Introduction

XML Templates are an easy but powerful way to create personalized videos. With just a few lines of code you can produce Dynamic Movies that would otherwise require long editor sessions, SDL scripting and programming skills. Many standard elements, such as animations, transitions and dynamic story flows are now easily accessible.

Dynamic Movies exported from XML Templates can be integrated into Dynamic Stories as other Movies created by other tools, such as the Editor and vice versa.

You can edit XML Code directly with the integrated code editor in the Project Console and quickly preview all or parts of the template without first exporting a Dynamic Movie.

XML Templates have the following components:

• Like any video, templates uses Scenes to divide a larger templates into groups. Scenes are rendered sequentially, but may be skipped or choosen dynamically.
• Each scene consists of a number of Layers that provide the visual and audibel content of a scene. There are many different types of layers, such as video, image, text and sound layers. The contents of these layer may be dynamic or variable.
• Layers can be transformed, masked or filtered, changing the visual content, size or shape of the layer.
• Layers can be animated change their position, scale or opacity over time.
• Variables let you substitute a value or a resource (such as an image) for each rendering of the video.

Basic Workflow

1. Create a storyboard of your personalized video. The more detail you put into the planning the easier it is to translate the storyboard into an XML Template. Have run lengths, frame sizes, Font sizes and colors defined.
2. Seperate the static, non-personalized parts from the elements that are personalized. Shot footage that you need, collect other assets like background video, images, fonts and audio files and upload them to the project you create in the next step.
3. Create a project in the Project Management Console and select it. Create a new XML Template.
4. Edit the template with scenes, layers, animations as you have outlined in your storyboard.
5. Preview the template and test it with various values for the parameters that you used in your template.
6. Finally, export a Dynamic Movie. From this point on you can render videos of this Dynamic Movie via the Render API.