Chameleon Branding

Chameleon Branding focuses on branding assets. Assets are either bugs or snipes. A bug is distinguished from a snipe by how it is removed/hidden. A bug remains until it is taken off whereas a snipe does not require removal and automatically gets removed.

Assets are triggered in the following ways:

1. manually - from the Branding Player, Flow, Branding Master or any app/external platform (eg. Ross Dashboard) which can send commands over an ip port

2. assets scheduled in Flow

3. automation

There are 2 types of commands:

1. automation commands

2. branding commands

Automation and branding commands can be the same but the difference is that automation commands can be defined in the player or in Trigger Master to correspond to automation systems. Automation and branding commands are triggered over different ip ports. Branding ports are always defined as servers on the players while automation ports are always clients.

The branding commands never change and they include the following:

Open

Note: preview support is only optionally supported in XPression currently. Preview commands are ignored if the player can’t do anything with it.

Automation commands can be modified to suit your automation system. By default they include:

Open

The # defined above represents the asset name which is also often called a house id. It’s the name used when defining assets in Flow.

For automation, there is support for an optional reconcile key (reconkey) which can be part of an automation commands. For example, the following automation command:

<#;%>

defines a command structure where the % represents the optional reconkey. For example, if automation sends this:

<12345;00120034>

The asset name is 12345 and the reconkey is 00120034.

Reconkeys are unique ids that can be used to help reconcile sponsors in the as run logs. They are an optional feature in some automation/traffic systems.

The delimiters above are a way of delimiting multiple commands. That is, if more than one command is sent at once, putting the delimiter between them allows for the commands to parse correctly.

The Branding Players have a special way to deal with media. Instead of using Chameleon’s standard Media data type, branding uses a logos directory to provide all the media used for assets. When defining an asset in Flow, all logos are defined using the media from the logos directory. The Chameleon database still uses references to the logos from the logos directory but this happens either manually using Gears or either manually or automatically using Logos Updater.

The Logos directory contains sub directories that correspond to either implicit or explicit tags in branding scenes. For example, this logos directory:

has all the media for tags ^channel, ^FF sponsor, ^fullframe,…

Each of the above directories can have unlimited sub-directories to make organizing the media easier. For example, you might have a directory for a team logo. The sub-directories can be organized in leagues.