Introducing the Scene Editor

Until now, moving something in a SportStudio template meant typing numbers. Bump the away logo’s X position, preview it, look, bump it again. It worked, but it was slow, and nobody thinks about layout in numbers.

The Scene Editor lets you arrange a template by eye. It’s a canvas inside the online editor where you can grab the text, logos and photos in a scene and put them where you want them.

Select, drag, scale

Switch the center panel to Canvas. The elements in the scene show up as boxes you can grab. Click one to select it, drag it to move it, and pull a handle to scale it. You can also click a layer in the timeline and it’s selected on the canvas.

Templates get busy, and elements stack on top of each other. So a click picks the smallest element under your cursor, which means you can reach a player name tucked inside a larger panel. Hold Option and click to cycle through everything stacked at that spot.

Guides for clean layouts

A few toggles in the toolbar help you line things up:

• Snap to guides: an element’s center snaps to the middle of the frame and a few other guide lines as you drag.
• Grid: an overlay for spacing things evenly.
• Safe zones: title and action safe lines, so text stays clear of the edges.
• Transparent background: check what’s see-through in your layout.

Drill into the source

Some elements are built from several pieces, like a lockup with a name, number and position. Double-click one to open its source. A breadcrumb at the top shows where you are, and Escape steps back out.

Inside the source you work on one piece at a time. Move a single line of text in the lockup and the layout around it stays put. Double-click a line of text to edit it right there on the canvas.

Same fields, two ways in

Behind the scenes, the canvas and the editor panel write to the same fields. Drag a logo and its position values update in the sidebar. Type a new size in the sidebar and the box on the canvas changes. Saving and rendering read those same values, so the two never drift apart.

The canvas also follows the board size you’ve picked, so you’re arranging for the screen the video will actually play on.

When the layout looks right, switch to Preview to watch it rendered.

Editing the canvas covers selection and moving things around, and Editing the source covers drilling in.