Lesson Description
Default Home Position and Expert Controls
13m 17s
Configure your room’s “wide-shot”, and explore the many controls you’ll need to fine-tune the ACPR’s behavior.
Transcript
Default Home Position and Expert Controls
13m 17s
00:06
Okay, next on down here is where we define that default home position.
00:12
So,
00:12
we're
00:12
going to pick a camera that is the place we go to when we want that nice wide shot,
00:20
where we're going to cut if there is a masking transition occurring.
00:24
You're going to pick which camera you want.
00:27
In my case, it's going to be the wide front one.
00:31
Then, when this is connected to a core,
00:33
you'll see the coordinate data here in the position,
00:37
and you would save your home setting when you've got it lined up properly.
00:41
Now, this doesn't have to be a wide shot.
00:44
Generally speaking, it often is, but it could be a variety of things.
00:48
Maybe it's going to cut to the closeup of the most important person in the room,
00:53
and you want to save that.
00:54
Maybe it's cutting to a logo that's in the room,
00:57
and you want to zoom in on that.
00:59
I don't know, you get to choose what it is,
01:01
but you're going to define it here as your default home position.
01:06
There are a number of different possible events that could cause ACPR
01:12
to choose to go to this default home position,
01:15
so think about those as you're doing them.
01:17
One of them is like I talked about if a masking transition is currently in place.
01:23
So, if you're in a camera position that does not have a secondary camera
01:27
and it is in the act of moving,
01:29
and you have engaged that masking transition option,
01:33
that is the first reason we would cut to the default home position.
01:37
Another reason it would go to the default home position is if silence
01:41
has been detected in the room for a sustained amount of time,
01:44
and we'll show you where the threshold setting for that is in just a bit.
01:47
So, if your local room is quiet and no one is talking,
01:51
you probably don't want the camera to still be stuck at the last person who
01:55
was talking because, guess what, they're not talking now.
01:58
It's just them. It's a shot of them not talking.
02:02
Looks like this. Nobody wants that.
02:08
So, we're going to cut to a wide shot so that we can see everybody not talking.
02:13
Essentially, the default home position is a safe place that you can always return to,
02:19
no matter what if there's external factors at play
02:23
and too many people are talking or who knows what's going on,
02:26
and we're just flooding the system with too many inputs.
02:30
We're coming back to a nice safe place.
02:33
Think of the default home position as a nice warm,
02:35
cozy place you can always live in forever.
02:40
But you could turn it off if you wanted to.
02:42
There is an option when it's on, it's in auto mode.
02:44
You could click it to turn it off, and that way it won't go to your safe place.
02:50
That's on you. I don't know why you'd want that,
02:52
but if you want the camera to just linger on the last recall,
02:57
regardless of when we're in one of these weird conditions, go for it.
03:03
But please, let's not keep that on.
03:05
Another reason the default home position may be triggered is if the far end is talking.
03:09
So we've got that far end signal presence going into the plugin for a reason.
03:14
If they are talking, it probably means everybody in the room is now paying attention to them,
03:19
and we want to cut to a shot that is going to show everybody in the room,
03:23
presumably, paying attention.
03:25
If someone in our room does start talking and takes over the conversation,
03:29
then we're going to cut back to them again.
03:31
So those are the reasons that it might cut to the default home position.
03:33
The last reason is this cross-talk that I keep talking about.
03:37
Cross-talk is basically when multiple people in your room are talking at the same time,
03:44
and ACPR is detecting multiple zones that are trying to claim
03:49
to be the most important one to be recalled simultaneously.
03:53
What you don't want is you don't want ACPR to go bam, bam, bam,
03:57
cutting between these really fast.
03:59
That's not a good experience.
04:01
When ACPR detects that there are multiple zones that are all saying that
04:07
they are ready for their camera preset to be recalled simultaneously,
04:10
if that is happening too quickly,
04:12
it will enter cross-talk mode.
04:14
And in cross-talk mode, one of the things you may want to have it do is boom,
04:19
cut to the default home position instead.
04:21
So that way you're getting a wide shot of these multiple people who are presumably arguing.
04:26
I don't know why they're talking over each other.
