 Hi, my name's Andy, I work for Redial Communications and today we're going to be talking a little bit about smart panels. Now, you hear the term smart panel and you might be wondering what's actually so smart about it. Well, a good way to explain it is if we take the example of mobile phones. If we think back to the original telephone, all it could do was talk, listen, and once they got a bit more advanced dial a number, not very much. And that's kind of the same as the original intercom panels. They could talk, they could listen, you could contact people and that's all they could do. But with smart panels, the whole concept is that they can do a lot more. Just like with my phone, I can program football to record at home, even if I'm in a different country. With a smart panel, I can control lots of different things from this one device. So we can take a whole big rack of equipment and we can compress it down so it's all in the one device. So for example here, we have intercom, I can call the director, I can call the video engineer from my panel. Also, I have the option with the control that I can switch the video that's being shown on my multiview up here. So just by pressing a button, I can change which source is being displayed on a video output. And also, which is the new thing we're going to be talking about today is AMMA, the audio monitoring app. Now this is an app that allows us to take care of lots of different audio signals that might be bouncing around our facility. You have an audio engineer who is responsible for the output of the facility and sometimes that audio engineer has to be able to monitor multiple different channels. A broadcaster typically doesn't just have one channel, they have many. And so having one audio engineer who can then make sure that all of those channels are doing the right thing means that you can really make your workflow a lot more efficient. And here with AMMA, we can have lots of different audio channels all on the one device so that we can then be monitoring what's going on from this one station without needing any extra hardware. Now we're going to have a look at the interface and how it works. Now when you're setting up your control panel, you can have up to 256 different sources available in the bank in the panel and then up to 16 of them can be put on the individual keys here. Now when you're assigning the 256 sources, you can either input them with SDP files or we can use NMOS. Both are available options. So here we have the AMMA interface. You can see here we have lots of different signals coming in and we can also, when we're setting up, we can assign them different colors to make it a little bit easier for the operator to be aware of which source relates to which channel or which kind of source, whatever works for your facility. So you can see here on the display how we have, for example, a stereo channel, which is doing left and right. We also have mono channels, which is just one signal coming in. We also have the option to do a mono sum, which is where you take left and you take right and you put them down together, mix them up down so that it's then just one mono channel that's coming in and that is what is happening right here on video two. We also have the option to mute individual channels. We can either mute the left or the right and that you can see here, for example, the left channel has been muted and here the right channel has been muted and on the display, the colors will make it really easy for you to see what's been muted and what hasn't. If it's been muted, it's going to be gray, although you can still see the level. If it hasn't been muted, then you're going to have the colors. In order to use it, it's a simple question of using the lever keys. Swift, for example, I wanted to listen to the drum track. I can just push up with the drums and then they're playing out and I can hear the drums at my monitoring station. I can make sure that the audio quality is okay, that nothing crazy has happened with the EQ and that it's exactly the kind of sound I want to be going out. Once I'm finished with that, then I can just turn it off and then the next thing, maybe I want to check some of the music that's going on. I can go to the program audio and then I can listen to that. I can make sure that the audio coming out of the program feed is what I want and then if I'm happy with that, then I can just turn it off. So from a workflow perspective, it's really easy to use. I also have control of the volume, so there's a little rotary encoder on the lever and if I turn that up, then the volume is going to get louder. If I turn it down, then the volume is going to get quieter and that allows me a lot of control over what's happening on the audio and the kind of mix I have, what kind of volume is either going to be coming through my headset or through the loudspeaker that's in the panel. Now as an operator, you might often want to be able to change the different sources that you have in your monitoring panel. You can have, as we said earlier, up to 256 different sources available and up to 16 of those can be put on the different keys across the panel. So let's say we have here a lever with no source coming into it right now. I can hold my finger on the touchscreen and then I go to edit and then I have here the ability to scroll through the different sources that are available with their name. Let's say I want to put the rhinos in here, then I just confirm that and then the rhinos come in and it's actually the same as its neighbor and you can see now that the source is coming in there. If I want to take it out then again a long press I go to edit and then this time I take the one that is empty and then again I confirm and it's available now to be used for a different source at a different time. I can also edit the sources that are already on the lever keys. So if I go to epic for example and I hold down then I get the menu that comes up and from there I have the option to either mute the left channel, mute the right channel, change the source, change the level or take a mono sum of the lift and right channels that are coming in to then give me a mono that's coming out. If I want to do one of those then I'm just going to select for example mute left from the option in there and I can see straight away that the left channel coming in is grayed out, the right channel stays green so that gives me the visual indication that I'm only listening to the right channel because the left one is muted. We also have a clipping indicator on the monitoring app so as you can see here some of the led rings around the lever keys are flashing red that's to give the monitoring app operator the indication that the level coming in is too high. If that's happening it's something that needs to be adjusted to avoid saturating the sound and outputting a distorted sound to the viewer or listener at home and by having this visual indicator even if that source is not active when the clipping occurs the operator gets an immediate visual indication that okay I need to pay attention to something there because the level is too high. Now because we have multiple apps running on the panel it's possible that you could get conflicts between what's trying to happen between the different apps at different times especially with audio where you only have one set of ears and you can only really be concentrating on one thing at a time. So if we have AMMA the audio monitoring app running on the panel and we have intercom at the same time let's say that we're listening to a beautiful drum solo because that's what we like to do and while that's happening we get a call via intercom. Hello Andy can you please answer? So Cristina just called me to say that the show's starting and because I have the drums in my headset if she calls me and the drums stay at the same level as her voice there's a good chance that I'm not going to be able to understand what she's saying so well because the levels are the same. So what the audio monitoring app does is a process called ducking. Now you need to be careful with the pronunciation but with ducking if you have the drums coming in at a certain volume and then Cristina tries to talk to me the level of the drums come down so then the audio channel that I'm monitoring is much quieter and Cristina's voice is much louder so I can concentrate on that and hear the message that she's saying to me. Now sometimes when you're monitoring audio you really don't want to be disturbed from what's going on you want to really be able to focus on the audio that's coming in and you don't want to even get any intercom calls. You want to mute all other audio and just focus on that one channel that's potentially giving you a problem. Now to do that we have a function called solo in the monitoring app. We can press down on the key rather than pressing up and as long as the key is pressed down this is the only audio source that I'm going to hear. So if I have a different audio source running and then I solo this one the original one gets cut. Also if there's no other monitoring sources running but I solo this one and at the same time I get an intercom call such as Cristina calling me now. Then I get the visual indicator here that a calls come in but the audio is not interrupted. I can then go back to my intercom interface and I can simply reply to Cristina and find out what she wants after I finished controlling the problem and making sure that it's fixed. So we've seen a lot of the functions that are available with a smart panel. We can have intercom of course on there but we can also mix that in with a monitoring app and with this monitoring app we can also regulate the interaction between the two functions so that we have ducking which is where the volume of the monitoring will get ducked down whenever an intercom call comes in. We can take up to 256 AES67 streams coming into the panel and then we can have up to 16 of them shared out across the lever keys that we have there. Having a smart panel allows you to really reduce the rack space that you're taking up on each workspace and by adding in the software functionality you're saving on a lot of rack space and also on power consumption because energy is becoming more and more important these days. If you'd like to find out more about the monitoring app please check the link that's down here in the description and we'll look forward to seeing you on another video very soon.