Lesson Description
Global Camera Setup
12m 15s
Connect your cameras to the ACPR plugin so they are available to your zones.
Transcript
Global Camera Setup
12m 15s
00:06
Okay, so let's open up the plug-in control panel
00:09
and take a look at all of the controls inside of it.
00:13
First thing I want to point out is on the first tab,
00:16
you have a setup tab, microphone tab, and expert controls tab.
00:20
On the setup tab, there is a button called "Bypass Auto Recall" on or off.
00:27
This is the way that you would deactivate the plugin if you want to configure things
00:33
and not have it still change camera angles on you.
00:37
Here's what's interesting about it: if you go to the plugin itself and look at its control pins,
00:43
you may think to yourself that that's what this disable pin is.
00:48
That is not what this disabled pin is.
00:51
You hear that it's not;
00:53
the disable pin is a control pin that comes in every single plug-in
00:59
that completely shuts down the script of that plugin.
01:02
That's just part of building a plugin
01:04
- you have the ability to disable it if you want to control this remotely.
01:09
That is not the same thing as here.
01:13
Scroll down under the settings section,
01:16
the tracking bypass control
01:19
- that's what this button here is,
01:21
the tracking bypass control.
01:23
Now, this is important.
01:24
There are a number of reasons why you may want to turn off the camera recall call
01:30
without shutting down the entire plugin.
01:32
Generally speaking,
01:33
I would not recommend disabling the plugin unless you have a very intentional reason
01:37
to do that.
01:38
While it is disabled,
01:40
if you were using the disable button,
01:42
then none of the controls can be changed.
01:45
It's not bringing in any more Telemetry data;
01:47
there's nothing about it that works at all.
01:50
It is completely non-functional.
01:52
Whereas if you simply bypass the recalling of the presets,
01:57
the rest of it is still functional,
01:59
and that may be something that you generally want to think about.
02:04
Reasons you may want to disable the ACPR plugin - let's talk about it.
02:08
You've got a combinable space,
02:10
two rooms with an air wall in between them,
02:13
and you want to be able to have one setup in the first room when it is separated from room two.
02:20
Same thing in room two;
02:21
you want its own ACPR for when it is in its own isolated mode.
02:25
Then you remove the air wall,
02:26
and you've got a new version of ACPR that controls the entire room together.
02:30
So in this case,
02:31
you have three different instances of ACPR,
02:35
and only one of them, or potentially two of them,
02:37
will ever be active at a time, right?
02:40
So you want to disable
02:42
- I'm sorry, I'm going to say that more clearly
02:44
- you're going to bypass the ACPR plugins that are not matching the current state of those rooms,
02:52
but you don't want to completely disable the plugin entirely.
02:55
You simply want to bypass the tracking information.
02:59
Another reason why you may want to bypass ACPR is what if you are in a meeting
03:03
and you've got a CEO who is going to speak for an extended length of time.
03:09
They've got a 30-minute presentation that they want to give;
03:14
they're at the front of the room.
03:16
Um, you don't want someone who may inappropriately chime up
03:21
and ask a question or something like that to draw attention from the CEO.
03:25
Uh, you want them to have a dedicated camera shot on them.
03:28
So, while we are in this version of someone speaking, you can just bypass ACPR.
03:35
That means no matter what, that camera is going to stay on the CEO as they talk,
03:39
no matter what.
03:40
Uh, and then you can, you know, unengage again.
03:47
There are lots of possibilities on why you want the plug-in to still be running
03:52
but simply not allow the camera presets to be recalled.
03:57
Just don't disable them.
03:59
Uh, okay.
04:00
Um, on this tab,
04:02
you've got the global camera setup section.
04:06
Next, I'm actually going to enter emulation mode now so that we can configure these.
04:11
Uh, I don't need those control pins anymore.
04:13
The global camera setup is asking how many primary cameras do you have.
04:18
Uh, in this case, I happen to have four primary cameras.
04:22
You can see below it's listing the possible primary cameras and secondary cameras.
04:27
Make a little bit of space for myself to remind us that 1 through 8,
04:31
even when they are not being used,
04:34
are still dedicated as primary cameras and these N9 through 16
04:38
are the secondary cameras.
04:40
These numbers here, these are not being fed information from the cameras themselves.
04:45
They are simply telling you which pin of the media cast router we are linked to.
04:50
So, you can see primary one and nine,
04:52
these are a pair, two and 10, these are a pair.
04:55
We covered this before, but again,
04:58
this is like the big way you can get things wrong.
05:01
So, I'm going to keep on hammering it in that this is the way you need to wire them.
05:05
Primary cameras 1 through 8,
05:06
secondary cameras correspond with them 9 through 16.
05:11
Um, okay.
05:12
So, we wired those appropriately previously,
05:15
so it looks like it's making sense right now where we need it to go.
05:18
What's next?
05:19
We've got this option called mask transition.
05:23
If you hover your mouse over, you can see it says mask transition.
05:27
You can choose to engage or disengage mask transition for each of these camera positions.
05:33
What does mask transition do?
05:35
Earlier, I talked about how you may have a scenario where you don't have
05:40
a secondary camera and you want to cut to a different shot
05:45
when that camera is in the act of moving.
05:48
That's what mask transition is.
05:49
We are masking the transition of the camera from one position to another.
05:53
So, you wouldn't really need this on the positions that have a secondary camera,
05:58
but you definitely would on the positions that don't.
