Automatically playing a regularly updated Weather or Travel report over a bed in Myriad Playout v5

Introduction

One very common scenario in many stations is content like Weather or a Travel report being delivered via automated file transfers such as Dropbox, and wanting to play that content from the Scheduled Log but over a bed.

If the duration of the audio can change - for example at peak times a traffic report may be twice the duration of it at quiet times - then you need a way to fade out the bed once the report has completed.

Option 1

One option is to just schedule these in the Scheduled Log as 3 separate items. 

The first is the Weather Bed, and has the extro set at the point you want the Weather Voiceover ("VO") to play. You then edit the audio itself to add in a fade at this point down to a lower level so it doesn't drown out the Weather VO.

The second item in the Log is the Weather VO itself - there is an article here that covers setting up AutoImporter to automatically import a news or weather item

The final item in the Log is a Command media Item that tells Myriad to fade out the Weather Bed.

For example, if our Weather bed was in Media Item 9001, our Weather VO in 9002, and our End of Weather Command was in 9003, then the command in Media Item 9003 would be :

REM Fadeout the weather bed
Players.FadeOutItem(-1,0,9001,250)

This command tells Myriad to find 9001 in any player and fade it out over 250msec.

This process works very well, but relies on you modifying the actual Bed itself, but is a good solution for many users.

If you have a "Weather Out" stab that you want to play, you could also just add this scheduled log after the command to, to give a very well produced program segment.

Option 2

This option is slightly more complex than Option 1 but gives you much more control over the audio in the bed, as well as only needing a single item to be scheduled into the log.

In this scenario, there are still 3 Media Items:

Media Item 9001: the Weather Bed itself

Media Item 9002: The Weather VO

Media Item 9003: The weather sequence macro command

On Media Item 9001 (the weather bed), set the Intro End timing point at the point you want the Weather VO to start, then turn on the "Trigger Items" on the View ribbon, and finally set the Weather Sequence item (Media Item 9003) to be played at that Intro point. Leave the Extro set to the end of the Weather bed as normal.

You now need to setup the Weather Sequence Macro Media Item (9003) to reduce the volume on the bed, then play the Weather VO, before finally then fading out the bed altogether, which will then automatically close and the Scheduled Log will then continue. 

Edit Media Item 9003 and set the command to:

REM Duck the volume of the bed down to 40% using a 200msec ramp
Players.FadeToItem(-1,0,9001,200,40)

REM Wait for that fade down to complete
Commands.Wait(0.2)

REM Play the Weather VO and wait for it's extro
Players.PlayItemToExtro(-1,0,9002)

REM Fadeout the weather bed
Players.FadeOutItem(-1,0,9001,250)

Save the media item and close the Editor window.

Note: Media Item 9003 as used in this example is attached to this article and available for you to download and use.

That's the process complete. Whenever you now play Media Item 9001 (the weather bed), it will automatically play the Macro command at the intro end, which will duck the bed, play the Weather VO, wait for it to end, then gracefully fade out the remainder of the bed.

This item can then be played from the Scheduled Log or even played from Favourites and will always  play the Weather VO neatly over the bed.

If you wanted to automatically play a Weather Out Stab (for example in media item 9004) then you could just append a command such as:

REM Play Media Item 9004 in any player until it finishes.
Players.PlayItemToExtro(-1,0,9004)