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good day and welcome to our short video explanation and demonstration of how to set up digital signage for free assuming you have a PC or something you can run it off of and when I say free I'm there's a lot of digital signage software tools that are out there but that claim to be free but there is like free download okay that's not free free for 30-days okay that's not free or insanely limited functionality so it's a free but not really what we're gonna show you is actually free after a couple of weeks are goofing around with different things we've settled on one that we like we're not being paid for this by the way it's completely honest view and explanation so let's go through a couple things before we get to it the first thing is well let's go to show you what the product is we're looking look talking about digital signage comm there is let's go over some of the the negatives before we get started the first thing is that with the free version you don't get transitions between the different slides between the different panes scenes as they're called is that a big deal for you if it is then you're going to want to pay it's about 30 bucks a month I think for that version it isn't for me I would much prefer transitions but I'm not going to pay for them also there are a whole pile of pre-built what they call scenes which are just things that are assembled into a single package things like the particular background with a box around it with the weather and maybe an RSS feed that kind of stuff is pre-built and there's lots and lots of them if you pay and there's fewer although still lots if you don't pay next thing is that they claim that you can play it as you can see here lots of different devices and you can but one of the ways you can play that they claim is using the browser rather than downloading a player software which is free my experience has been that you can't do it that it's not stable and reliable I talked to tech support about it and they said yeah we don't recommend it so if you have to run a through browser for this probably isn't for you however you just download the app and you're on your way next thing scenes and components this is e and these are the things you snap together to build your presentation and your signage and they some of them just don't work which is a little annoying but it's not the end of the year the game I can I can live with this the last two things are well the one is a little annoying for me but it's hardly a crisis and that is if you're pushing this to a device well let's pick on a pcs do you understand it if you have a PC with two screens what would keep it nice and simple this software will stretch and display on both screens you can't say assign your presentation your signage to the left screen and do something else on the right screen and you can't set it to display on both screens it's just going to display on both screens so in my case I built a presentation I built a signage the previews look great on a single screen when I went to actually run it on the dual screen system that I had it just stretched across and looked like hell well I really have two choices I can have the canvas be two screens wide and then everything would be fine or you can do what I did which is I simply set the two screens to be duplicated so that as far as Windows is concerned it's just one screen so that was a bit annoying for me but that was really about the only thing that sort of got me unhappy that gets us to the best thing about this system which is this little button right here a live chat also over here live chat these guys are on there helpful door friendly workers a guy named Joe worked with a couple other guys they're pretty happy they answer your questions they're friendly you don't have a giant queue they'll get to you within 20 30 seconds and they won't get back to you tomorrow they'll fix it and work with you right away the next thing that's good about this is signage studio signage studios is there is there a twitch is free that lets you build the presentations or the signage and under help there's videos and there's a lot of them and they're short so they get to the point you don't to watch it's not like some you know two-hour webinar where you have to sort of clip through to get to your point they have short answers that are direct with video explaining how to get through things if you have questions before you get a hold of the chat guys alright so let's get started and guess where you click when you want to get started you click get started and this comes up and it says well what do you want to do well create new account and it's SQLite or pro these are the same thing so I don't and you could toggle back and forth so I don't know why it asks you this but let's just click go for over fun these are just examples sample boards that you can go through I don't care about any of them none of them are what I want so yeah so alright so there's some examples I don't care about them just go to direct download download signage studio and install it I'm not gonna waste your time with the install because it's click Next so there's nothing to do there launch signage signage studio and well what do you wanna do well I don't have an account so I want to create a new account and this is asking you well what type of business are you in this is so I can get you started I don't care so I'm just gonna click create account again and it's asking well what is it well let's go with up and you are a tech I am good to go create new account update stations sure just click Save on this and this is where it takes you to and this is in what they call simple mode which you see in the top right hand corner I find simple mode to be too simple I find it quite confusing they have tried to limit things to make it easier for people but I just find it a mess so let me explain a couple of things that are here by changing first into the advanced mode and it will just things will just make more sense so I just click on