Template Properties

This section controls some of the most important properties of a template.

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  • Active: A template marked as active is visible in Viz Pilot Edge, otherwise it is not. This can, for instance, be used to treat a template as a draft until it is ready to use in Viz Pilot Edge, or hide unused templates.

  • Legacy: Decides how the template behaves in Viz Pilot Director:

    • Enabled: In Viz Pilot Director. Legacy templates open in the built-in template window, but with no UI. See below.

    • Disabled (default): In Viz Pilot Director 8.6 or later, the template opens in Viz Pilot Edge.

  • Full HTML panel URL: URL to a custom HTML page that replaces the UI generated in Template Builder. If you add a URL to a custom HTML page, the payloadhosting JavaScript API must be used to handle the fields and data in the template.

  • Tags: View and edit the Tags of the template. These tags can be used to classify and group templates.

For more information about the Legacy setting, see Template Compatibility.

Video Timeline Duration

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The Video Timeline Duration section allows you to control timing properties for data elements based on this template when they are added to a video timeline as overlay graphics. Typically, these properties can be left blank, as the default duration for overlay graphics is automatically retrieved from the scene, when the template is added to the video timeline. However, in certain cases, it may be useful to override the default duration and define minimum and maximum duration values.

All durations are expressed in seconds.

Update Service

Update Service can be used to make sure the latest data is filled in automatically when the data element is taken on air. See Update Service for more information.

Concepts & Variants

The template’s concepts are listed on the left side of Template Properties:

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Hovering over the thumbnails, the following functionality is possible:

  • Upload a custom thumbnail image-20250120-111305.png: Select a file from the local disk. The image is resized to 320 x 180 pixels and stored in the database.

  • Revert to- or refresh the default thumbnail image-20250120-111448.png: If reverting to the default thumbnail, the custom thumbnail is discarded. If refreshing the default thumbnail, this generates a thumbnail snapshot from Preview Server. This thumbnail is not saved back to the database. The default thumbnail is generated automatically by Pilot Data Server.

Note: After saving the template, it can take some time until the default thumbnails for all concepts are refreshed in the browser, as Pilot Data Server does this in a background operation. Also caching in the browser can keep the old thumbnails for a while.

Variant Properties

Expanding each concept reveals the variants for the expanded concept.

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Warning: To make sure the template behaves correctly in Viz Pilot Edge and during playout, it is strongly recommended that all concepts contain the full set of variants, and that variants are based on scenes that have the same set control fields. This makes it easy to crate templates with a coherent input UI for the user.

The following properties can be set per variant:

  • Category: A Category must be configured to use a specific playout channel. See Categories and Channels for more information.

  • External Id: When a template has no unsaved changes, each variant can be attached to a numeric number. Click the edit button to open the External Id dialog box where it is possible to assign a new, unique number to this specific variant, and add a description to it. The External ID can be used by 3rd party integrators to refer to a template with the specified concept and variant selected, to create data elements based on this template for instance.