Today we are rolling out a major update focused on graphics flexibility, automated timing controls, and critical reliability improvements for your live broadcast workflow.
From animated transparent overlays to self-healing DeckLink outputs, here is a detailed look at what is new.
Animated Overlays & Dynamic Logo Design
On-air branding gets a significant visual upgrade. The Logo Designer now supports high-performance web formats with transparent backgrounds, including WebM, animated PNG (APNG), SVG, and AVIF.
- Intro & Outro Animations: You can now assign separate entry and exit animations. An animated ident will build up, pause cleanly on its final frame while on air, and play an exit animation when cleared.
- Independent Transitions: Coming in and going out are now decoupled. Choose distinct transition styles (Cut, Fade, Slide, Grow, Wipe) and separate durations for entrance and exit.
- Custom Naming & Dynamic Sync: Rename any logo preset directly within the designer. All open playout cue lists update instantly to reflect the new name without interrupting live graphics.
Precision Cue Timings: Sponsor Bugs & Auto-Clearing
Managing graphics manually during fast-paced broadcasts can lead to clutter. This release introduces automated lifespan and timing controls directly tied to your rundown:
- Cue-Bound Visibility: Set a logo to remain on air until manually changed, strictly for the duration of the current cue, or for a set countdown. Sponsor tags and segment titles now clear themselves automatically without requiring an extra “clear logo” cue.
- Offset & Pre-Roll Controls:
- Comes in after: Delays the graphic entrance by a set number of seconds after a cue starts, letting video intros breathe before the bug appears.
- Leaves early: Automatically removes the graphic a set number of seconds before a video ends or a cue transition occurs, ensuring clean segues into ad breaks or bumpers.
DeckLink SDI Health Monitoring & Self-Healing
Hardware feed reliability is critical in mission-critical environments. The playout engine now actively interrogates Blackmagic DeckLink cards every second to verify that video frames are physically leaving the card.
If an output stall or frozen driver state is detected:
- The engine logs the state and reflects 0 FPS in the status bar.
- It initiates an automated background restart cycle with exponential backoff (from 3 seconds up to 2 minutes) to recover the feed transparently.
- If the card remains unresponsive after three recovery attempts, an operator alert prompts clear diagnostic steps.
System Stability & Under-the-Hood Fixes
- Legacy GPU & Web Cue Fixes: Hardware acceleration has been cleanly disabled across the embedded browser runtime. This completely resolves crashes and black-screen playback bugs when loading online video or YouTube cues on older integrated graphics chips.
- Graphics Rendering Polish: Fixed an issue where previous graphics could briefly flash after bumpers, and resolved a bug where clearing a graphic caused it to shift towards the screen origin during fade-outs.
- Multi-Playout Synchronization: Fixed counter tracking across multiple open playout windows, guaranteeing that rapid graphic changes across parallel playlists are never dropped.
- Cleaner Asset Diagnostics: The engine now writes actionable diagnostic warnings to the log whenever an overlay file is missing, renamed, or formatted incorrectly.
- Automated Module Maintenance: The updater now cleans up orphaned or duplicate module files, enforces proper user-space permissions, and ensures only the latest version of any module is active.
- Crash Analytics: Crash reports now capture precise Windows build and revision numbers for faster troubleshooting.
Updating
This update is available immediately. Run Check modules in your settings or download the latest installer from our portal. If updating an existing installation, perform one additional system restart to ensure all runtime flags take effect.