Best 3rd Party Graphics Solution?

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m_covert

Member
I've got a Tricaster 460 running the AE2, and my boss wants me to start doing live sports productions streamed online. I'm looking for suggestions/reviews of 3rd Party graphics solutions like Character Works, Vizrt, Nixus Celio, NewBlue Titler, and NSport.

I've virtually no experience with live sports, so I probably have a lot of blind spots in terms of implementing a solution that will work seamlessly in a live environment. Can anyone who's used a few of these products chime in with their opinions of the strengths and weaknesses of each?

Anyone have any advice for what to look for and what to avoid in a graphics solution that will be need to be run by a small team (possibly even just me running the graphics and the tricaster at the same time)?
 
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fgolman

Member
You should probably also add Compix to your search (www.compix.tv).

To add to your confusion, there are also a plethora of free software packages.

You might want to check out Caspar CG, pretty well known for their titling and animation software (www.casparcg.com).

Obviously, going forward, any software that supports NDI gets a gold star, too.

Cheers,

Fritz Golman
Museum of Broadcast Communications
 
ZachSchuster

ZachSchuster

Member
SuiteCG MultiSport Scoreboard will be available soon. Designed for very simple operation like you describe, as well as more complex options. I hope to have a new update video posted sometime in the next week or two. www.suitecg.com
 
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Radio_TVPat1982

New member
I would suggest that you make a list of must have on the graphics front and them match up the providers. Basically what is most important to you.

I lucked out and had a company with a very solid package provide me one for free in exchange for some referrals and testing.

I will warn you that some of the higher end graphics solutions come with no pre built templates or very few. If you are looking for a turn key solution for sports you may want to look at Graphics Outfitters. The new Virtz partnership also looks amazing! Character Works has a solid product but they don't offer a full turn key solution. You would have to build each package from scratch or pay someone to do it. I looked a NewBlue Titler recently and like everything about them except for their turn key packages are a bit too flashy for me. I also wanted something I just could auto adjust columns and rows for chart style graphics like stats.

As mentioned, find one that does NDI. Another thing to look for is to find someone that can handle data link. It makes things much easier that way. You can build one lower 3rd for each team instead of say 100 for each football team. Even the regular Tricaster graphics can support Data Link now and they have some packages available for a really decent price.

https://www.newtek.com/software/content-packs/#sg-slider
 
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m_covert

Member
Thank you everyone for your suggestions.

Radio_TVPat1982, to your point. I guess my biggest need is the ability to pull real-time score and clock information so that I don't have to do it manually and risk displaying information that disagrees with the score keeping on the field/court/mat/whatever. I'll be covering mostly city league, highschool, and local non-collegiate or professional sports. I'll be travelling from small venue to small venue and most of them have their own score boards. Some don't have anything. I'm not worried about doing a little design work to make the graphics pretty or to match whatever brand I want. It's more important to me that when we go live the solution just works.

I've been told that most scoreboard systems are daktronics systems most of these graphics solutions mention that they work with Daktronics but I haven't seen anyone explain how the integration works. Is it a simple USB connection out of the daktronics board into a machine running graphics software? I imagine there is more to it than that. Also, what if one of these schools has some other off-brand scoreboard system. does that rule out the whole possibility of pulling data from the scoreboard?

With that in mind, I'm curious what others have to say about how they would handle this situation.
 
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Radio_TVPat1982

New member
Just to follow up on answering your question about getting data in to your graphics from the score board. You are correct that most but not all boards are Daktronics. You will find some especially at the lower levels that are not even a brand you have heard of.

You will need a device that turns the data out the board and makes it readable in your graphics software. These boxes are typically called score bots. There used to be only one or two companies that made these now there are a few more. Sportzcast, and Graphics Outfitters I know both offer a box. You want to find a flexible one since you will be moving from site to site. Also know there will be some cable and network setup needed for these to communicate.

There is also one other solution that can be used and that is OCR (optical character Recognition) software. This basically takes a clock cam and the software can read the score and convert the data and send it down the line. It has some advantages and disadvantages. In a pinch it could work it you cant match a board. This however will not feed stats and things like that.

