Lesson Description
Properties and Wiring
11m 13s
Configure the ACPR plugin’s properties, and integrate its audio input with your AEC system.
Transcript
Properties and Wiring
11m 13s
00:06
Okay, the next thing you want to do is go to the plugin itself.
00:10
We're going to open it up and look at its control panel in just a little bit.
00:13
First, let's spend some time here in the properties
00:17
and make sure that it is configured properly for everything that we need.
00:21
I mentioned this earlier when you're choosing what microphone you're using,
00:25
that's the first stop here in the mode.
00:28
There are a number of different models that you can choose from.
00:31
I mentioned in my example we're going to be using the Audio Technica,
00:33
so if I can click on that,
00:35
it's going to change some of the properties,
00:37
some of the configuration on the inside.
00:39
That's true for whatever model you may happen to pick.
00:42
On the Audio Technica,
00:45
this one happens to have a second property
00:47
I just want to mention really quickly called Camera Zone mode.
00:51
You have the ability in the microphone settings to set a specific camera for each zone.
01:00
On the microphone end of things,
01:02
we generally recommend to leave that at no.
01:04
We recommend doing that here in Q-SYS.
01:07
We definitely prefer to do all the video routing inside of Q-SYS
01:10
rather than going over to the microphone GUI and changing it there.
01:15
It just makes it a little bit easier to keep things flexible in runtime if you keep that at no.
01:20
So, I just want to let you know what that was for.
01:23
Each of these, you are going to have different options.
01:26
The reason why you need to set up what the mode is,
01:29
is so that the plugin knows how to get the Telemetry data from that microphone
01:33
that you'll need to set up your zones.
01:35
Different microphones deliver those in different ways.
01:39
We're basically telling the plugin what to expect.
01:42
If you have been using ACPR in the past,
01:45
you may have been used to bringing in a control plugin for that microphone specifically,
01:50
like bringing in our plugin for the AT and then getting the Telemetry data from that plugin
01:56
and sending it to the ACPR plugin.
01:58
You don't need to do that anymore, congratulations.
02:01
That is part of the reason we've got this mode here.
02:04
It will be able to communicate with that device within the plugin itself,
02:08
so that's one less thing you have to do if you use it in the past.
02:12
But again, there are different ways that it reacts based on what it's doing,
02:17
and it also kind of changes some of the internal gating options as well.
02:23
For instance, if you're using discrete mics,
02:25
you're going to have individual inputs for every single microphone that you're bringing in,
02:30
whereas when you're using something like the Audio Technica,
02:32
you only have a single microphone input
02:34
because that's the one channel we're bringing in from the microphone.
02:39
It also changes the way that it considers what cross-talk is because some of these
02:44
microphones are going to be pre-AEC or post-AEC.
02:48
It needs to know about that before it gets in here
02:50
so it knows if it's dealing with a single microphone that's on
02:53
or potentially multiple microphones that are on
02:55
when it's trying to figure out if multiple people are talking at once
02:57
and what it should do about that.
02:59
We'll talk about that a little bit more later on.
03:01
Basically, I'm saying pick the right mode.
03:03
I don't know why I'm over-explaining this.
03:05
Pick the right mode for your whatever model you're using because that's important.
03:09
Um, okay.
03:10
Uh, also, you can choose multiple microphones if you have multiple microphones in your room.
03:15
And then you have the option for cameras.
03:17
I mentioned we can go between eight and 16 cameras.
03:21
It's reinforcing it right here.
03:22
It's telling me as a popup between 8 and 16,
03:25
so I can't pare this down lower to eight when I'm only using four.
03:30
Generally speaking, I would keep it at either 8 or 16.
03:35
Here's something to be aware of:
03:38
if you change this now,
03:40
it is going to change the way that you would have to wire your MediaCast router.
03:45
For instance, if I brought this up to 10,
03:50
then I now have 10 cameras in my plugin,
03:54
which means I have a total of 10 primary possible positions
03:58
and 10 secondary possible positions.
04:00
So, my MediaCast router should then be set to 20.
04:03
The important thing is that means that pins 1 through 10 are now the primary cameras
04:10
and pins 11 through 20 are now the secondary cameras.
04:15
So, what I did here of wiring my secondary cameras to 9 and 10,
04:18
I would have to move those to 11 and 12
04:21
because that's where the secondary camera bank starts.
04:24
So, again, plan ahead of time.
04:27
Don't, you know, don't get it too tight.
04:30
Make sure you got a little bit of room for growth if you want it.
04:33
But I'm going to keep mine at eight because that's more than enough cameras that I need,
04:39
and that's going to make sure that nine and 10 are the proper start of my secondary bank.
04:45
Okay, uh, what else is in here?
04:46
We definitely want to turn on the camera preview property.
04:51
That will give us a little bit of live stream inside the plugin of whichever camera is active.
04:55
So, I generally recommend to turn that on.
05:00
Okay, I'm going to do another thing here,
05:03
which you don't have to do,
05:04
but if you're following along with me,
05:05
I recommend that you do it because I'm doing it for a reason.
05:10
I'm going to add some custom controls here,
05:17
and I'm going to set these to be LEDs, and I want six of them.
05:24
And I am going to expose the select button control pins of my MediaCast router.
05:31
So, we've got input one, two, three, four, nine, and ten.
05:36
Those are my six cameras.
05:37
I'm going to wire those – oops,
05:39
I'm going to wire those to my LEDs,
05:42
and then I'm going to drag those LEDs out of here.
