What's New?
This page is a summary of the most relevant changes of the current version of Ventuz Director for existing users. For a detailed list of new features, changes and bug fixes, see the official release notes.
Ventuz 4.05
- Director can manage multiple channels of content and a topology cluster supports addressing multiple ports. This enables a multitude of scenarios from multiple layers of content on a single machine (e.g. background, foreground, overlay) to having separate content on different machines that belong to a single show. Channels are added and connected to channel slots in the topology via the Channel Manager in the main menu. Channels can be deactivated to not listen to user interaction but still run their predefined playlists via the timeline window.
- Channels can be activated by pressing Ctrl + 1 to Ctrl + 9 (or Ctrl + Shift + 1 etc to keep the previous selected channels active as well).
- All playlist and property editor windows as well as the timeline window now have optional take/update/clear buttons per channel that can be added to their toolbars via their docking window configuration pop-ups.
- Each channel can now have a set of channel rules to restrict which content can be cued on any particular channel. For example, full-screen movies can automatically appear only on the background channel while branding information is routed to the overlay channel. Channel rules also allow to replace content being cued by channel specific versions, for example replacing all usage of a sponsor template with a dedicated pre-filled sponsor page.
- All channel-based windows (e.g. property editor, playlist and plug-in windows) now show the name of the bound channel underneath their tab-label.
- The plug-in API has been extended such that plug-ins can now directly be associated with a show via the Show / Plug-ins main menu entry. Enabled-plug-ins are loaded when the show opens and their configuring is stored in the show file. However, similar to window layouts, project specific defaults can be embedded into the VZP file. The Ventuz Visual Studio extension has been updated to include the new interfaces:
- IChannelRuleProvider: add custom condition and actions for channel rules. One interesting use case is doing database lookups when specific templates (such as statistics) are cued.
- IConfigurablePlugin: Such plug-ins have a configure settings button next to their entry in the plug-in manager and their settings are stored in the show file.
- IShotboxExtender: add custom entries to the shot box
- IWindowProvider/IPluginWindow: replaces the older IWindowPlugin interface and allows to provide multiple window types from within a single plug-in as well as develop channel-dependent windows. The existing IWindowPlugin interface still works but is now obsolete and will be removed in a future version. Plug-in developers should switch to the new interfaces!
- Keyboard shortcuts can now be customized via the shortcut manager.
- Topologies can now be embedded into a Ventuz project file via the Embedded Topology main menu entry. When a show is opened, it checks the underlying project and shows a selection dialog if the project contains embedded topologies.
Ventuz 4.04
- Ventuz Director officially became a multi-machine solution with the introduction of the Topology Editor. It is a simple and elegant user interface for creating an environment of remote machines (e.g. one or more cluster of playout machines) that are controlled by Director but also can be used for monitoring and performing basic administrative tasks.
- Creation of a Director Show and managing multiple shows based on the same project has been vastly improved. Auto-Templates and Scene Import Information is now stored in the Ventuz Project File (.vzp) to be consistent among all shows. Window Layouts are also no longer stored in a show. Instead they are stored in the user settings on a per-project basis but can also be bundled into the Ventuz Project File for deployment. All of this combined makes creating a new show as simple as selecting a project from the project browser!
- A Window Layout can now contain multiple instances of type Property Editor, Preview Renderer and Playlist. To what data source they are bound can be changed in the window manager.
- Director has a new Tools main menu which contains the options menu entry. In it, various start up options like fullscreen and default topology can be set. See Application Settings for more.
- The default order of preview/program windows has been changed such that the preview window is on the left. Note that this only affects projects for which no window layouts are stored in the user settings when a show is opened and only shows create in V4.04.