06:01
For my camera three, which is my rear shots,
06:06
I'm going to engage mask transition so that if camera 3 is in the act of moving,
06:11
it's going to cut to our default home position and show the
06:15
default home position until my position three is now aimed at the right place.
06:22
Now, you can define what that default home position is.
06:25
In our case, it's going to be the wide shot.
06:27
It's going to be the NC 110 that's in the front of the room.
06:31
That has a good shot of everything.
06:33
That way, we can always cut to this nice,
06:36
safe establishing shot. It shows the entire room.
06:39
But then cut back to the closer shots once our cameras have found the right place.
06:44
We'll define that.
06:46
That's a home position just down here,
06:47
in just a little bit.
06:48
We're not going to get there quite yet,
06:50
but that is where the ACPR takes you when it is in the state of masking a transition.
06:58
While we are here,
06:59
let's make sure that we assign all of our cameras appropriately.
07:02
If you click on the drop-down menu for any of these,
07:06
you will now see, voila, the names of all of the cameras.
07:11
These are the code names that we assigned them at their component level.
07:16
You'll also notice that they are coming in not necessarily in the order that they
07:21
were wired in in the Mediacast router.
07:24
So, once again, they are coming in.
07:26
Looks like they are alphabetical.
07:28
So, one more reason why it was really important to think about the
07:32
nomenclature of your naming convention.
07:36
Why you would want to give all,
07:38
like, a prefix to all of the Tranquility rooms before the sustainability room
07:43
or whatever your HR has named your very reasonable conference rooms.
07:49
Camera one is left primary for me.
07:52
Camera two is right primary.
07:56
Camera three is my rear.
07:58
Camera four is my wide front.
08:01
Camera nine is my left secondary.
08:04
Camera 10 is my right secondary.
08:07
And then I do not have a secondary camera for camera 11 and 12.
08:12
Once again, the majority of issues might come from right here. I know it's simple.
08:17
I talked about it earlier.
08:18
It's not that complicated, but it sure is easy to get it wrong.
08:22
It's not that complicated to make a ham sandwich,
08:24
but it sure is easy to put the ham on the outside of the bread.
08:28
And then it's not a ham sandwich.
08:29
It's just a disaster zone, and nobody wants that.
08:32
Okay, next thing you got to do is come down to this big red field
08:38
where you are going to identify which Mediacast router you are connecting to.
08:41
Once again, if you did not give a code name to your Mediacast router,
08:45
it's not going to show up in this as an option.
08:47
I named mine ACPR router.
08:50
You can also choose which output of the router you want to control.
08:54
Ours only has one output because we're only feeding one USB video bridge.
08:59
You may be in a scenario where you have multiple USB video bridges that are
09:04
outputting from the system,
09:05
and maybe you're doing different things with each of them.
09:08
If that's the case, you would have another ACPR instance for that second output,
09:14
and you would be sure to assign it here as output number two.
09:19
Here, I only see 01 as an option.
09:22
Last thing here in the global camera setup is the PTZ switch delay.
09:26
You can see what it says:
09:27
length of time someone must speak before a new camera preset is recalled.
09:31
Basically, how reactive is the system to a voice?
09:37
Well, a lot of people want to just grab this slider and bam,
09:42
take it right there to one second because you want the system to be as reactive as possible.
09:47
You want someone starts talking, boom, new camera, boom, new camera, boom.
09:51
No matter where it is,
09:52
you want to jump back and forth as people are talking.
09:55
That's a good instinct.
09:56
I get why you want that.
09:58
You want it to move quickly so that we can see whoever's speaking.
10:03
There's a reason it's limited to 1 second, by the way.
10:05
We don't go lower than 1 second because we don't want any ambient noises to
10:11
create false positives here, right?
10:13
Someone loudly scooches their chair or they pick up their cup that
10:18
has a lot of ice in it and it's making noise as they move it around the table.
10:23
Someone just closes their laptop really loud and it slams.
10:26
We don't want those momentary spikes to cause a camera preset to be recalled,
10:33
but we still want to make sure that someone is actually talking in order to cut to them.
10:39
One second is still really, really short.
10:44
That might create some false positives.
10:47
It might end up cutting to someone who is not actually talking or to
10:52
someone who just made a quick comment that didn't need to be on camera.
10:57
And now we're on that camera,
10:58
and now we're cutting somewhere else,
10:59
and we're getting a little bit too quick of camera choices.
11:03
I would generally recommend setting this to at least one and a half,
11:09
maybe two seconds.
11:10
This is a better starting point.
11:12
One and a half to two seconds ensures that someone is actually speaking
11:16
with intention before we cut to that camera angle,
11:20
and we know that it's someone that we want to look at.
11:23
If the client complains that the system just isn't reacting fast enough,
11:28
well, you can come in here and adjust the fader.
11:30
This is a fader that is controllable in real-time.
11:33
You don't need to set it and then re-push and deploy the design.
11:36
You can move it and test out and see what works for your deployment.
11:41
But again, one and a half to two seconds is probably a good starting point.
11:45
It's also worth noting that a longer delay time will help combat cross-talk.
11:45
It's also worth noting that a longer delay time will help combat cross-talk.
11:52
If you've got a lot of people who happen to be talking at the same time,
11:56
then you really are waiting a little bit longer to make sure that a certain zone
12:00
is giving you a sustainable amount of signal presence in order to cut to that shot.
12:05
Whereas if people are talking over each other,
12:06
you don't want to be too reactive and trying to look at someone.
12:10
We'll talk about more cross-talk in just a bit.