Tech Talk Recap – XPression 10.5: Increasing Creativity, Efficiency and ROI

Ross Video’s XPression team recently hosted an online Tech Talk event focused on the latest update to the XPression real-time motion graphics system: version 10.5. During the session, Patrick Twomey (Director, Graphics Product Management) and Greg Ozimkowski (XPression Product Specialist) gave an overview of the new features and highlights included in the release and discussed the benefits that they provide to creative, technical and business users.

If you missed the session, you can click here to watch the full event on-demand.

XPression 10.5 Highlights

Exporting (and Importing) Single Scenes

The Tech Talk kicked off with Twomey and Ozimkowski introducing the new single scene import and export function, which enables users to export a single scene which can then be shared with another user on another XPression system. This creates a file-based workflow similar to legacy graphics systems that operators and designers used to work on.

Font Management Tools

Next, the two discussed XPression’s new font management tools, which provide the option to clone fonts for a specific scene rather than change them globally in the project, and lock fonts to protect them from deletion or changes. The new font tools also allow users to add notes to fonts to help other users identify how or where the font is used.

Color-Coding & Visual Logic Blocks

Following that, the session went into detail on how XPression 10.5 also adds the option to color-code template data fields to guide operators. It also includes new Visual Logic Blocks, including one which allows artists to show or hide template fields based on conditional use of other fields. This means that unused fields do not have to be shown, improving accuracy and saving decision-making time by hiding unnecessary fields from the user.

Assign Scenes to Take Item(s)

Next, the Tech Talk went over another key feature of XPression 10.5 which allows people to assign a scene to a take item. This means that an operator can now replace a scene used in a take item at the last second without having to rebuild everything from scratch as XPression will remap all of the existing fields in the selected take item to the new scene template, thus resulting in huge time savings when last minute changes are required.

XPression Status Client

Twomey and Ozimkowski continued by going into detail on the new XPression Status Client, which allows users to see all the XPression systems that are on the network. Users can use the client to start or stop XPression services, group systems by location or function and even push installs – a major time saver for technical teams!

XPression Video Codec 2

The session finished with an overview of XPression Video Codec 2, which allows users to work with HDR content and in Wide Color Gamut. This is important, since not all users can retool their stations into UHD hardware, but they might want the benefit of the improved High Dynamic Range and Wide Color Gamut. The codec is also backwards compatible, so all legacy assets still play, but any new assets created with the XPression Video Codec 2 will also play, open, and decode even faster than before!

Learn More

These were just a few of the dozens of new and exciting new features included in XPression 10.5 – there are lots more for our users to discover!

To watch the “XPression v10.5: Increasing Creativity, Efficiency and ROI” Tech Talk on-demand, click here.

For more information on the XPression real-time motion graphics system, you can visit our XPression product page, and be sure to check out the XPression U section to see all the training videos.