trigger lower third animation from keyboard

[markusk90069483]

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!

[Mylenium]

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]

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!

[Mylenium]

No, there isn't and that is that. Those MIDI scripts extensively use markers and elaborate expressions, but other than providing alternate methods to navigate inside a single AE timeline and recording a bunch of keyframes this does nothing to solve your issue, in particular since a) expressions may slow down stuff and b) even under best conditions you wouldn't get guaranteed realtime playback one way or the other. And you misunderstand how "professionals" work. Nobody I have met in my 20 years of AE would even try to work like you attempt. You render the clips in AE, import them in the production system and organize them there in whatever form, be that quick access clips from libraries or laying out timelines with cue points, which can of course be tied to all manner of external control devices and keyboard shortcuts. Still, those are separate steps done by separate people at separate time throughout the day and neither bares any influence on the other. In strict production terms, AE is and will likely forever be an offline tool and unless things are down to a wire only minutes before air time, there is no problem whatsoever having it work the way it does.

Mylenium

[markusk90069483]

Assuming you're right, then I don't get it why there are tons of lower thirds animations to be found on elements.envato.com even for news and sports productions. If you cant use them live, they would be useless in my opinion. And second, why can I use external data sources in AE, i.e. a json file, to replace content dynamically in the animation. I found a lot of tutorials wich show how to create a wheather forecast animation with dynamic data from external sources. Could you please explain how those are used if not "live"?

What is the workflow for this stuff ?

Thanks

[Andrew Yoole]

I'm a little confused by your approach.  Do you want to play out the animation directly from After Effects as a preview, and feed that into another device or application?  Very unwise as After Effects RAM previews are very inconsistent. And, as Mylenium said, just not what After Effects is built to do.

Normal workflow, including with the template projects you mention, is to pre-render content into a format suitable for a live production player (hardware or softwre) to then play on command.  If you need instantly update-able content, especially if it draws from external data sources, there are much better options available.  One example:

https://www.ligrsystems.com

[Mylenium]

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

[markusk90069483]

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 😉 

[Andrew Yoole]

So i would think one possible approach might be to use After Effects templates to build pre-rendered pre-text elements for your job, ie lower third animations, then use Titler Pro to add the final text on top of the pre-rendered animations.

If you have decent lead-time to create the graphics, like 2 minutes or more depending on the complexity of the render, then any decent After Effects designer would be able to pump out renders as required.  I can't see any real benefit of using scripts for this process, other than populating content from external data sources.  The most important thing is to have solid, well-rehearsed systems and procedures for rendering to the appropriate location, so that Vmix or whatever tool you're using can easily access the rendered files immediately.

[markusk90069483]

Thanks for your suggestion!

But somehow I had the hope that I can get rid of Titler Pro. I made some research how the rendering process of AE can be automated. And I found this:

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/user-guide.html/after-effects/using/automated-rendering-networ...

By calling aerender.exe I can render prepared AE animations. This is what I meant with using a script to automate the process. So my plan is: When I recived my dynamic content I write it into a json file wich is acceseable by my prepared AE Project. Then I call aerender.exe to render it and to get a .mov file wich I then can play in vmix. 

Would that be a workflow wich you would say it works?

Thanks!