With the new products in the TriCaster™ family, NewTek has made it much simpler to create or modify titles. TriCaster PRO FX and TriCaster STUDIO have full-featured character generation, which can export any created page to the Title Templates list for live production.
TriCaster ships with almost 100 different overlays for lower-thirds, full page titles and left and right banners, but you may want to incorporate custom logos or graphics into these pages, or perhaps use a corporate-approved ‘look’ for all titles. This tutorial instructs you on how to change and modify TriCaster overlay templates or create your own.
Templates for TriCaster are located inside this folder:
TriCaster\Skins\BlackBoxDesktop\Live_Tab\SetupTabs\Overlay_Tab\MainArea
_ALLTEMPLATES_
The Template Parent Folders
Here you will find the parent folders for every template found inside the software.
A_LowerThirds, B, C_BillBoards, D_LogoBugs, E_BuildYourOwn
These parent folders are strictly used for organizational purposes. They help configure in what order the templates will show up inside the Overlay Tab dropdown list. For example, if you are going to make a special collection of templates for a particular client, like “Joe's Grill Lower Thirds” and you want all of these to appear at the end of the list, together, you can name your parent folder “F_JoesGrill”. This will ensure that your Joe's Grill Lower Thirds will show up at the bottom of the list all in the same section together. Why F? At the time of this writing, the last parent folder starts with E. Naming your own section starting with F will tell the software to place your special section of templates at the bottom of the list.
Template Folders
For now, go into the folder “A_LowerThirds” and you will find more folders. Each folder contains the actual Overlay Templates. The names of these folders are what appear inside TriCaster's Overlay Playlist dropdown. For example, if you wanted to create a new Lower Third template, you could simply make a new folder here and place the proper files inside. Let's take a look at what constitutes “the proper files” by browsing into the “Lower Third 03” folder.
Getting familiar with the template files
Inside the “Lower Third 03” folder there are 3 files (and the hidden NewTek Info folder, which you can ignore), which are the essential building blocks of a successful Overlay Template.
- Bk.tga
The actual graphic element that is overlayed. This file can contain an alpha channel so that it can be composited or it can be a full-screen graphic that has no alpha channel when you want to use the entire screen. This file can be .TGA or .PNG format. A .png file might be preferred due to its smaller file size.
- Initialization.ToasterScript
This is the script file, which is used to control the template. This can be opened with Notepad or any text editor, edited and saved.
- Thumb.png
This is the thumbnail file displayed when you roll your mouse over the template name inside the Overlay Playlist dropdown. This file is also used for the Overlay Playlist itself.
A closer look at the template files
Bk.tga (or possibly Bk.png)
When creating your background image, you cannot ignore proper video frame dimensions. Television aspect ratio is 4:3, (it is wider than taller). It is important when creating templates to start off with a 4:3 document. For NTSC, the active video area frame dimensions are 720 pixels by 486 pixels. This is the resolution used in North and South America. You could start a document with this resolution, drawing your graphics inside these bounds. If you would like to create a template that is “VGA Projector friendly”, then start with a higher resolution document such as 1440 x 1080. This document is still 4:3, so it will still show on your NTSC output fine, while ensuring crisp VGA resolution should you output to a projector.
If you intend on having your overlay “keyed” on top of video or anything else, as opposed to a full-screen graphic, then an alpha channel is required. In this case, you will want to be sure and save 32 bit .tga or .png file.
Always remember to account for “title safe” area when designing your template graphics, since most televisions do not display the entire active video frame (720 x 486) as the sides are masked by the plastic bezel of the television face. To ensure that your titles are seen, you will need to adjust for this “title safe” area. Usually 5% on all 4 sides is a good rule of thumb to follow. 5% of 720 is 36 pixels. So this means, start drawing your graphics 36 pixels in (on left and right side). This same math can be applied to figure the top and bottom “title safe” area.
Thumb.png
This is the small image that shows inside the “Add to Overlay Playlist” dropdown as well as inside the Overlay Playlist itself. It should be 200 x 135 resolution and in .png format. One nice thing I like to do if your graphics have an alpha channel, is place a checkerboard pattern behind the graphic to show that the graphic has transparency. This can be done inside Photoshop fairly easily. If you are going to make several Overlays, I would suggest creating a checkerboard background layer the size of your graphics document then shrinking the entire thing document down to 200 x 135 to resave as the Thumb.png. It may be helpful to create sample text for the thumbnail in Photoshop that resembles the TriCaster font style to help differentiate between templates that are very similar
Initialization.ToasterScript
If you open this file with notepad.exe or any text editor, you will find all the commands, which handle the text and image layers. To create and edit these files, you need to be familiar with the following commands:
NewTextItem(ID, “FontStyle”, X coord, Y coord, “Default Text”)
- ID
ID is simply a unique number for that text item. Any other commands used for this item will keep the same ID so that the code knows which item it is talking to.
