Multiple Text Boxes / Graphics on One Cue?

We would love to have this capability at ECC, we are still using PPT for our announcement loop.

I would love to be able to put a text box, a video box, and a flash animation box over the same BG graphics.

And, of course, be able to properly layer them (as suggested yesterday by Brent).

I can hear those cores sizzling with excitement.

It'd be nice to have a multi-layer cue, that could be built of any components. You could select what media to apply to a layer. So it'd be more complex than standard cues to set up, so you'd keep the standard BG/FG cue types for basic users.
But then the multi-layer cue would be one (as suggested above) where you just build the layer types. So you could have a good number of layers, and be able to use the function found in many programs to "bring layer forward" or to the front, and "send layer backwards" or to the back. So you could have different components on top of others as you required.

This is a great idea! I highly support it.

Yes! When I first realized I *couldn't* do this, I figured there must be something I was missing. I wasn't.

As soon as this is added to MS, I can say adios to powerpoint forever!! Yea!

Great idea Chris!

For just the text boxes, I've been creating the layered text in Paint.NET (freeware!) and saving it as a graphic. This gives me the freedom to quickly mess around with layering and transparencies without resorting to the full ppt application.

Because MS can already play flash animations and pptx slides with animation, how difficult would it be to implement a portion of the API from those apps to build this into MS? The APIs are freely published by Microsoft and Adobe respectively, because they want to encourage development of their platform. Of course you would have to bundle the runtime engines as a dll's into MS itself, rather than rely on external rendering engines. If that is feasible, it would remove the MS dependency on having ppt-viewer, the full version of ppt, or flash player installed, while allowing (limited) editing within MS itself.

For flash, I've used .swf files with actionscript 2.0 or 3.0 included to provide timed or triggered FG/BG transitions of elements and proper z-ordering transitions during the animation, but I already have the full flash cs3 installed on this machine. Does anyone know of an open source flash builder that MS could bundle? There would probably be some licensing issues involved, as the open source GPL license usually requires that the 'parent' software application is also open source. But it could be useful to try baking this funtionality into MS???

Graeme, you should send the idea in the middle section of your above post, to featurerequest (AT) mediashout.com
It can easily get missed by MS as it's just part of another post, and not a seperate posting/topic.

It would be especially awesome if you could have "title" and "body" fields in Text templates, similar to the way scripture and songs have header and footer. This would be great for things like announcements, where you want the title to be a certain way, and the body to be a different way. I had to compromise and set our announcement template for the body, and each time you need to go back and change the font, etc, on the title.

Dual text boxes?! Oh my goodness yes!
I have been wanting this feature for a long time. Quite often I have text that needs different formatting for each line, or a translation for a song in Latin. It would be so helpful to have more than one text box. PLEASE CONSIDER THIS.