SI FAQ: Images in a Deko Crawl

Can I combine images and text in my Deko crawl?

Images in a Crawl You can put anything into a crawl that can be created in a still dko Deko graphic file, including text, images, and simple shapes like ellipses and rectangles. Unfortunately, you can not include other kinds of DekoCast elements like Cel Animations, Clips, or Video.

The Deko graphics are set up and displayed using "Deko tags" embedded in the Transition Deko text override or contents text. Deko tags are XML-like commands surrounded by < and >. For more info, see the Multiple Deko Layers FAQ.

The trick to combining images and text in a crawl is to create a dko Deko graphic file with both a text layer and also a rectangle layer with its texture set to an image file, for example a tga file. Then use Deko tags in the contents string to select the text or image layer, and to change the image file to which the image layer refers.

There are a lot of details to setting everything up correctly, so to see it all working, you can download Pinnacle's LogoCrawl example (about 160K bytes), or you can just view the readme file here directly. The example is a self-extracting exe that creates a new LogoCrawl folder in C:/DekoCast/samples. This is an unsupported example created and owned by Pinnacle Systems/Avid Technology. The copy on this site is provided for your convenience.

In this example, the crawl contents come from a text file. The lines, including the Deko tags, look something like:



<macro>layer_select layer 2; detail_edit 1 shader=(texture
"C:\DekoCast\samples\Logo Crawl\Images\enron.tga"
hgroup=left)</macro>



<layer id="1"/><preset id="1"/>ENRNQ<preset
id="5"/>  .11 <preset id="4"/>B<preset id="7"/> .01

This example also changes text color and style, and uses characters from a custom typeface to display up and down arrows.

last modified 10/20/2005

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