Overlay Editor

CuePoints > Settings… > Overlay Editor

An overlay is text or a picture laid on top of your video: the cue name, a countdown, a clock, a logo. This pane lets you build on-screen overlays and preview them against the program feed.

Overlays show up on your video output, on your NDI stream, and burnt into anything the Recorder captures.

How It's Laid Out

• Left, OVERLAY ITEMS. The list of things on your overlay. Click one to edit it.

• Middle; the settings for whichever item you clicked.

• Right, POSITION and PREVIEW. Where it sits, and what it looks like.

The Five Kinds Of Item

Click Add an overlay item and choose what to add:

• Text: words you type. A show name, a warning, anything fixed.

• CuePoint: the cue that's happening now, or the one coming next.

• Timecode: the running clock.

• Timestamp: today's date and the time of day.

• Image: a picture, usually a logo.

Choose carefully. An item's kind is set when you make it and cannot be changed afterwards. If you picked the wrong one, delete it and add a new one.

The buttons above the rail let you duplicate the selected item, and remove the selected item. Removing takes it off every output. It does not change any of your other items.

Placing Things: The Position Grid

The grid on the right is nine squares: left, centre, right across, and top, middle, bottom down. Click a square and the item goes there.

Items sharing a position stack in this order: the order they appear in the rail. So if two items are both bottom-centre, they sit one above the other.

• Move up puts an item closer to the edge of the screen.

• Move down moves it further in.

Use H padding and V padding to push an item away from the edge, so text isn't jammed against the frame.

Making It Readable

Every item shares the same look controls, under TEXT STYLE:

• Font and Font size: the size is in points relative to the video, so it scales with the picture.

• Text colour and Opacity: white on a dark background reads best.

• Bg colour and Bg opacity: a panel behind the text. This is the trick that makes an overlay readable over a moving picture. Black at about 25% is a good starting point: you can see through it, but the words never disappear.

• Reduce to Fit: if the text is too long for the space, shrink it rather than let it run off the screen. Leave this on.

Kind-By-Kind

Text

Type what you want in Content. That's it.

CuePoint

Shows cue information live.

• Cue filter: which cue types this item watches. All Types watches everything; pick one type to only ever show, say, Lighting cues.

• Shows: whether it shows the cue that's happening now or the one coming next.

• Prefix and Suffix: words wrapped around the cue, so 12 can read CUE 12:.

• CueID prefix and Joined by: how a cue number is written and what separates it from the name.

• Timer: a live counter next to the cue:

  • Countdown: time left.

  • Time Since: time since the cue fired. This is only offered for a current-cue item, because a cue that hasn't happened yet has nothing to count from.

  • Countdown to Next: time until the next one.

• Dwell: how long the cue stays on screen after it fires, before it clears.

Timecode

• Striped timecode: the timecode written onto the track itself.

• Incoming timecode: timecode arriving from outside (see Timecode settings).

• Playhead position: simply how far into the track you are.

If you're following someone else's clock, Incoming timecode is the honest one, it's what everyone else is looking at.

Timestamp

The real date and time, for a recording you'll watch back later.

• Date format: DD/MM/YYYY, MM/DD/YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD or DD-Mon-YYYY.

• Time format: 24h, 24h no sec, 12h or 12h no sec. Drop the seconds if the constantly changing number is distracting.

• Show timezone: worth turning on if the recording will be watched somewhere else in the world.

Image

Click Choose Image… and pick a file. Size sets how big it is as a percentage of the picture. A logo at about 25%, bottom-right, with background opacity at 0, is the usual look.

Watermark Overlay

A separate always-on mark, kept apart from your ordinary items so a show layout can't accidentally remove it. Same controls: an image or some text, a size, and a position.

Preview

The preview on the right shows exactly what the overlay will look like. Show the camera behind the preview puts your real video underneath it, which is the only honest way to check something is readable, text that looks perfect on black often vanishes over a bright stage.

Presets

The Preset dropdown saves a whole overlay layout under a name, so you can switch between shows in one click.

• Save Overlay Preset stores what's on screen now.

• Pick a saved name to load it back.

• Delete only appears while a preset is actually selected.