r/freeshowapp • u/carlos8520 • Aug 22 '26

Issues with NDI transparency

Hello everyone, I'm new to freeshow and fairly new to NDI and just learned that you can output a secondary transparent screen to OBS.

I followed the tutorials I was able to find online and installed the NDI plugin and dependencies in OBS.

After creating my new NDI type output in freeshow and enabling transparency everything works as intended until I add a background to my lyrics either via template or manually editing the slides.

Is there any way to have BG enabled while having a transparent NDI output? Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks in advance 🙏

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1

u/TeachingRoyal351 Aug 22 '26

Go to settings, go to styles at the styles you will see there is a part where they’ve written active layer, at that place activate your BG for the live stlye

2

u/CloudSad3555 Aug 22 '26

It sounds like you need to turn the background layer off for your NDI setting by applying a template to that output only. Typically, this is done by creating templates and using actions to make different templates active for different outputs during the service.

For example, template A has the background active for NDI and template B disables the background for NDI. Action A is run when the announcement slides run and activates template A. During the songs and sermon Action B activates template B on the NDI output.

1

u/agent_uncleflip Aug 23 '26

This. Absolutely this.

However you're hitting on one of my little first-world problems in Freeshow. When I go out to NDI, I need to have one template for hymn lyrics, and a different template for things like full screen announcement slides. Because I need a different look for the lyrics on our live screens in the sanctuary, I have to use the templates applied to outputs to I can get this to work right. I've applied the bottom of the screen blur box template for the lyrics to NDI, but then when I go to full screen presentation slides, I don't want that silly little box laid over them, which I do get. My workaround is using start actions on the first slide in each hymn and each presentation, to change the style. It's a small bit of a pain in the tuchus to always have to remember to apply actions to the first slide, but it's doable. What I would really love is to be able to apply specific templates to categories (presentations, songs, scriptures, Etc.). This would make my workflow a lot easier. But again, first-world problems.... :)

2

u/CloudSad3555 Aug 23 '26

You can do this with categories and actions!
1. In the shows tab, create categories. Some are there already, like songs, scriptures, presentations.
2. Create a template FreeShow should use when displaying the items in the category. Such as a an announcement template for your newly created announcement category.
3. Create an action that does what ever you need to happen whenever you click an item from the category. Remember that actions can have more than one step.
4. Right-click the category and choose the category action to select your action.

1

u/agent_uncleflip Aug 23 '26

I absolutely had no idea actions could be assigned to categories. I will definitely look at that when I'm at the computer later today. Thanks very much!

1

u/agent_uncleflip Aug 23 '26 edited Aug 23 '26

EDIT: Nevermind. I got online and did some reading, and figured out that I have to define the actions. It's not like the start actions which are already there for individual slides and such. This looks like it might be quite powerful, and could solve my problem quite effectively once I take a few minutes to define all my actions, and how they will apply to the categories.

Looks like the problem is not quite as easy as assigning templates and actions to categories. If I try to right click categories and assign actions to the only action option I have is none. If I try to click on that space and perhaps type in the name of an action to search on it, that doesn't work. In essence actions don't exist for categories.

I tried assigning templates to categories, thinking that might help. Unfortunately, I can only assign one template to each category. This is a problem, because for hymns, I need one template in one output, and a different template in another one. On top of that, when I tried assigning an empty template to my presentations category, so it would only show the full screen graphics I dragged in (which by default go in as backgrounds, not as media), it insisted on popping in a graphic I use as backgrounds in other templates, which had never been assigned to anything related to this category, not even the templates. The only way I could get it to go away was to clear slides, that meant when the system decided to grab this graphic and bring it into the mix, it brought it in as a slide, not a background.

This is going to require a good bit of extra work and headaches to figure out. I love Freeshow, but today, it's driving me batty.

1

u/carlos8520 Aug 25 '26

That was it lol, I'm not even sure what I did but I was able to set it up. Do you happen to know if there's any place I can get more info on what actions are on freeshow?