Terminology

Q-SYS QuickStarts : Public Address (Paging Systems)

4 ) Automatic Camera Preset Recall (ACPR)

13m 16s

5 ) Video Freeze for NV Endpoints

1m 41s

6 ) Camera Streams to NV Series devices

2m 47s

7 ) Q-SYS Security – Introduction and Best Practices

13m 35s

8 ) Integrating Microsoft Teams Room

8m 54s

9 ) HID Conferencing

1m 58s

10 ) Integrating Axon C1

14m 34s

11 ) Bring Your Own Control with Q-SYS

4m 32s

12 ) Feature License Activation

4m 12s

13 ) Q-SYS Video 101 Training

0m 0s

14 ) Block Controller

19m 9s

15 ) Online Connectivity & Security Considerations

12m 37s

17 ) Public Address

18 ) Dynamic Pairing

6m 38s

19 ) Core-to-Core Streaming

8m 23s

20 ) Room Combining

12m 23s

21 ) Notch Feedback Controller

4m 0s

23 ) Intro to Control Scripting

12m 30s

25 ) E-Mailer

6m 30s

Video Transcript

Terminology 9m 26s
00:06
Welcome to a nice, long, detailed,
00:10
in-depth overview of public address.
00:14
We will cover all of the elements, components,
00:16
and areas in CES Designer software that you will need
00:19
to touch in order to integrate our robust public address
00:23
paging system into whatever design you may be integrating.
00:28
Public address is used in a wide variety of different types of installations,
00:32
largely in the entertainment and hospitality worlds.
00:34
We’re talking about things like hotels, theme parks,
00:39
and transportation—announcements that you hear
00:41
at the airport, for example.
00:43
However, it could be used in smaller areas too.
00:45
Anytime you need to send an announcement to a specific area,
00:49
you might be using the public address tools that are here in the software.
00:53
Now, everything that we’re going to touch on,
00:54
generally speaking, isn’t that complicated.
00:57
This is not an advanced class or tutorial.
01:00
This is nothing that you’re going to need any
01:01
scripting knowledge or coding for.
01:04
Everything’s pretty straightforward,
01:06
but it is a really wide subject.
01:08
It does touch your design in a really sort of spider-veiny manner,
01:12
in which it reaches out and touches everything and everywhere.
01:16
We’re going to be doing a lot of bouncing
01:17
back and forth between the design schematics,
01:20
the administrator, the control panels, the hardware devices,
01:24
and the touch panels.
01:26
So, it does take some time to go into the detail
01:30
that we want you to have.
01:32
That’s why this is going to be done in this nice,
01:34
long format of training videos.
01:36
Hopefully, it’s still going to be worth your time.
01:38
If you’re learning about public address, this is the place to be.
01:42
Public address, I know, is one of the biggest fears
01:46
that everyone has in the world.
01:47
It’s right up there with moving and death, right?
01:50
Those are the top three fears: talking in front of people.
01:53
Well, fortunately, I’m the only one who has to talk here.
01:55
You just have to learn.
01:57
And in order to learn, we have to make sure you have the right vocabulary.
02:01
So, behind me are some vocabulary words.
02:04
There will not be a test on this, don’t worry.
02:05
Actually, I think there might be a test.
02:07
There may be a test on this. Definitely worry.
02:10
We want to make sure that you all have the same
02:11
nomenclature when we’re talking about these elements.
02:15
So, what are the things that make up a public address system?
02:18
First of all, a page station.
02:20
A page station is going to be the source of anything
02:24
that we send to our paging world.
02:27
Now, this could manifest in one of two different ways.
02:30
It could be a physical page station.
02:32
We have physical page stations that we sell.
02:36
Here’s a PS600 model.
02:38
This has a handheld microphone on it.
02:40
You can grab it and talk into it.
02:42
It’s got various buttons on it for you to trigger preset commands,
02:45
things like that.
02:46
This might be the way that you integrate with your paging system.
02:50
But we’ve noticed that most people don’t tend to go this route.
02:54
Most people prefer to go with what we’re going to call a virtual page station.
02:59
A virtual page station is really any combination
03:02
of your ability to speak into the system and interact with it.
03:06
That physical page station had keys and a microphone.
03:09
A virtual page station will show itself by having another
03:13
microphone that you can talk into and a touch panel.
03:17
So, if you’ve already got a UCI in your design that does
03:19
all kinds of things, gives your user access to all of the
03:22
things in the room that they need to control,
03:24
you might just be adding a page to that touch screen
03:27
that allows them to interact with the paging system.
03:29
Any microphone in the world will be fine for them to talk into.
03:33
It can be a Dante microphone, a direct analog microphone,
03:38
or a USB microphone that you plug into a
03:40
USB-A port on a device and bring it that way.
03:43
You could do a page from a headset.
03:45
It doesn’t matter how the audio gets in.
03:47
That’s a page station.
03:49
I’ll show you how to set all those up.
03:50
That’s the source. It’s where we’re sending things from.
03:53
The places that we’re sending them to are called zones.
03:56
A zone could be a single loudspeaker.
04:01
Maybe you’ve got one room with one loudspeaker
04:03
up in the ceiling, and that is the zone.
04:06
A zone could be, honestly, a thousand loudspeakers.
04:09
If you have a big area and you never need to divide
04:14
that area into a smaller geographical chunk to get a
04:18
dedicated page there,
04:20
then that is a zone.
04:22
I mean, think about something like all the main
04:24
causeways in a shopping mall.
04:27
You’re probably not paging just the East Wing versus the West Wing.
04:32
You’re probably sending pages to the entire shopping mall
04:34
