Working with Content

Common Input Fields

Display5 offers you a diverse range of content widgets for your Shows.Many of the widgets and modules have common settings, such as dimensions and background colour. All slides have a duration and all slides have a schedule option. Once you learn these features, you will be comfortable adding these properties to any slide.

Background Colour

Many of the slides offer a background colour option, this is a field input that you can either type in a color value - e.g. FF0000 for red or 0000FF for blue. Or you can use the color palette to select and specify a color for the background, to open the palette simply click on the input field box for the color setting and the palette will automatically open.

You can now pick the color from the palette for your BG and the relevant hex code will be updated in the input field.

In the example above the color is set to a dark blue (624FFF).

Opacity

You can set the opacity of a slide by using the sliding bar or typing in a number from 0.1 to 1. This will create a transparent look when creating a slide. If you have panels in a free design show that overlap this can be especially effective (This is useful for things such as logos and watermarks).

Transparent Background

You can set the background colour or image to transparent if you are working with transparent GIFs and JPEGS. When creating a slide, select the transparent background radio button.

Slide Title

Always try to add a slide title to any slide you are adding as it will help you to remember what the content of the slide was when you are later managing your show playback. The slide title is a standard input field into which you can type any text or punctuation, up to 260 characters long.

Duration of Play

This field tells the system how long to play this particular piece of content, when it comes up in the Playlist.The duration input field is expecting a value in seconds for the playback of the slide, you can enter a value of any length in this field and the play back will be converted to hours, minutes, seconds etc. For example, 6000 seconds would be 100 minutes; 600 seconds would be 10 minutes.

Width and Height

You will often see width and height options for the media or content item that you are adding into the slide Playlist. Most often you will want to use the whole panel for the content, and the default values for the width and height of the panel may already be set for you. You can override any of these values and save new dimensions for your content.This is especially useful if you want the background (BG) color you have chosen to be visible around the content item.

When you add a new slide you will also notice that the panel dimensions are often given at the top of the add or edit windows, e.g.:

This is designed to remind you what the panel dimensions are when you are setting the dimensions of your content item.

Top and Left Margin

For many of the slides in Display5 you have the option to add a top and left margin in pixels to help to center or move content that is smaller than the slide size.

More Info

You will also notice in the "Add Slides & Widgets" list that there is a "What's This?" column and hyperlinks in the column to each of the slide types.

Clicking on these hyperlinks will open a small dialog box containing more information on what the actual slide properties are, as well as a small image representation of the final slide to give you some sense of what the widget or container is able to offer. The example below is for the RSS widget: