Add a Reference to an Existing Zone

You can add a reference (a link) to an existing zone in another screen or playback. This is the perfect way to share content between screens and playbacks. Changes made to one zone (either its pages, templates or playlist) affect the linked zone as well.

When sharing zones between screens, the following should be taken into account:

• Target Pages. Pages in shared zones should not target other pages. If they do, the following will occur:

• If the shared zones are in the same playback, then the target page will play, and will thereby activate the extra zone (the zone being targeted), which will go on air.

• If the shared zones are in different playbacks, targets are ignored in the shared playback, but not in the original playback where the target pages reside.

• Alpha Background, for Audience.playback.tv and Audience.playback.sign only. A good practice is to use alpha as the background in all pages, so that pages can be displayed over any zone or screen background and not look out of place.

• Zone Placement.

• Audience.playback.tv or Audience.playback.sign: With zone layering turned on, you can add a reference to a zone from another screen that overlaps an existing zone.

• All other systems: There must be room on the screens to share the zone. For example, if you want to share a crawl zone from Screen A among three screens, no screen should already have a zone in that area (except for the originating Screen A). If they do, remove those zones first, then add a reference to the crawl zone you want to share.

• Screen Background. For consistency in appearance, it is best if all screens sharing a zone have the same screen background (or at least the same zone background for the zone you want to share). This is especially true if the pages in the shared zone use the zone's default background. If screen A's background is blue, and screen B's background is brown, sharing a zone from screen A on screen B would display a blue background in the shared zone, where all other zones would have the brown background. (This does not apply to Audience.playback.tv or Audience.playback.sign users who create alpha backgrounds in their pages).

• On all systems, if the pages in the shared zone do not use the default zone background but their own, then it is safe to share the zone regardless of the screen background. For example, if all pages in the shared crawl zone have a black background (as determined by the page's Layout in CorelDraw), then whereever those pages play, their background will always be black.

To add a reference to a zone

1.In the tree, select the screen into which you want to add the zone.

2.For Audience.web systems, make sure the screen background is identical to the screen background of the zone you want to reference. For Audience.playback.tv or Audience.playback.sign systems, this is not required if all content uses an alpha background.

3.Right click, and select Add > Reference.

4.Select one of the zones from the list (name.zon.xml).