Adding an overlay

An overlay is an HTML package: text, a logo, a ticker, whatever it is designed to show, with a small set of controls you edit without touching its design. InterDirector comes with ten: Lower Third in 1, 2 and 3 lines, two Fight Card lower thirds, Simple Text, Scrolling Ticker, Rolling Credits, and two Logo Scrollers. You can also bring your own.

Add one

Press Add Input…, choose Overlay, and press Choose Package… to pick one of the bundled packages or a package of your own. It becomes a card, the same as any other input.

Edit its text and settings

Each package exposes its own controls on its card — text, numbers, colours, choices, on and off, images — and editing them updates the overlay live, without touching what it looks like underneath. If you change the package itself later, its own settings show Reload Package (to pick up changes you made to the files) and Change… (to switch to a different package) side by side.

Take it to air

Load the overlay into Preview, then press the Overlay button under the transition controls — not Cut or Fade, which are for the picture. It reads Overlay Off once it is on air, and pressing it again takes it down. It stays up across every switch of the picture behind it, so a lower third over a rotation of cameras runs unattended.

Layering more than one

If you are running more than one overlay at once, the Layer control beside the Overlay button (1 to 4) decides which sits on top when two overlap.

Next

Binding data to an overlay, so a package’s text updates itself from a spreadsheet instead of you typing it in.