ClassX Applications 6.5

Think of a rock-steady huge medieval fortification made to be steady throughout the AGES, constructed and widened over time by sapient and far-sighted minds. This is what LiveBoard has become in over 20 years of growth thanks to ClassX Developers continuously shaping and broadening it according to the newest technologies, across the insidious traps of evolving operating systems, evolution of hardware components and the massive growth of processing power, video output technologies and resolutions.

Reason #1: Move Templates in the LiveBoard Positioning Panel

NEW FEATURE! This will make you want to upgrade your ClassX Broadcast Applications right away: move your graphic templates of CastaliaCG, MoreCG and CoralCG freely in the LiveBoard Positioning Environment! That alone makes it worth upgrading, don't you think... Making a Bloomberg-type of project composed of many different templates or adding an animated background to your ticker will be as easy as putting the object into edit mode and dragging it to the desired position in the Positioning Panel of LiveBoard. Watch the short below looping comic video animation that shows how easy it is now to compose a LiveBoard Project made out of several templates and plugins.

Reason #2: Template Editors now support most video formats

NEW FEATURE! CastaliaCG, MoreCG and CoralCG no longer have the limitation of AVI-only files to be used as graphic objects. Import EFFORTLESSLY your After Effects Animations with transparency into our Editors and make your lower third in no time! Import any video format that is supported from FFMPEG (see FFMPEG supported codecs on www.ffmpeg.org). Alpha channel is obviously supported, as you can see in the little looping video comic animation below, showing CastaliaCG importing .mov into its 64bit version. Anyway with this feature you can import a MP4-type of video or any supported by FFMPEG and use it inside ClassX Template Editors.

Reason #3: The NEW Video Input Manager

NEW FEATURE! ...yeah this is a great feature! The old NDI® SourceManager changes entirely and becomes a VideoInputManager... allowing to assign to a input source an NDI® source, an SDI source or a video stream or screen capture ... plenty of possibilities. If you already have activated the Picture-In-Picture option for LiveBoard, you'll be able to view your captured SDI video streams within the MultiView of the Preferences Panel and within the new VideoInput Plugin inside LiveBoard, just select it and look at the Preview window.
This means that NOW you're able to capture the incoming SDI stream and to preview it from within your LiveBoard! Note that all audio management is now skilfully managed by the ClassX Engine! Adjust the master volumes of your video inputs in order for them to be aligned to each other. Whether it be your DeckLink, Bluefish444 or AJA video input card capturing the video stream for you or the NEW LIBVLC decoding facility inside LiveBoard, or your NDI® sources, you'll have everything under control with this single panel. You don't have the input yet but want to test audio and video? The NEW Colorbars and audio signal will help you creating your project. Amazing new possibility. Need to check the audio preview of a single source? Go ahead put on your headphones and select the source audio you want to preview.

Reason #4: Better ContentsGrid Preview and better operation in LiveBoard Chinese and Taiwanese GUI for LiveBoard and the Editors

BETTER GUI: The Contents Grid now has a bigger Preview area and shows the preview of images and vector shapes for a quicker and better overview of the loaded contents. We always keep working for making the life of operators easier and we love to make things simpler. The preview area will help you to quickly identify the loaded content. Always remember to take a good poster frame of your graphic template while you edit it (little "camera icon" on the lower right corner of the Template Editor Positioning Panel), so it will be representative for the operator who has to check what he's choosing to air or to modify.
Another new GUI improvement is the opportunity to select NOT to display the plugin contents (From Preferences > Misc panel) but only see the plugin preview of the selected plugin (in "edit" mode and the orange frame)... very useful if you have lots of plugin contents in your LiveBoard v.6.5 project.

Reason #5: The NEW MediaConverter

NEW APPLICATION: The NEW MediaConverter arises like a Phoenix from the ashes of QuickTimeConverter and ClassX users don't have to struggle with installing the old and unsupported QuicktTime any longer.
Only install ClassX Broadcast Applications and you have a fabuolus tool coming free with your 6.5 upgrade: transform any video supported by FFMPEG to a broadcast-quality, alpha channel supporting, frame-accurate avi codec for magical results inside your template editors. Seek to the frame, pause on first/last frame, ping-pong play mode, every frame under control.
NEW FEATURE: use the NEW MediaConverter to crop the area of your video with alpha in order to optimize it for real-time broadcasting inside your graphic templates. Just check the box of "Auto crop to OPTIMAL video size" and let the Converter do the job for you!

