Lesson Description
Microphone Angles and Crossover Zones
11m 12s
Explore your beam-forming microphone’s data to define the geographical boundaries of each zone.
Transcript
Microphone Angles and Crossover Zones
11m 12s
00:06
The HA and VA positions
00:08
- we need to define where in our
00:12
microphone's range the voice will
00:16
trigger this preset to occur.
00:18
Now, for these ceiling microphones
00:21
like the one I have right here, that's
00:22
going to be done in a 360° horizontal axis
00:27
- that's the HA. And then the vertical axis –
00:31
guess if you can, what do you think it's going to be?
00:33
Is it 360? No, you're not listening to the room above you,
00:37
are you? You're only listening straight down.
00:39
So, it's only a 90-degree slice of the pi
00:42
on the vertical axis. In that case,
00:45
90 is straight out, basically horizontal
00:48
with the microphone, and zero is straight down.
00:51
And then 0° through 90 is the way that you're
00:53
going to calculate it. I think it actually might
00:54
be reversed on the Sennheiser,
00:56
where 90 is straight down and zero is straight out.
00:59
I forget, it doesn't really matter.
01:00
It'll be very obvious when you're setting
01:02
it up because you'll see those angles come in,
01:04
and you can test it out for yourself.
01:06
And on these microphones,
01:07
generally speaking,
01:08
wherever the logo is on the mic or the LED,
01:12
that's going to be the zero mark.
01:15
And in my room,
01:16
let me look back over here on my sketch.
01:19
This is my setup; however,
01:21
the way that it's actually installed is upside down.
01:25
So, this LED is actually at the bottom,
01:26
the way that we've installed it in the room.
01:28
So, the zero mark is here.
01:31
I am sitting right around here.
01:33
You saw the cameras that looked at me were over here.
01:36
So, that means that this is zero,
01:38
and it's going to go, I believe,
01:39
counterclockwise the way this map is arranged.
01:41
So, that's zero.
01:42
It goes all the way to 90 here,
01:45
all the way to 180 here, to 270,
01:47
and 360 all the way back here.
01:50
Do note that some of the zones
01:53
you are going to have are going to overlap
01:56
that 0-360 mark.
01:59
If that is the case,
02:00
you need to make sure you input this properly.
02:02
The way we're going to define our
02:03
zones is basically by chopping them
02:06
up on these angles,
02:09
and we're going to get that specific right now.
02:12
You might just want to kind of do a rough guess of it.
02:15
I know that in my room,
02:15
I was going to do a zone here and a zone here.
02:19
You may want to put these onto your map,
02:22
put some numbers on there so you can
02:23
kind of rough cut it around.
02:25
So, my guess is that the first zone's going to start around,
02:28
like, I don't know, around 45ish.
02:33
And then when it gets over to me,
02:34
that'll be about 90°.
02:36
And then the next zone will go
02:38
from about 90 to about maybe 135,
02:41
just guessing.
02:42
But the rough cut is just a guess right now.
02:45
We're going to get it really specific in a second.
02:47
So, my rough cut is that I'm guessing that my first zone,
02:51
which will be this area over here to my left,
02:54
that's going to be probably about 45 to 90.
02:59
I'm using a space B to delineate the two differences there.
03:03
I could also use a dash 45-90 or even a comma 45,
03:08
comma 90; that would work fine too.
03:10
And the next one's going to be about 91 through 135.
03:14
That's about my guess just for now.
03:17
Note something that I did:
03:19
I did not say it went from 90 to 135.
03:23
If I did that,
03:24
then I technically have two zones that are
03:26
overlapping because if it detects
03:28
a voice directly at that 90° mark,
03:30
it doesn't know if that falls in the zone one
03:33
category or the zone two category.
03:36
So make sure that you always have one integer
03:39
between your angle numbers.
03:41
There's no decimals in these angles;
03:43
it's just whole numbers.
03:45
So make sure there's no overlap.
03:47
That's going to be 91 through 135 for me,
03:51
and that way,
03:52
anything detected in this area is going to show up as zone one;
03:55
everything from here that way is going to show up as zone two.
03:59
We're going to specify that in just a bit.
04:01
Now, for the vertical in my case and in a lot of rooms,
04:06
you might not care about splitting the zones vertically.
04:10
You might just care about what's going on in the 360.
04:14
If that is the case, then you can just leave this VA blank.
04:19
I'm just going to clear that data out.
04:20
If there's no data in there,
04:22
then it basically ignores it.
04:23
It says anything from 0 to 90 is going to count as anything is detected,
04:31
and that's perfect for me.
04:32
I only care about doing it in my pie shape.
04:35
There are a lot of reasons why you might, however,
04:37
need that vertical dimension as well.
04:40
What if I had a whiteboard behind me in this conference room,
04:43
and I want a different shot for when people are sitting down
04:46
versus when they stand up to work on the whiteboard?
04:50
In that case, I do want to listen to their voices
04:52
to know if it's coming at a low angle or a high angle.
04:56
So I can load different presets depending on where they're standing.
04:59
Similar to the auditorium I was talking about earlier,
05:02
when you're looking out into the audience,
05:03
that's definitely going to have a vertical angle.
05:06
So you want to make sure that if they're close
05:07
to the front of the stage,
05:09
they're going to be coming at a steeper angle,
05:10
whereas if they're in the back rows,
05:12
then that's a more shallow angle from the microphone.
05:14
And you're going to do the same thing.
05:15
You're probably going to guess it like I just did,
05:18
and then what we're going to do in a little bit,
05:20
you're going to walk around the room and
05:22
make a lot of noise and figure out where exactly
05:25
you're getting that angle detected and then
05:28
input that into your parameters.
