Video Transcript
Adding a Static-View Camera
7m 49s
00:06
Next, we're going to talk about static view cameras.
00:09
And this is an additional camera which we can switch to
00:12
when the presenter approaches a certain zone.
00:15
Perfect for white board areas, particularly in higher education environments.
00:20
Let's give a quick demonstration.
00:22
So let's say I'm teaching in some kind of hybrid learning environment
00:26
and I've got students over here in the room with me
00:29
and I've also got people joining me from the far end.
00:32
Now I've got a whiteboard that I want to use as part of this teaching,
00:36
and I'm going to walk over to it and maybe I want to write something on it
00:38
or just draw attention to it.
00:40
But straight away, you can see there's two problems.
00:43
One of them is that the board is a digital whiteboard,
00:45
and the way the brightness is set up means it's quite
00:48
bright considering that the cameras expose for me.
00:51
But also, as I move out of the way to let everybody see what's on the board.
00:55
Of course, the camera is tracking me so people in the room can see it.
00:58
Fine, but not so much for people on the far end.
01:02
So now I've added our static view camera.
01:04
And let me show you the difference.
01:06
This time as I approach the whiteboard.
01:08
We're actually going to switch to a dedicated static view camera,
01:12
which is exposed perfectly for the whiteboard.
01:14
You can see that I'm now kind of dark,
01:16
but that's because the camera is exposed perfectly for the brightness of this interactive whiteboard.
01:21
It also means that I can move out of the way,
01:23
make sure everybody can see it.
01:25
And of course, this camera is not tracking me.
01:28
However, we are still being tracked by the tracking camera.
01:31
And you'll see as I leave this zone,
01:34
we switch back to our tracking camera,
01:37
which was tracking me the whole time.
01:40
Our first job in setting up a second camera is to add our camera to Q-SYS designer.
01:44
Here I'm using an NC 12x80,
01:47
so I'm going to add that into the schematic
01:49
and name it according to the name of the camera on the network.
01:54
Let's also make sure we've got enough inputs on our mediacast router
01:58
and connect the new camera to the router.
02:01
Next, let's return to the Seervision plugin properties.
02:04
Here we can see we've got a property for the number of static cameras.
02:07
Let's change this to one.
02:09
Open up the plugin and we can see that there's a new page for static cameras.
02:14
The plugin is going to control the Q-SYS camera directly
02:17
and from here we can save and recall position containers.
02:20
And later on,
02:21
we'll be linking those two trigger events on the tracking camera's page.
02:25
But if we try to link it to our new camera now,
02:28
we can see that it doesn't work.
02:30
We've also got these MCR input and output controls, which don't work either.
02:35
And if we go to the tracking camera's page,
02:37
we can see there's also an MCR input and output control there,
02:41
which again doesn't seem usable at the moment.
02:44
Well, that's because in this context MCR doesn't stand for your favorite nineties emo band.
02:49
It stands for media cast router because of course the plug in
02:52
needs to control the router
02:53
and control the new camera
02:55
and it's going to control these components via their code name.
02:59
Now just a quick refresher.
03:01
The code name is a property of every Q-SYS component,
03:04
which allows for scripts,
03:05
plug ins and third party control systems to change all of the components controls.
03:10
You can see it in grey text when you hover your mouse over any component,
03:13
but you can also find it in the properties for the component under script access
03:18
so that the plugin can access these components.
03:21
Let's give them a meaningful code name
03:23
and change the script access property from none to script or all.
03:30
Do the same for the newly added camera as well.
03:37
When you're ready,
03:37
emulate the design so we can change the controls in the plugin.
03:42
Now with our code names added,
03:43
the first thing we can do is choose our camera router
03:46
via its code name on the media cast Router Controls page.
03:50
We'll learn more about this page later on.
03:53
Next, come back to the static View cameras page and choose the correct camera.
03:57
We can also tell the plug in what media cast router input the camera is connected to
04:02
and what output we want to use for switching.
04:05
Let's do the same on the tracking camera's page as well.
04:10
And now the Seervision plug in is set up to control our static view camera
04:14
and to control the switching via the media cast router.
04:17
All right,
04:18
now we're done linking those components in Q-SYS
04:20
What's next is to create a trigger zone in Seervision to activate that white board shot.
04:26
Now we want to switch to the static view camera.
04:28
When someone approaches the whiteboard.
04:31
So let's set up a trigger zone in Seervision to detect that.
04:34
I'm just going to move the camera over here so we can see the whole of the whiteboard.
04:38
Add a trigger zone and adjust it accordingly.
04:48
Back in Q-SYS we need to point the camera where we want it
04:51
and save that as a position container in the Seervision plug in.
04:58
This looks good.
04:59
Now, one of the benefits of a dedicated whiteboard camera is
05:02
we can also adjust the exposure manually to give us the best image possible.
05:07
You can set the exposure and the white balance manually
05:10
and play around with the sharpness
05:12
and contrast to make sure that the image is perfect for your whiteboard.
05:18
Looks nice.
05:19
Now we set up that camera position.
05:21
We can save that on the static camera's page in the plug in.
05:24
Just hit save and change the container name to something meaningful like whiteboard.
05:30
Setting up the trigger zone to switch to that whiteboard
05:32
view is now going to be really straightforward.
05:35
Just choose the trigger zone as we did previously.
05:38
But instead of calling a