MimoLive is looking great! I notice in your youtube videos that you have animated lower 3rds. How is this achieved? The animations look like they’re constructed from the Mimolive logo, so what I really want to know is if I will be able to create my own animates in after effects or photoshop that will tie in with the lower3rd layer in MimoLive?
We have used our own animations for lower 3rds in mimoLive and it’s quite easy. We build our animation in After Effects or Motion and save it as a video file, making sure to preserve alpha channels. In mimoLive use the lower 3rd layer and in the background section select custom image from the “type” pulldown menu. Drag your animation video file into the image well and activate the layer. If you don’t see your animation, try adjusting the background height setting until it appears. If you haven’t build your text within your lower 3rd video, you can adjust the title content within mimoLive to line up with the animated background video. Adjust the timing as needed so it appears at the proper time within your animation.
If you have built your text into your graphic and don’t need to add any text within mimoLive, I believe you can just use a placer layer and adjust the positioning of your animation as needed.
One issue we have yet to solve is how to build a graphic that animates onto the screen and then stays there. Looping the video does not work in this case. A hack we’ve considered is to trigger the graphic animating onto the screen and then discreetly replacing it with a looping animation after it has resolved. A little more work intensive, but it will work if you must have this feature. Good luck.
@alternativeplan Thank you for chiming in with a solution!
Could both of you (+@chrisis) please post example video mockups of what you want to achieve? We definitely want to make this much more easy.
Thanks for the great response alternativeplan. That’s exactly what I needed to know - that the lower3rd layer can work with motion graphics as the “image”.
Brilliant implementation, Boinx!
@“Dan Abrams” Sounds great! Looking forward for your toolkit!
@alternativeplan , I’m a new user of the commercial version of mimolive and have successfully used it for a live multi camera recording at a convention while also providing a live feed to two projectors. I was impressed by the product and probably should not have used it at such an important gig for the first time…however it worked well.
2 things I’d like to bring up:
1 - while attempting to use a prebuilt still lower third as a png file (with “cutout”) it crashed the software twice. This may or may not be a known issue, or maybe png files are just not to be used…however I am thankful that when I restarted that everything returned to normal including all cam inputs and the feed to the projectors…instantly! Experienced this live and was impressed with the recovery!
2 - I’ve tried (no longer at the live event) to bring in animated elements with alpha into the lower third layer with no success. Per your instructions above I should be able to do it. You say you save your anims as “video files” …can you please explain what “video file” format? If you could please provide format, codec, rate or any other technical advice that will work it’d be appreciated. I’ve tried QT + alpha in pretty much every iteration into every available input within the layer with no success. I’m getting no image at all and have “moved around” the image within the module to be sure that I wasn’t just “missing it”
Thanks in advance for the help
-Kev H
@“Fandom House™” I use animations with alpha channel all the time in Mimolive. Are you sure your video files are being exported with the alpha channel? I found my biggest struggle was getting my output files from After Effects and Premiere Pro to include the alpha channel. To test, import your new file into Premiere, add it as a layer above a layer that has a red background. If you can see the red background behind your animation then you’ve got your alpha channel exporting along with the video file.
As an aside, if you are rendering in after effects on a Mac, selecting “Lossless + Alpha” will output a file with the alpha channel intact. After I’ve rendered this file, I always open in Quicktime on my mac, which performs a conversion. I’m not sure what the conversion does to the file but the result is that thumbnails of the file in Finder render properly, as do they in MimoLive. Just remember to save the converted animation.
In MimoLive itself, the animation file might be missing. Just check your margin settings etc. Set all to 0 to ensure there’s no offset or area too small to display your image/animation. Come to think of it, if you add a placeholder image do you see it?
@chrisis thank you, problem solved. It was opening it in QT and saving the conversion that did it! Yes, I was sure there was alpha. I would never have come up with re-saving with QT and your response is greatly appreciated…As you know…this opens up so much. Nice piece of software.
How can we have an animated Channel BUG ?
@“Shahzad Nawaz” Create a ProRes 4444 looping movie of your animated channel bug so that it is transparent in the appropriate places. Add it to the Sources list and set the Mode to “Loop”. Then add a Station Logo layer to your layer stack and choose your bug movie as the Content.