Endless Possibilities

Layers and Settings are an essential concept of BoinxTV. Layers are responsible for rendering graphics and sound. You can use any number of layers, which can be placed on top of each other, just like in Photoshop, toggled on and off and interactively controlled. Settings let you configure your layers in interesting ways.

Interactive control means that important aspects, like a movie, its title, the caption of a lower third, and other vital parts of your production, can be change at any time while the show is being recorded/broadcasted.

Sample Layer Setup for a News Show

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  News Show (all layers combined)

  The screenshot shows the final result as seen in the Preview window of BoinxTV. BoinxTV ships with more than 50 different layers that can be combined. See the other example templates in the template chooser of BoinxTV on how to use them. These are meant to be inspiration for your own configuration. See below how this example is composed of different layers.

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  Digital Clock

  The Digital Clock layer displays the current time in a number of different formats. You can change the clock's background, size and font and position it anywhere on the screen. This is an example of how layers can display all kinds of information. Other ideas would be countdowns and stop-watches which can all be created using custom layers.

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  News Flash

  The News Flash rotates through 5 messages that you can enter directly in BoinxTV. Of course you can specify the text style, background and position. When the layer is turned on, it appears on the screen in various animated styles and when it is turned off it dissappears in a different style.

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  Station Logo

  The Station Logo displays a transparent graphic on the screen. It looks especially stylish if you adjust the Opacity so that the logo seems embossed on the video. Of course, its appearance and disappearance can also be animated and you can adjust position and size.

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  Static Text

  BoinxTV also includes the functionality of a text generator. The Static Text allows the placement of simple multiline text on the screen. You can set font, color, rotation, choose a background image, add a drop shadow and more. The 3D Static Text places the text in 3D space. Some layers already include the text—for example, the Interview layer which has subtitles for the names of the people shown.

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  News Crawl

  The News Crawl layer creates a news ticker from an RSS feed that is updated in real time. It is an example of how you can integrate real time data into your production, with BoinxTV—for example, the feed from your blog. You can select a divider image to place between the news, and then select fonts and color for the title and description fields in the RSS feed. The text can scroll from left to right or right to left. The background can be animated using a two image technique.

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  Lower Third

  The Lower Third layer is another example of a text layer.  Lower thirds are usually used to display the name of the person on screen or as a subtitle to video footage. Often, the lower thirds are used with in and out animations. The Lower Third layer in BoinxTV can also have an animated background.

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  Placer

  The Placer is the essential part of BoinxTV. It "places" a video source like a camera, a prerecorded clip or an image on screen. It can scale and crop video and has a transition that is executed when the layer is turned on or off. If the video source is chroma keyed (the uniform color background is removed), as shown in our example, the layers below this layer show through.

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  Background

  Due to the layered nature of the BoinxTV output, the background that replaces the greenscreen can be a movie, a still image or even a complex set of layers. In this example, the World News layer displays a 3D globe. The globe can be resized, animated, positioned arbitrarily, can have a photorealistic or a stylized surface, and can even be translucent. All kinds of customized effects can readily, and simply, be created with BoinxTV.

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  Overshoulder

  The purpose of the overshoulder inserts is to show a picture or video footage to accompany the news. This example shows that video or pictures can be mapped onto any shape. It can also be displayed anywhere in 3D space.

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  Textblock

  To display more text full screen, this is actually two layers. One layer is a Static Text layer, and is placed on top of a Placer layer, that displays a movie clip as a background, giving the border of the frame a nice glow effect. This shows how combining two or more layers can lead, quite easily, to a new and unique look for your video production.