05:30
For me, I'm going to leave them blank.
05:32
We're kind of doing a real simple setup right now,
05:34
so I'm leaving my VA as nothing.
05:38
And I'm going to call this Zone one and Zone two.
05:43
Those are fine for me because I know which zones they line up to.
05:46
Okay, but for me, the rear of the room does cross that Z degree mark.
05:52
If I look back at my sketch,
05:53
I've got my logo down here,
05:54
so this is my zero.
05:56
So this section is probably going from about 45° here to 315° here.
06:05
That's about what we're covering if I'm taking that quarter of the room.
06:08
So if that's Zone three,
06:11
then I would not want to go from 45 to 315
06:16
because 45 through 315 is actually almost the entirety of the room, right?
06:22
It's everything from 45 all the way to 315.
06:25
So when you're spanning that 0-degree mark,
06:27
make sure that you put this the other direction.
06:29
It's going to be 315 to 45.
06:33
It takes everything from 315 all the way up to 360
06:37
and then everything from zero to 45 again inclusive.
06:41
Don't do it the other way.
06:42
Make sure that you are putting the big number first
06:45
and the smaller number second if you are crossing that zero mark.
06:50
Okay, but before we start really defining these zones,
06:53
let's wrap up talking about all these buttons.
06:55
There's this little button to the right of your camera
06:58
selection field called the priority switch.
07:02
Those start off as disabled.
07:04
You can turn them on when you have that turned on.
07:09
Then you are choosing to prioritize the second camera
07:13
of this primary and secondary camera pair
07:16
when you have the option to do so in that zone.
07:20
Let's say that for some reason you've got your
07:23
primary and secondary camera,
07:24
but the secondary camera just has a slightly
07:27
better shot of this area than the primary one does.
07:31
And when you first cut to that place,
07:34
you'd rather use the secondary camera shot than the primary camera shot.
07:37
That's where you're using here you are prioritizing the secondary camera.
07:40
Now when the cameras are right next to each other,
07:42
you're probably not going to use this.
07:44
If they're so close to each other,
07:45
there's really not going to be much of a difference between those two shots.
07:49
However, there are scenarios where this could be very useful.
07:52
If for some reason your primary cameras are not right next to each other,
07:56
maybe there's a vertical difference,
07:57
maybe there's a horizontal difference,
07:58
whatever you've done to set it up, and you
08:01
really do prefer that secondary shot,
08:03
it really does look better, engage that.
08:06
It's a rare case when this is needed,
08:09
but when you do need it, you need it.
08:12
So make sure you know that that button is there and you can prioritize that.
08:16
I showed you the save and load buttons.
08:18
Worth noting that when the camera detects the presence of a voice in this zone,
08:25
the first thing that will happen will be that the
08:27
active LED will be engaged because it detects the zone,
08:30
but you're not going to see the load button trigger for a little bit.
08:35
Why is that?
08:36
Well, remember we added that delay into our system on the first tab,
08:41
and the delay is how long it takes for a voice to
08:44
count as a voice before we hit and load that preset.
08:48
Right now mine's set to 1 and 3/4 seconds.
08:52
So when we have this active,
08:54
remember right now mine is still bypassed,
08:56
you'll see the LED go on first,
08:58
and then 1.75 seconds later,
09:00
you'll see the load button trigger.
09:04
So just be aware of that if you're watching this and
09:06
it doesn't seem to be behaving the way you think it should be.
09:08
It's waiting for that delay.
09:09
Okay, now let's talk about those crossover zones really quickly.
09:12
Come on down to the bottom.
09:14
These final four zones,
09:15
like I mentioned before,
09:16
are potentially crossover zones.
09:18
A crossover zone occurs when you have a zone
09:22
that is essentially equally likely to be triggered by two microphones in the space.
09:28
So rather than just one microphone,
09:29
you have two microphones,
09:30
and both of them are detecting the same area with likeliness,
09:34
the same thresholds.
09:36
How do you know which of those zones should be the
09:40
winner to load up their camera preset?
09:43
Well, you would do the same thing here.
09:45
You would set up your angles,
09:47
and then you choose what your crossover mic is.
09:50
You're saying, hey,
09:51
this correlates with this other microphone's data,
09:55
and these fields for that secondary microphone.
09:57
I don't have a secondary microphone in here,
09:59
but you would set up basically a horizontal play for the
10:02
first microphone and a horizontal play for the second microphone,
10:05
maybe a vertical as well.
10:07
And then you've essentially set up a giant logic
10:10
ore gate in the system that says if the voice is detected
10:14
in what microphone one detects as this or
10:17
microphone two detects as this,
10:19
we're not going to rely on those individual zones.
10:22
We're going to set up our own zone for that.
10:24
Otherwise, you have the potential of two
10:26
different mics fighting back and forth as the person
10:29
speaks and then potentially loading two different
10:32
camera angles as those people speak.
10:34
We don't want that.
10:35
So set up your crossover zone for those areas
10:39
that are kind of overlapping between multiple microphones.
10:41
We don't have any of those in our system,
10:43
so we're going to leave these set to none,
10:46
which lets them operate as just normal zones.
10:49
Now we are going to set this up in a more comfortable manner.
10:55
I would never, in a million years,
10:56
want to give this mess of controls to an end user.
11:00
Certainly, I don't even want it for myself.
11:02
I want to make something for me that will make
11:05
setting up the room much more intuitive.
11:07
We're going to do that in a bit.