that in the top right corner click advanced mode and it's the same thing just things are well they make more sense to me anyway so this is junk that it low - I call it junk it's junk that it loaded for me because they were trying to get me started which is really nice of them I don't want that ok so let's start by explaining what these various things are these elements so let's go to navigation and we'll start with campaign campaign is the is really what you care about specifically in the timeline so what you have in your timeline is your output and a neo put you can see your screen type which cleverly is right here and you can see this one's called sd3 and you can see here it could be called anything it could be called I like cheese it doesn't make any difference and you can see that the output is one minute long and it's going to look like this it's going to have information at the top and then three panes below and now I can drag elements or scenes or both to the various frames that are here and I know you don't really follow that but you will in just a minute so let's go through it let's move down to screen types now so we'll explain this first section click on screen type and you can see here they are that's just a single ugly screen that's two screens right that's just two frames and then this one you can see he's got more stuff in and you can select and you can drag and you can delete sometimes you have to right-click and delete sometimes you you can just press the Delete key on your keyboard and delete so I'm gonna do that there we go and go on and I can create a new one just drag it around and there we go we're gonna come back to this so don't worry about it resources mostly things like graphics RSS feeds things like that we'll come back to that as well but you can click on any of them double click and you'll see what's there these are just single graphics that you may choose to use somewhere there we go now the scenes this is absolutely key a scene is a combination of things it's combination of components and resources so a component are things like RSS feeds and a clock and whatever else we're going to come back to this so don't worry about it just yet then stations stations are the machines your tablets or your PCs that you are going to communicate with so let's go through let's set up a basic campaign from scratch alright so there's a bunch of resources that were built in for this particular presentation which I don't want not but so I'm gonna get rid of it not because I have to but just because it's clutter and it's just going to confuse me so I'm going to select all of these spike and control by clicking on the first item I think we noted bottom selecting the last item and then I'm gonna press this little axe I could right-click and select delete except it will only delete one of them if I do that here I can dump them all at once go on so all that junks gone and you can see I've got a gig of storage here which is ridiculous amount of space for you know they state these types of things now I'm going to scene editor and I'm just got to get rid of this stuff you don't have to you could just ignore it it just is extra junk but I just don't want it around so you're going to be tempted to go to your screen types and do your screen layout first my suggestion is that instead of doing that in unless you really have your graphics already built you know what you're doing my suggestion is that you should start with the scene so let's do that and you'll hopefully catch on to why I'm saying that let's go so I'm from a scene editor and I'm going to click plus and I can just build a generic scene on hookers it's gonna call this one test let's make this 500 by 400 it doesn't make any difference for the purpose of this conversation this is 500 by 400 now I can go in the middle here and I can select components and I can just drag stuff out so I can go to the clock and I can drag the clock out I can drag out an RSS feed I can do that kind of stuff I can change the background but why do that when there's a whole pile of stuff already built in so I'm going to right click on that and delete it because it's just extra garbage then I'm going to go to library now this is great these are free scenes that are already built so let's go to global scenes and there we go you see there's all kinds of scenes that are pre-built now I'm going to go to will let's choose whether for instance and if by the way I was not using the free one I would see many more than this but because I'm using the free version I'm limited to these you know I don't know 100 thousand whatever a whole pile of them so I'm going to go to this I can click on any of these and they will preview now I know one that I like for my plane with us so far is the five-day forecast I believe it's this number nine when it's go blue background there we go so that's one that I like and so I'm going to select that now I can press play if I want to preview this and you can see there's no real animation this once it's not doing much but it still looks what I want so I'm going to click OK and it's gonna suck it in something critical to remember is that none of your work will be saved unless you save it so click file and click save and upload it's giving me an error message I don't care about it because I'm not finished this yet click Save and it's going to push it up now I can close my up I can relaunch it Tech by the way the little remember me checkmark there doesn't work so don't get you frustrated by it and look resources all the things I deleted are gone still it's all wonderful and it won't prompt you when you press the X to save so make sure you do that so let's go back to the scene editor and there's whether that's uh it's number 37 all of this is editable so I can go into this item right here where it's a city name and if I double click you can see it comes up with this window to go well it looks pretty plain that's because it's white see so have I I elated so I can go there and I could change this just for the heck of it I'm