Reason #6: TAG - based asset handling

NEW FEATURE! TAG-based handling and search of media files now on all ClassX file choosers: add/remove/edit tags to your media assets and look them up easily thanks to this new feature, see how easy it is in the below comic animation.

Reason #7: ProjectPacker better than ever

ProjectPacker is a wonderful tool for passing LiveBoard and/or Template Editor PROJECTS to someone. It will make a huge zipped package of the WHOLE LiveBoard project, including assets, scripts, datasources and the receiver will only have to unpack it in from within LiveBoard.
With 6.5 "Stronghold" version, ProjectPacker now keeps the metadata of packed assets and has a new preview tooltip of fonts, templates and project poster frames. Making life easier to operators and graphic technicians, always.

Reason #8: New Audio Management - Play your A/V clips on any supported output device

The new 6.5 simplifies the media and audio workflow by avoiding os-legacy audio handling (aka DirectShow). A new audio engine brings new power to your production with perfect lipsync and mixing capabilities through any FrameLinkDriver (BlackMagic, BlueFish, AJA, ForA TB2, etc).
High quality audio sampling and mixing with automatic auto-resampling to 48Khz will allow to mix any media source with your graphics. Each source has its own volume settings (all controllable through LBControl and from the LiveBoard Script content), VU-Meters and separate audio preview. Use the new Audio Preview MUTE Button on the LiveBoard UI for quick operation.

Reason #9: LibVLC VideoInput: the doors are open to ANY streaming media source

With 99+ millions of downloads, VLC is the most diffused media player and multimedia framework on the planet. It's cross platform, free and maintaned by a huge, responsive and well assorted non-profit organization. As the VLC platform is open to development through libVLC, we created a libVLC-based VideoInput device: the LibVLC videoinput.

LibVLC VideoInput opens the doors to media streaming into LiveBoard (and not only). Just type-in the media source URL and the magic happens. No matter what a/v format, resolution or other parameters. The LibVLC VideoInput asynchronously connects to the source and brings your media onair with effects and motion, just like any other graphics layer. Our implementation supports automatic reconnection, automatic a/v format detecion and "expert mode" command line customization settings (see the VLC docs for more info)!

Say WELCOME to streaming media inputs with the new 6.5.

Reason #10: the software chroma-keyer in CoralCG 6.5

NEW FEATURE: One of the amazing new things that you can do with the new video input and the NEW software chroma-keyer inside CoralCG v.6.5 is creating a whole new background to your speaker, whether him or her coming from an NDI® stream from a Skype call or an SDI a/v stream coming from the capture of your video I/O card. Stay 2D or get 3D and create your virtual set inside CoralCG directly; remember you can import "virtual furniture" in lots of 3D Object formats into your project. Furnish your Virtual Studio and upholster it with textures and... animated textures with LIVE Videoinput sources!!! Ingenious!

StealthCG

NEW COMMANDS! Integrators say welcome to some new 22 StealthCG protocol commands.
This is a very big advance in order to have a better and complete control over graphics and data automation with ClassX Applications. StealthCG keeps its rock steady position as the best graphics integration engine for any playout and automated realtime production, featuring a fully fledged, human readable, bi-directional control protocol and the power of its 2D, 3D data-driven built-in graphics engines.

MOS

MOS is an evolving technology. At ClassX we keep on evolving and updating our MOS implementation and we have been integrated with the most used NCRS solutions. With the new v.6.5, our MOS protocol support adds new features and countless improvements. Graphic automation with ClassX MOS is just one step ahead the competition, featuring automatic data handling, instant frame by frame renderless remote preview for 2D and 3D, lightweight architecture and ActiveX plugin support.

Reason #12: A new superhero! The MASKED TICKER

NEW FEATURE! Have you ever been dreaming of blending the edges of your Ticker? With this new feature you may do that AND you can add a MASK onto your Ticker for a incredible graphic effect! Magic playing out from LiveBoard v.6.5...

ClassX Applications 6.5 "Stronghold"

Biggest upgrade in 3 years!