Here’s a helpful tip from Beta Tester Jared Amos:
since whatever text is typed in on ID#1 appears below the icon in the Tricaster overlay menu where you call the pages from, on some graphics I make ID#1 an item with a font size of 0.0 at coordinates 0,0, and in the default text field I can assign a permanent “name” to the graphic regardless of how I change the text in Tricaster. This is more useful in some pages than others, such as sports scoreboards -- ID#1 can say "UpperLeftCrunch" instead of the visiting team's name on every page...
- “FontStyle”
Fonts are stored inside Skins/BlackBoxDesktop/Live_Tab/SetupTabs/Overlay_Tab/MainArea/FontStyles. TriCaster templates will only work with these font styles so do not try and use fonts from anywhere else. Inside the NewTextItem command, you will only use the actual font style NAME, not the “.NewTek Font” extension. Remember to use “quotes” around the font style name.
- X coord
The X pixel coordinate where your text will start on the screen.
- Y Coord
The Y pixel coordinate where your text will start on the screen.
- “Default Text”
The text that will display when your template is first added to the Overlay Playlist. Remember to use the “quotes” around the entire string of text.
SetTextItemFontSize(ID, FontSize)
- ID
ID is simply a unique number for that text item. Any other commands used for this item will keep the same ID so that the code knows which item it is talking to.
- FontSize
Simply the size of the font being displayed.
SetTextItemJustification(ID, “justify flag”)
- ID
ID is simply a unique number for that text item. Any other commands used for this item will keep the same ID so that the code knows which item it is talking to.
- “justify flag”
This flag sets the justification of your item.
(Remember that justification is where the text is placed relative to the starting X,Y coordinates, not screen justification.)
Be sure and use the “quotes” around your flag.
TL - Top Left
CL - Center Left
BL - Bottom Left
TC - Top Center
CC - Center Center
BC - Bottom Center
TR - Top Right
CR - Center Right
BR - Bottom Right
SetTextItemRotation(ID, degree)
- ID
ID is simply a unique number for that text item. Any other commands used for this item will keep the same ID so that the code knows which item it is talking to.
- Degree
The degree at which your item is rotated.
NewImageItem(ID, X coord, Y coord, X res, Y res, “location of image file”)
- ID
ID is simply a unique number for that image item. Any other commands used for this item will keep the same ID so that the code knows which item it is talking to.
- X coord
The X pixel coordinate where your image will start on the screen.
- Y Coord
The Y pixel coordinate where your image will start on the screen.
- X Res
The X pixel resolution of your image. This can be a different size as the image itself.
- Y Res
The Y pixel resolution of your image. This can be a different size as the image itself.
- “Location of image file”
This is where your image file is stored on your hard drive. Remember to use the “quotes” around the entire path. Remember that the image path uses forward slashes, NOT backslashes; ie., C:/Tricaster/
NewWarpedImageItem(ID, X coord, Y coord, X res, Y res, “location of image file”)
- This command is identical to NewImageItem however it does one thing different. This command “warps” the image to fill the entire X res, Y res setting. Meaning, if the image itself is a different aspect as set with the X res and Y res settings, it will “stretch to fit” this image to fill the set aspect.
Some example command sets here:
NewTextItem(1, "Impact_Black_BorderWhite", 760, 292, "CHRIS")
SetTextItemFontSize(1, 100.0)
SetTextItemJustification(1, "CR")
NewTextItem(2, "Arial_Black_ShadowGray", 760, 492, "SHIPLEY")
SetTextItemFontSize(2, 100.0)
SetTextItemJustification(2, "CR")
SetTextItemRotation(2, 45.0)
NewWarpedImageItem(3, 100, 860, 250, 250, "d:/Pictures/Catapiller.jpg")
NOTE: This tutorial is valid for VT[4] version 4.5 Title Templates module as well. The key difference is the path to the templates. VT[4] v4.5 templates are stored at C:\VT4\User Data\Default User\TitleTemplates\Templates\_ALLTEMPLATES_
