the weather forecast you mentioned. This stuff could be rendered half a minute before it goes on air you'd never know it was created in AE. You have to separate the process of producing content from its distribution/ broadcasting/ playback which ultimately may be the biggest misunderstanding you have. Even TV stations with all the money in the world use good old AE for their branding stuff (including lower thirds), explainer snippets in news and documentaries or even genuine FX work. Of course it's all backed by massive server farms, storage capacity and on the other end dedicated systems that fetch the clips and mix them with the camera/ video mixer inputs. AE doesn't handle any of that itself, however, and that's pretty much the end of it.

 

Mylenium


Ok, thanks so far for your reply. To get things strait and to explain how I came to my, in your opinion, wrong assumptions here a bit of a backround. I have to do a live stream of a figure skating event and I did already for several years. Here's a link of some of those produktions if you are interested:

https://sportdeutschland.tv/eiskunstlauf

So far we did it by using vmix together with new blue titler pro. Titler Pro is quite good if it comes about replacing the content dyamically and to be triggerd by pressing some buttons on our life stream hardware. What we dont like is the desing of the lower third itself. It looks old, outdated, ugly. Therefore I searched the internet for new lower thirds for titler pro, but I did not find to much, just some wich are done by newbluefx itself. What I found on elements.envato.com are many nice and fresh lower thirds , about 90% of them for AE. Therefore I assumed AE has to be our tool for the future since I also found no way to export these animations to be used in titler pro with dynamic content. 

I would be fine to figure out an automated workflow with scripts or something wich leads to this, that AE is able to render my lower third 10 till 30 seconds bevore it goes on air. Titler pro also needed always a few seconds to render the animation new after it recived the new dynamic content. But I need a documentation or tutorilal how this can be done 😉 

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