Chameleon CG - Preview Channel

Owned by Georg Hentsch
Last updated: Apr 19, 2021
3 min read

Chameleon CG has full support for preview channels. From the player’s point of view, it’s just another channel. For both the CG Sequencer and Branding, it’s just a matter of choosing what channel to define as a preview channel. For example, from the Chameleon Web Server (aka player), define a 2nd channel as your program channel’s preview channel. It will have it’s own unique endpoint and ip/port:

Once the preview channel is defined, we have everything we need for working with a preview channel. The following will discuss how to work with a preview channel for branding and the cg sequencer.

Note that while this article shows both program and preview channels as web-based channels, you can mix and match program and preview channels to be ndi, sdi or web. For example, a program channel can be SDI while the preview channel can be in a browser.

Setting up Web Server

First we’ll setup the Web Server (or NDI Player or SDI Player) before we show how it can be used with branding and the CG Sequencer.

We’ll create a program channel called TSN1 and a preview channel called TSN1 Preview:

You can see that each has its own unique endpoint (where the rendering happens) and ip/port. On localhost, TSN1 has endpoint localhost/tsn1 with port 127.0.0.1/8109 while TSN1 Preview has endpoint localhost/tsn1preview with port 127.0.0.1/8108.

Branding

Next up, we need to setup the program and preview channel in the Branding Player. That’s done from the Channel Preferences menu item:

Next up, it’s a matter of taking assets. That can be done from the Branding Player or Flow. From Flow’s Trigger Assets page, it’s a matter of selecting assets and using the buttons to take to program or preview channels:

If we setup a couple of browser tabs, we can see the output in both program and preview channels (aka endpoints):

CG Sequencer

We’ll use the same program and preview channel for the CG Sequencer. From Flow, go to the CG pages from the dashboard:

We’ll need to setup the players for TSN1 to define a program and preview channel here:

After that, go to the Sequencer and you’ll see program and preview support for taking scenes:

Pick your scene and it’s a matter of using the program and preview buttons to take it to the desired destination: