Let’s switch back to the normal lighting conditions. I want to demonstrate one more important feature. We have this screen in the background, currently filled with a still image. It’s common in virtual studios that we use these as virtual screens and put an external input or a video file on them.
How can we make it easy to use? Let’s find the shader of the screen. Its Color Map is currently a still image, but, of course, we can wire any video signal into it. Let’s expose the pin and name it Screen. From now on we can easily connect any content to it from outside. For e.g. let’s add our flowery video of the first tutorial to the scene, and simply connect it to Screen. As we can see the Luminosity of the screen is a bit off, so we cut it down to avoid burning in.
Also, we can use the screen to show an input from an external source, for e.g. a playout server. In this case, we use the Video Input module. We have to select an Input Device which is usually an SDI input slot. Of course, we do not have any input now.
We can put together a Control Board panel so that we can easily switch between preloaded videos during the live show. We can use a utility compound for this. It is found in the Common_Studio project under the Compounds / Tools folder. Its name is “Video_Menu”. So add it to the scene. We can Unlink it now and add its internal Pin Collector module to our Control Board. Its name is currently “INSERTS”, but of course we can change it at will. Now we can add videos to this bar simply by dragging and dropping them onto the slots. Let’s connect the output of this Video_Menu compound to the Screen pin. During the show, we start the added videos with simple clicks, or we can click OFF to cease playing.
And roughly these were the tasks we face when building a new studio.