04:27
One of them should probably stop talking, and we know which one of them it is.
04:32
I'm looking at you.
04:33
But we're cutting to this wide shot so we see everyone,
04:37
and then when we get the cross-talk no longer happening,
04:41
then it'll go to the appropriate camera.
04:44
You'll notice that there is an option here.
04:46
We have a drop-down menu for how reactive do we want this to be to cross-talk.
04:51
Slow, medium, fast, or custom.
04:54
These are relatively arbitrary on how reactive it's going to be when it detects this.
04:59
And we also have an LED here that indicates that cross-talk is active.
05:04
And by the way, anytime you see an LED in any component just like this,
05:08
that also means you could expose that as a control pin and use that for control logic
05:12
to do anything else in the room.
05:13
So maybe you want, if cross-talk is detected,
05:16
you open up a control pin, send it to an audio player,
05:19
and you have an announcement saying,
05:21
"Hey, please stop arguing."
05:23
That's what I would do.
05:24
Also, there's a reason why I don't have this as a job.
05:28
I would be fired for that anyways.
05:31
So, um, those are the cross-talk options right there.
05:34
I mentioned that you can fine-tune all of those settings,
05:38
and you can do that up here under expert controls.
05:41
So, I'm going to skip the microphone tab real quick
05:43
just so I can show you where the expert controls are.
05:46
Here's all the finessing of the stuff that I've been talking about.
05:52
First one, silence home position Trigger Time.
05:55
How long should silence be detected before we choose to
05:59
trigger going to the home position?
06:02
This is in seconds; it goes from, I think, 1 to 15.
06:07
Interestingly enough,
06:08
the background on this control is a meter,
06:11
and that meter is always running.
06:12
So, you can keep your eye on this anytime there's silence; you'll see this meter moving.
06:18
And when it gets to the end of its meter,
06:20
that's going to be the trigger to go to the default position.
06:23
Same thing with far-end home position Trigger Time.
06:27
How long should the far end be talking before we decide to
06:30
trigger the preset that takes us to the default home position?
06:34
You know, how long does do they count as someone who is speaking
06:38
before we want to cut to the wide shot.
06:41
Here is our cross-talk trigger custom level.
06:44
Same thing,
06:44
you can choose how reactive this is going to be when multiple zones are
06:48
occurring at the same time.
06:50
And the cross-talk reset,
06:52
that means that basically when cross-talk is no longer detected,
06:56
we go out of that cross-talk true state and want to resume normal ACPR triggering.
07:02
How long do we wait?
07:03
How long do we hold in that state after the argument has stopped before we realize,
07:09
okay, the argument has definitely stopped?
07:11
Let's actually load this couple of other controls here:
07:15
the mic audio detection threshold and the far-end audio detection threshold.
07:20
We want to make sure that we are setting the threshold for what counts as
07:25
someone talking relative to basically the noise bed in the room, right?
07:29
You don't want the H back in the room to count as a trigger and try to recall the camera preset.
07:35
So, you're going to need to finesse this when you're in the actual space.
07:39
Make sure that when the room is silent,
07:40
it's not detecting anything as noise.
07:44
Maybe you need to raise up this threshold to accommodate for a louder environment.
07:50
Same thing with the far end,
07:51
you may realize you need to adjust this a little bit in order to make sure that
07:54
the far end is not creating false positives when it's not talking.
07:57
These thresholds will have LEDs over here on the microphone tab.
08:03
So, on the mic tab on the right side,
08:07
you've got a local mic signal LED and a far-end talker signal LED.
08:11
These will light up when a local mic has been detected or
08:15
when the far end has been detected.
08:17
That's what you want to keep your eye on when you're
08:19
setting these threshold faders to make sure that you're only getting
08:25
a signal presence when someone is actually talking with intention.
08:29
Okay, and last but actually not last but not least,
08:32
the end and weirdest Zone hysteresis.
08:34
So, Zone hysteresis, this one's a little bit odd.
08:38
What happens when you've got someone who's just in between two zones?
08:44
Let's say you've got Zone one set up on an angle from 0 to 15,
08:49
and zone two is set up from angle 16 to 30.
08:53
And you've got someone sitting right here on that like 15° mark.