gonna set it to blue and we've sent it to bold there we go and because I'm going to have the date running somewhere else I don't want this here I'm going to right click on this and select delete gone I also don't want this here some point you'd leave that gone now there's a couple of quirky things when you're coming we're working with scenes that you need to know so one of them is that there are anchors so I'm going to double click on this one and what I'm going to do is on the right hand side I'm going to go down to position and static and you'll see that this is locked I can drag this but it's just going to snap and so if I take the horizontal constraint off I can move it anywhere I want in that row but I can't move it anywhere else and that can be quite frustrating if you need to move it so in my case I know I want to take off the vertical constraint and I want to move it up a bit and I'm gonna now I'm gonna lock it down so okay so now we want to go in and I want to change this text from sample tax in the gain it's white so it's hard to see but it's there so I double click on it and on the right hand side here under properties I can highlight it and I'm going to change this for the sake of this conversation to something that we can all see which will be let's go with something that lets go with red so at least I can read it here so I can say this is not subject to legal interpretation I don't know what that means I just put it in I can change the font size right so bold and underline I can do what I want 14 there we go now if I gain I don't click file and save it won't save it so just ignore that there particular error message because it's not relevant okay so we have now one scene now you could add dozens of these scenes it doesn't make any difference for the purpose of this conversation we're just gonna say we just wanted this one scene that was prevailed and the rest of it it's gonna be like still graphics and clocks and really standard components nothing too complex background stuff like that so let's go build a campaign and click on campaigns and then a timeline here and this is the screen that it's selected I don't want to use that one so I'm going to go here to screen templates and I'm going to again just for the sake of this conversation I'm going to change it to this one I'm gonna drag it up and drop it then I'm gonna right click on this one and I'm going to delete it yes I'm certain I want to delete it there we go so now I've got a simple to frame timeline and I'm gonna let this one run for let's do a 10 second time frame here and this whole thing is just too long too so if you double click on this you can't change the time here but I can't drag the time how do I change that time easy like over here on timeline and you can see it's set to one minute come over here set the - let's do 20 seconds and we'll set that to zero minutes there we go and look it changed so this is a tiny little cycle now what I have in here are I have these five or six channels that were from the previous campaign which I don't care about a minute right-click it I'm gonna delete them all by there to save you the time from watching that I just did that off-camera and so now I've got two channels there as they're called left and you can see I have two frames up here and I could add more I can add more channels a channel is basically what fits into a frame so let's show you how that works it's not that hard so I'm gonna go to here double click on it and I'm going to take this channel I'm gonna drag it down to this left frame and you'll notice that the corner changes to match this color and this one I'm gonna drag down to here and now you can see they're color-coded so I know what's going on except if I click this little preview button up here nothing much happens because there's nothing in these channels so that's not particularly useful what I've got to do is put something in here what would you put in there here's the idea how about a scene so I'm going to go to scenes I'm gonna put the wither in here so I'm going to drag this weather out and I'm gonna drop it in this channel right there and now I want to add something to this this channel here there's channel 1 and so I'm going to up just upload some graphics so I'm gonna go with 2 resources I'm going to click + I'm gonna say well were you stealing them from well I'm gonna pull it out of my local and I'm just gonna upload some graphics that I've just got lying around here I'm gonna upload this red phone 9 and I can do red phone 5 these just different graphics that I built positive touchscreen and resistive I'm gonna load those up just for fun and I'm just going to click open now that added all of them but they're just added into the system they're not still in the channel lets show us something interesting you see I've got these graphics here and they say JPEG and they look fine I have to click file save and upload before I can use them which is a bit obnoxious so now I can take this red phone 5 I can drag it out to here and I can make this let's make it that long and I'll take digital capacitor capacitor yeah that's not the bird let's go play this now and you'll see what this does doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo there you go right so isn't that lovely now I'm press stop now take a look this is the little quirk that may catch you so if I go to the plus here and I try to add more content and I choose let's choose first capacitive touchscreen there we go and now I'm going to delete this one for the sake of argument and I'll get rid of this one as well and now I take this one up and I drag it in here and I've got a preview it's not gonna be there and why was that annoying it's a little thing but where is it well that's because I didn't save and upload and there is now when I go to preview it works just fine all right so let's finish this off and build something a little bit more useful than what we've done okay so now I'm going to build a screen type I'm going to do basically everything from scratch again I'm gonna