If you want things like real time data from stats you have to link that data to the source it is coming from. Say for instance if you are doing a D-I football game you can pull you stats from stat cast. One last note is that you can take this stuff straight in your Tricaster now a days if you have AE. Tricaster supports data link. Like the other graphics solutions you will need to set it up to work.

If possible it is normally best to go out a day ahead of time to setup the different feeds. From past experience it can go south quick.
 
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T

themovieguy

New member
Ok. To add to this discussion.

I have NO interest in sports.
I have been following both Character Works and NewBlue Live FX for about a year and have seen important updates over the last versions of each software.
I need to purchase one very soon and have narrowed it down to those two.
New Blue Live 3 broadcast seems easier to use and Character works seems to do everything and more (Love the independent video control) but looks like it might be a hard learning curve to master.
NDI and macros use is critical.
Does anyone have any real work experience in both of these to point out some pros and cons?
Mostly titles, lower thirds, especially on the fly lower thirds, ticker tape on a live set...
 
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fgolman

Member
NewBlue Titler works great!

Excellent NDI integration AND macro support.

Lots of templates that you can work with to start and modify, as needed.

Also, don't know if it's part of your requirements or not, but NBT has a very nice integration with social media, too, pulling live content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

I haven't worked with Character Works so can't compare.

Support for NBT is also good, I had gotten questions answered and issues resolved quickly.

Also, it was a pretty painless setup and was off and running fast.

Cheers!

Fritz Golman
Museum of Broadcast Communications

PS Anyone reading this, we're thinking about our next TriCaster Chicago/Midwest users group meeting in mid-July.
 
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Mriley19

New member
themovieguy said:
Ok. To add to this discussion.

I have NO interest in sports.
I have been following both Character Works and NewBlue Live FX for about a year and have seen important updates over the last versions of each software.
I need to purchase one very soon and have narrowed it down to those two.
New Blue Live 3 broadcast seems easier to use and Character works seems to do everything and more (Love the independent video control) but looks like it might be a hard learning curve to master.
NDI and macros use is critical.
Does anyone have any real work experience in both of these to point out some pros and cons?
Mostly titles, lower thirds, especially on the fly lower thirds, ticker tape on a live set...
Click to expand...


I purchased CharacterWorks in August 2017 with the Live Input Capture and Secondary Output options. It was for a hockey arena. I felt that the learning curve wasn't too much of an obstacle. My largest hurdle was creating a timer that worked with my Daktronics timer and was able to auto-play a horn when the timer reached zero. I emailed for support and was given an answer pretty quickly but still could not figure out the small line of code I needed to write. When I reached out for more assistance they created a custom video tutorial for me that showed the exact steps I needed to take. I was very happy with the customer support response time. Keep in mind though that support is only through email.

Do you plan to send live video to the CharacterWorks machine?
 
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John Freedom

New member
I have used NewBlue Live for about 2 years. It has powerful features and plenty of pre-built templates. The templates are not really well designed. My biggest complaint with the software is trying to change a template.

The user experience for creating templates is terrible (IMHO).

For example, moving, sizing and positioning items on templates is painfully tedious. (It reminds me of software from the early 80's.) . The cursor doesn't respond well. It's hard to select the correct layer and settings for effects are on multiple tabs, which is slow. I work a lot with After Effect and Photoshop. There you can grab a layer and move it easily. If you expect this program to function as easily as those, you'll pull your hair out.

The other thing I dislike is the way it saves files. Not very user friendly. You end up with stuff all over the computer is you are not careful.

If user issues were better, this would be a winner. I cringe when setting up graphics is needed! One of my least favorite softwares. (And the upgrades are really expensive)

Woeful ... <-- your mileage may vary.
 
K

kevincopeland

New member
An inexpensive solution is SimpleSupers.com. It's an app for Windows that uses PowerPoint as a character generator. Build your titles in PowerPoint, activate the app, then advance your slides with key and fill from your display. It generates an alpha channel for use with your production switcher upstream or downstream keyer.
 
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