Media Pool - New User

Hello all,

I am a broadcast instructor at a small catholic school. We have underclassmen produce our morning announcements.

I have recently convinced the school to make room in the (small) budget for some new equipment. We ordered 2 black magic studio cameras, and ATEM Television Studio HD. I had a couple questions regarding the switcher - Mainly the Media Players

For our news program we rifle through announcements pretty quickly, normally showing a graphic with each, much like a slide show. So my questions -


Is it possible to quickly switch what graphics are in the Media Player? Is there a hot key to advance to the next stored graphic? Or do you have to navigate with your mouse back to the Media Pool and change the assigned Media Player key each time? Maybe there is a way to set a macro to advance images?


I know this is meant to be a switcher, not a CG machine. If it is not possible to quickly shuffle through the Media Pool, Id not be opposed to a 3rd party. Mimo seems to do exactly what I want, however it is Mac only, we are PC based. Casper seems a little complicated for these students level. Are there other options? Ive seen people talk about ProPresenter...

Thanks in advanced

You should have a look at the ATEM Macro features.

Caspar CG has a client available that is really easy to use. And you have the benifit of not only being able to play out stills but also videos. Take a look at the Caspar CG client. It is very powerful but easy to learn.

The media pool in the Atems is also easy to use. You can drag and drop compatible formats to the pool or you can export direct out of Photoshop and even put it into a media player. As far as I know there is no shortcut to advance the graphic in the media player. You can do this if you have a hardware panel (like 1ME or 2ME panel) or you should take a look at Just Macros and get a small X-Keys panel for that.


Cheers

Robert

EDIT:
You could indeed record a macro that puts another graphic store into a media player BUT there is no way to advance one by one in the media pool. You would have to record a macro for each still store because the macro function can only record button presses or in this case changing the graphic in the media player. - As I said take a look at Caspar CG! It's free and very powerful!
I believe that if yo get the TV Studio Pro (the one with the integrated button panel) you have the ability to switch through the still store graphics one by one. So if you have the budget get this one instead.

There's an android and iPad app called meta control that has user configured buttons for many of the Atem's controls. The idea being you can create a touchscreen control panel running the app on a tablet etc... Of the many buttons available for use, one jumps forward in the media pool and another back.

Another thing to consider: you can have as many instances of the ATEM software open on different machines as you want.

I manage a public access station that is housed in our local high school, and, like you, they also do a daily morning announcements with tons of graphics in the media pools. So, we have a CG operator who has a laptop that has a 2nd monitor attached with Photoshop open on one monitor (in case they need to change something or build on the fly), with the ATEM software (open on the Media Pool tab) open on the 2nd screen so they can cycle through the graphics in the 2 media pools.

We have another instance of the software on another laptop so a student can shade the cameras.

And while we have a Broadcast Panel for our ATEM, we could have a 3rd instance of the software open for the technical director to switch the show. (The Broadcast Panel has a knob that allows you to cycle quickly through the Media Pools when we don't have a CG operator).

While I know that you talked about a tight budget, but the ATEM software can run on pretty much anything, so if you could get a hold of any old computer or laptop, you could have a student running the ATEM software on it just to change the graphics in the Media Pools, so that you don't have to interrupt the person operating the switcher.

There are many ways to switch the image assigned to a media player quickly. It could be done with any number of input devices (keyboard, X-Keys, Elgato Stream Deck, Arduino, Midi device).
I do it with Windows PowerShell using any of these input methods. Example of Arduino using an old broadcast panel (could be any keypad that can be interfaced to Arduino) changing the media slot. Would be a great project for students. I have a hotkey utility that could advance the slot from keyboard shortcut also.

If there are only graphics and no videos why don´t you put them into powerpoint, connect the computer to hdmi in and switch to this input if necessary? If you want to change to the next graphics you even could use a presenter like that: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Logitech-Wirel ... B002L3TSLQ