click here I'm going to click new screen it's called screen division and I'm going to select new I want this as a background so I want that frame to be there and I'm gonna call it that the names here are relevant by the way so I wouldn't bother naming them and I want this to be a full 1920 by 1080 and you'll notice the dragging them doesn't always get them right where you want them so that's probably the happiest place to be pixel wide zero there we go so I want this whole screen click the plus and I want a frame here and I want to put that along the top another one and I'm going to put that there and another one and I'm going to put it here and just for the sake of argument I'm going to put another one down at the bottom here and I'm gonna put the clock probably in that just something goofy so something just to prove the point so there we go so there's a layout it doesn't really make much difference what layout if I want these things to be exact you can see that got snap turned on you can see this it's very hard to see with a little line here or I can just go edit the numbers and I can say I want this to be you know 200 right now I'm just gonna drag this out because I want to do this fast but there we go that's my screen I'm gonna call this you are tech screen layout there we go it doesn't make difference what you call it and click Save and upload and if you don't things just don't work so just save it upload pretty much anytime you make a change go to timelines go to screen templates drag out our new one and I'll put that in for the second a little bit here the second ten seconds this and now now I need know you think oh geez well I've got all these different things how do i how do I fill these up now well not very hard click the plus like a local channel like the bus like a local channel you just add them so how many did we have here I add one two three four so I need for any channels local channel and I don't care what it's calling them so here now I'm gonna name these just for fun I'm gonna double click on this one and you can see over here I'm gonna call this this is the weather pane this one was the red phone so I'm going to call us the I'll just call this rate pain because you can call it whatever you want now this one no this one's not assigned as I said so I'm gonna make this one the background is gonna drag this out and put it on the background here there we go and you can see that's there so I'm going to call this background and then this one I'm just gonna drag down to here and I'm gonna call us one header it doesn't make any difference again you koley's whatever your heart desires drag this down drag this down or you can just leave them which I'll do further for the others so here I'll here I'll put this one and I'll put bottom frame just do you get the idea it doesn't make much difference what they're called and you can change the color so I'll change this to change it to that there we go alright so let's start dragging stuff into this so I'm going to go to components and I'm going to go into clock and I'm gonna direct the clock in tubes you don't drag it into here you drag it into wherever you want the clock which I'm going to put right there there we go and I only want it from ten seconds on so I'm gonna go over here and I want it exactly ten seconds and I want to last for ten seconds there we go now I'm going to add what else can I add in here so in here let's go to RSS feed let's go grab an RSS feed and because that's kind of fun and I'll go to there's a few RSS options here let's do RSS news it's gonna drag that out and put it here and I want that actually in the in this larger frame so that's not where I want it I'm gonna move it yes I'm sure I wanna delete I want to put it into this one here there we go which is slightly larger you'll recall that's that little orange frame right there and an RSS feed I can double click on it I get the properties and over here it'll you know say well how do you want to handle it and this I don't like really any of this so I'm going to set this to be a blueish and I want it to be much larger than that I want the headings to be a lot smaller larger I want them to be 28 and I want that to be a little darker blue and I want the text to be I'm making this up here obviously I'll make it 22 so it's a little bit larger and easier to see now you think okay well that's a an RSS feed no I would like to be there SSP I like well here's some pre-built ones and yes you can put in a customer oh you can just paste it in here now whatever you like so go search for an RSS feed I'm going to go for let's go to something nondenominational let's go with business there it is and it will load Ian so there's that and then in the left frame what am I gonna do here this is the which frame is a sort of double click on this because I've already forgotten which frame it is that's the pink is the pink that's the right that's this one here so what am I going to put in here let's put a picture sure so I can take a PowerPoint graphic or whatever else and I can upload it and I can put it in let's put this resistive touch graphic in here there we go and for the header I'm just going to put some text in and well let's show you how to do that so we'll go to components and then I believe it's called label oh by the way you'll see here that there's all of these called Enterprise only that's if you're paying look at all the other ones you get if you aren't paid so quite a lot external video I believe that goes out to YouTube I'm not positive that you got a check but let's go find label here we go so I'm gonna drag this up to here I'm gonna call it so I'm going to double click on it which will change the properties over here and I'm going to type something in label I don't want it to be green I really hate that so I'm gonna go with let's go with that whatever color that is start typing in here so the label is going to be you are Tex free dig signage sir above garbage how's that there we go and but you know I want that to be centered actually so there we go