so that when little Billy is lost, you can find his parents, right?
04:38
So, if that’s the case, maybe all of those loudspeakers
04:41
that are in that area might be a single zone.
04:44
The point is that a zone—just don’t think of it as a room,
04:47
don’t think of it as a channel—think of it as a geographical area,
04:51
again, that you would have no cause to
04:53
ever split up into a smaller geographical area.
04:56
Okay, so what are we sending to these zones?
04:58
We’re sending either pages or messages.
05:01
A page is anytime a human voice is involved in that announcement.
05:07
So, if I’m talking into a microphone live,
05:11
then that microphone is open, it’s going out into the system,
05:14
and I am coming out of the loudspeakers, right?
05:16
That’s a page.
05:17
Pages could be handled in different ways.
05:19
You might be talking into a hot mic.
05:20
You might be talking into a mic that then records
05:23
your voice and sends it a little bit later.
05:25
But those are all pages because a microphone is involved.
05:28
Whereas a message is an audio file. It is any kind of audio file.
05:33
It could be a pre-recorded message.
05:35
I mean, it’s still a human voice that’s going out,
05:37
so I guess when I said it’s a human voice, that’s a page,
05:39
that’s not quite accurate.
05:41
You could record your voice ahead of time,
05:42
and then that’s an audio file, an MP3 or a WAV file, whatever,
05:45
that you’re sending out.
05:47
It could be music on there.
05:48
It could be all kinds of different things.
05:49
But a finished file before you launch the system,
05:53
that is a message.
05:54
Whereas when you’re talking into a microphone,
05:56
that’s a page.
05:57
They’re handled in very, very similar ways,
05:59
but there’s a little bit of nuance in the ways
06:01
that they might be handled.
06:02
So, when you hear “page” and “message,”
06:05
just know that those are different types of announcements.
06:16
Now, how to do that?
06:17
If you’re watching this class, these videos,
06:21
you should be able to figure out for yourself
06:23
how to get a microphone channel into CUSIS
06:25
and send it to an output.
06:27
You should know how to play an audio file
06:30
from an audio player and send it to an output.
06:32
That’s easy.
06:34
That’s not what a paging system is.
06:36
What a paging system is,
06:37
is the ability to take all of that and synthesize
06:41
it for when there’s a lot of traffic.
06:43
What happens when you have two different page stations
06:47
that are sending different pages or messages
06:50
to a zone at the same time?
06:52
You don’t want them to just show up at the same
06:53
time and be mixed together.
06:54
That sounds terrible.
06:55
I can’t hear anything they’re saying because you’re
06:57
playing them at the same time.
06:58
You need a system that manages it.
07:01
So, when we come to management,
07:02
there are a couple of different things to keep in mind.
07:04
The first one is the concept of priority.
07:07
We need to be able to make sure that different
07:09
types of announcements have a higher or lower
07:11
priority compared to other announcements,
07:13
so we know when one should be more important than the other.
07:16
If you’ve got an emergency announcement,
07:17
that’s got to be the highest priority,
07:19
and we want to be able to cancel anything else that’s playing,
07:22
duck it down, replace it.
07:24
Maybe the thing that gets removed has to go and
07:27
wait its turn and come back again.
07:29
We have all kinds of different things
07:30
that we can do to determine priority.
07:32
A page station itself could have its own priority.
07:35
A page could have its priority.
07:37
You can override that priority system in
07:40
either direction based on your preferences.
07:42
There are a lot of ways you can specify that priority,
07:45
but understanding it is going to be important.
07:47
And then queuing is the other half of it.
07:49
I mentioned if a page gets interrupted by a higher priority page,
07:53
it might have to go and wait its turn again.
07:56
That’s part of a management system.
07:58
We need to make sure that if multiple announcements
08:00
are going to a zone at the same time,
08:02
they know that they have to wait their turn in
08:05
order of their priority.
08:06
You’ve got to determine what happens if it
08:08
sits in that queue for a really long time.
08:10
Is it still relevant?
08:11
Do you want to throw it out because it’s been
08:13
sitting in the queue for an hour?
08:15
What do you want to do if it gets booted
08:16
multiple times from being played and then goes back into the queue?
08:20
These are all really minute details,
08:24
but you have the ability to customize all of them in
08:26
your paging system,
08:27
which again is why this takes a good long time
08:30
to really look at all of the details and what we can touch.
08:32
The last piece that makes it a real paging system is ducking.
08:36
I kind of mentioned this earlier too.
08:37
When an announcement is played in a room,
08:39
you don’t want the music that’s already playing
08:42
in that room to keep playing because
08:44
now you can’t hear anything, right?
08:46
If the music is playing, especially if there’s vocals in that music,
08:49
and you’re playing an announcement that’s
08:50
just mixed in with that,
08:51
no one’s going to be able to understand it.
08:53
So, we want some method that will duck
08:55
down the existing program material in a room when
08:59
a page is present and then return it back to its
09:02
regular volume when the page is complete.
09:04
That is a ducking system.
09:05
So, page stations, zones, pages, messages, priority,
09:09
queuing, and ducking—that’s the vocab test.
09:12
You’ll hear all those words a lot over the
09:15
next several videos on this.
09:17
So, hopefully, you’ve got that.
09:20
Take a quick break.
09:20
We are then going to dive into the software.