05:45
I'm just going to place them next to each of their associated cameras.
05:50
That way, we'll be able to have a quick visual confirmation here in the software
05:55
about which camera is currently routed through the router
05:59
without having to open up the router itself.
06:01
So, we do things like that all the time to help make your design
06:04
a little bit more intuitive to someone else who's looking at it.
06:08
Alright, well, the next thing we have to do is actually wire up the plug-in itself.
06:12
If we hover our mouse over the input pins,
06:14
we can see that we need the audio input as well as the far-end audio input.
06:19
So, let's get those into the system.
06:21
I'm using the Audio Technica microphone,
06:23
which is going to come in on a software Dante channel.
06:26
So, I'm going to add a software Dante receiver and drag this in here.
06:31
This first channel will be the mix of the microphones coming in for the far-end callers.
06:36
That could come in in any number of different ways.
06:38
You might be using a speakerphone,
06:40
if you are connecting through your USB audio bridge to a PC in the room.
06:45
You could be using pots, you could be using VoIP.
06:48
However it is you're getting the far-end caller into your system's environment,
06:52
it doesn't really matter.
06:53
Once it's here, then we're going to do with it whatever we would do normally.
06:57
So, I'm just going to assume that I'm using a speakerphone here on my core.
07:02
So, we'll bring in the speakerphone in as that foreign caller voice.
07:08
Now, the most important thing to keep in mind here is that
07:11
we need to send this through AEC before it gets to the plug-in.
07:16
So, if I look for my acoustic echo canceller
07:19
that's going to be in your schematic elements library,
07:21
I'm going to drag this right in here, make a little bit of room,
07:25
send that microphone signal through AEC before it gets to AC CPR.
07:30
Even an intelligent beam-forming microphone is not going to know
07:34
the difference between someone who's talking in the room
07:36
and the far-end caller's voice when all it's doing is listening to the room.
07:40
So, we've got to do the same thing we're normally doing with AEC,
07:44
which is to subtract everything in the room that is not the human voice
07:49
from the microphone channels so that we can isolate the human voices
07:52
from all those non-microphone sources.
07:55
So, that's exactly what we'd be doing here.
07:57
If you've got other things in the room,
07:59
you've got announcements.
08:00
If you've got audio players, whatever it is,
08:03
that's generally all going to be wrapped up in your AEC reference.
08:06
This is not an AEC tutorial by any means.
08:08
So, for us, I'm just going to send the foreign caller's voice to the reference of AEC,
08:13
and we'll assume that if we're doing a full AEC installation,
08:17
you'll know how to properly get everything into your reference.
08:19
But I'm also going to wire the foreign caller's voice to the far end audio pin.
08:25
We need ACPR to know when the far end caller is talking.
08:30
If the foreign caller is talking,
08:31
that's probably going to be a good reason for us to cut to something
08:34
like a wide shot where we can see everybody in the room listening to that far end caller.
08:38
If you don't do that,
08:39
then you're probably going to be stuck with the last triggered camera presets
08:45
based on someone in the room that was talking,
08:47
which means now we're just getting a closeup of that one person
08:50
while the foreign caller is talking,
08:51
and that one person is just sitting there listening.
08:54
That's not great for them.
08:56
Now they have to look like they're really intently listening.
08:59
"Oh yes, I'm very interested."
09:00
Yes, we don't want that.
09:01
So, the far end caller going to the plugin is very important.
09:05
Now, keep in mind we're not actually processing any audio with the ACPR plugin.
09:09
We're using that to listen to when we've got some talking in the near end,
09:15
when we've got talking on the far end.
09:17
All the processing is still being done through ACPR.
09:20
You, of course,
09:21
would then send this audio also to the rest of your signal flow
09:25
and then deliver it to the speaker phone out or the pots out or the Voice wipe out,
09:29
whatever it is you're doing.
09:30
You've still got to do all that AEC configuring
09:33
beyond what you're doing right here in the software.
09:37
Now, this is post AEC,
09:39
like I said, for a reason.
09:40
There's a couple of cases to think about if you're using the NMT1 microphones.
09:45
So, let me grab the NMT1 microphone.
09:49
If you're using this,
09:50
this one actually has AEC built in already,
09:54
and you'll notice that it has an AEC reference input pin in this component.
09:59
So, when you're bringing the audio channels out of the NMT1,
10:03
those would be delivered to your plugin one by one without going through
10:08
another AEC component because AEC has already happened to them.
10:12
So, even then, it's happening post AEC.
10:15
Another fringe example might be if you happen to
10:18
choose to use the onboard AEC that is available on some of those microphones.
10:23
You can then send a reference from Q-SYS to the microphone itself
10:27
via a Dante stream,
10:28
and then you can use the A reference onboard the microphone.
10:30
In that case, you're still getting something that's post AEC.
10:34
It's just coming in on the Dante Channel after the microphone's A,
10:37
and it's coming to your plugin.
10:39
We don't generally recommend that.
10:41
Generally, we strongly say use the AEC that's inside the software in Q-SYS.
10:46
That way, we have a little more control of it.
10:48
So, it's pretty unlikely that you're going to use that onboard microphone AEC
10:52
if your device offers it,
10:53
but you know it's possible.
10:55
I just want to show you everything.
10:57
Alright, so we are going to move on from this.
11:00
Everything is wired up,
11:01
we've got the cameras all connected,
11:04
plugins connected.
11:06
It's time to open up the control panel.
11:08
We'll look at that in the next section.