08:58
If they start talking, they're likely to be picked up in both Zone one and Zone two.
09:03
And you know,
09:04
just very subtle audio changes and where they're aiming their face
09:09
could very likely trigger those zones to try to combat each other.
09:13
And you don't want those two camera presets to be flickering on and off too quickly.
09:18
So, Zone hysteresis lets you establish an angle span essentially of
09:25
how far away a talker must be in the new Zone in order to count as a new Zone.
09:33
This is done in angles and it goes from 0 to 10.
09:37
Generally speaking, I think two or three is a pretty good setting here.
09:41
Basically, what it means,
09:42
and this will make a little bit more sense later when we're showing things live,
09:46
but if we're in Zone one as our active Zone,
09:50
someone has to be at least three degrees into Zone two in order for it to
09:57
count as a new Zone trigger.
09:59
If this person is right on the borderline between these two zones or they're
10:04
only a couple of degrees in,
10:06
then it won't count as a new trigger because it's not far enough away
10:10
from Zone one to retrigger it.
10:13
You want to make sure that they are distinctly far away.
10:16
And obviously,
10:17
this only makes sense when you're cutting from one zone to an adjacent Zone
10:21
because if you're going to a Zone that's even further away,
10:24
it's clearly going to be more than 3°.
10:27
Uh, we'll notice later on when we have the live system set up that
10:31
when a zone is in this hysteresis mode,
10:34
it will light up as blue to let you know that it has been triggered.
10:38
But it's actually not recalling it again.
10:41
We'll see that when it's live,
10:42
it'll make a little bit more sense when we're actually seeing this jump back and forth.
10:45
Obviously, this goes without saying,
10:47
but I'm going to say it anyways:
10:48
this only makes sense for when you do have those angled microphone options.
10:53
When you're looking at a microphone that's bringing in that Telemetry data
10:56
for discrete mics, that's it.
10:58
It's not going to make as much sense.
10:59
Discrete mics are just pulling their recall information based on
11:02
whether or not they are gated open at the time.
11:04
We're not doing any angle information,
11:07
so that would basically be useless here.
11:10
So, Zone hysteresis
11:11
- how far into a Zone does a voice have to occur in order to
11:16
consider that zone to be the more important Zone to cut to?
11:20
And like I said,
11:21
about three degrees is pretty good.
11:24
Okay, last couple ones here: home position masking time.
11:28
How long do you want to linger in the home position?
11:32
I talked about how if you don't have a secondary camera,
11:35
you will cut to the home position while the primary camera is getting ready.
11:39
What if the primary camera was only moving for like a quarter of a second to find its position?
11:39
What if the primary camera was only moving for like a quarter of a second to find its position?
11:45
You don't want the far end to just get this random blip of jumping to the wide shot
11:49
and then cutting back into the tighter shots.
11:51
That's going to feel a little weird, especially if it happens a lot.
11:54
So, you're basically setting a minimum amount of time that you will
11:58
stay in that home position when the home position is triggered,
12:02
even if the conditions that cause that home position to be triggered have now stopped.
12:07
So, you know,
12:08
it goes down to one second,
12:09
one or two seconds here at the very least.
12:11
That way, if you do go to that establishing shot,
12:14
at least you're going there for a reason.
12:15
You're going to watch it long enough before we cut back again.
12:19
Alright, now lastly on this page is load settings from other ACPR plugin.
12:24
If you were using one of the older versions of the plugin and
12:27
you want to migrate that data into this version (this is the 3.1 version),
12:32
then you can add the code name for that component and then copy it here,
12:37
and it will input that data automatically.
12:40
This could also be very useful if you have multiple instances of the ACPR plugin
12:47
for a room based on different layout conditions.
12:51
Maybe sometimes it's set up as a training room and you've got
12:53
all the tables lined out in rows,
12:55
and other times you may reorganize everything to be in a
12:58
V-shape or something like that
12:59
- same cameras, same names,
13:02
same everything on the inside,
13:04
but you're going to be using different settings for different reasons.
13:07
Yeah, just copy the plugin, load it in here.
13:10
At least that way, you're saving yourself the trouble of labeling
13:13
all the cameras and things like that.