and let's just see what that looks like now so oh you know what's missing these the background so the background I want to use let's go to resources and I want to use let's use the red phone again we'll just drag it out and we'll put it right there and that will get stretched to fit over the entire thing so let's let's play this now and see if this looks like isn't this exciting Oh three more seconds it'll flip there we go this is my RSS feed man that looks like hell but you get the idea right of how that works all right so let's get out of that we'll stop so let's take a look at this because you may have noticed that the weather isn't actually there and you're thinking well there's text but there's nothing actually there how do we change that just double click on the weather component and on the right side here enter your city this will take postal codes it'll take zip codes it'll take whatever I'm going to put in let's put in Calgary because that's where I am right now and it won't take in less you click out of it so click somewhere else and there you go now I can go preview this again click the play in the top left hand corner and look we have got weather yay and I could go fix these a lot this alignment if I wanted I'm not going to for the sake of this demonstration let's show a couple of advanced things so under label I can set effects actually all of these things you can set effects on so I could I can have it alpha blend I can have it so I'm just gonna get rid of these I can have a border on it I can set you're going to go through these on your own I'm not going to take more of your time but I did want to point them out the shadow actually have used a few times when it comes to text so let's go to well let's go to shadow I'll actually do that so the shadow and I find the shadow to be very large here so I don't like that a whole lot I'm gonna set it to black and I'm going to set it to oh there we go we'll just leave it like that now watch this play and you'll see the shadow there see the shadow behind now of course that whole text is a mess right but you get the idea that that's what shadow is so hopefully now you've seen why I suggest you create your scenes first and then you create your screen types because if you want your frames to match exactly the easiest way to do is to build a content first and then make the screen match it rather than the other way around there are lots of things in the library having to do with masks and other things that you may really like but as far as just being straightforward goes that's the easiest way to do it most of these elements can be used for kiosk so what that means is well to here's an example let's say you were trying to build a kiosk for a mall you know so it's a store finder and information and you know police and bla bla bla bla bla well you can do that as well I'm not going to show you here because this is just supposed to be the down-and-dirty to get you up and running but it does work you can make these things clickable and that gets us to the help so let's go to help and the most interesting help here is the video tutorial so here's the video help now I haven't done much with kiosks so let's go see what they have on kiosk and I genuinely don't know look there we go so let's go to kiosk and we'll go and seem to touch you let's go to intro to events guy talking short concise it's really helpful so now the the thing you need to know now is how to get this to actually play you built your presentation or your signage you've got your screens laid out you're all happy so you've got a player and you think you get player but that only takes you to this studio thing which is not helpful go to direct download and in here you've got signage player now you can download it for all of these different things in my case I just want to run it on Windows it's a signage player click that I download it I install it on the machine in question as soon as I install it on the machine in question and start to run it what it will do is it will say who are you and ask you to sign in as soon as you sign in using the credentials that you just entered for your whole digital signage experience here what will happen is it will register in the digital signage player so let's go to stations and it will show up here as a station at that point you can take screenshot so you can see what's going on you can assign campaigns to it so at this point we're pretty much done but I do want to explain something for people that are going to do more with this sequences in particular so timeline you can just play the timeline and everything's happy right now however you can also go to sequences but and to create a group of timelines so let me explain what that means if you keep extending the set if I go double click on this timeline and I'll call us you were a tech timeline right that doesn't make a difference what I don't care how I spilled it and they make this yeah let's make it 25 minutes there we go by the time I'm done adding channels here this could be a mess so what you might want to do is build it in smaller chunks so build a frame or two on one timeline and then build another timeline and another timeline and another timeline keep your channels straight it just keeps everything straight in your head then you can go to sequences and you can just drag these timelines on set the different time frames you want and they will run in the order that you have you can say where then they repeat or not and what that will do is make your complex signage much easier to understand however you don't have to do that it's just an advanced thing when I double click on sequences I get kiosk mode and that's how you turn on kiosk mode as well by the way so if you're trying to test it that's that's this is how you're gonna have to do it okay I think that's enough for one session but that should get you through your free digital signage and you can see it's actually quite useful it works pretty well if you have any questions or concerns please get a hold of us at www.uaex.edu