By Adrian Jeakins, Director of Engineering
25th February, 2021
Centralise your workflow with IP Control
Our Tessera LED processing systems are never used in isolation, there are always other elements in play; the media server that generates the content, signal distribution systems, camera systems viewing the screen, the LED screens themselves, and also lighting control, audio and more. For users working within these complex systems, it’s important to have the ability to centralise control as much as possible to create a fluid and straightforward workflow.
We already provide a very powerful live control system that allows the use of our Tessera processor features via traditional industry protocols, but these systems are naturally limited in their scope and granularity.
In Tessera 3.1 we introduced our IP control API build on top of the ubiquitous HTTP and TCP transports. This gives a much wider range of live controls, with a granularity that allows much more scope to build powerful aggregate control interfaces. Industry-standard systems such as Bitfocus Companion make building rich multi-device controls intuitive, and also allow users to share workflows they find useful.
An example where this could be useful is a system where an IP controlled matrix is used to route different sources to the processor and each of these requires different colour settings. Wrapping your matrix control in Companion or a similar system allows the input and its colour settings to be switched with a single button press, ensuring the source always gets the right colour settings.
Adding onto this is the fact that live control is supported alongside IP control – e.g. you could be independently controlling the screen brightness from a lighting desk, for an extra level of power and control. Another example is of content that requires different processor settings, and the media server could be configured to send a set of IP control commands to the processor when specific cues are triggered.
The other feature that comes with IP control is system monitoring. Traditional live control does not provide an easy way to read back information, but via the IP control API users can now query the health and status of both the processors and the LED panels connected to them.
Easy creation of custom status monitoring is also now possible, allowing at-a-glance key statuses to be easily available to key technicians – even in very complex systems using a large number of processors. This is especially useful for big systems at live shows, but also for long term installations where the processors are generally are unattended day-to-day and it’s very useful to have a way to monitor it with a 3rd party system and send notifications of any issues.
At Brompton, we have always prided ourselves in coming up with ingenious solutions to both technical and creative problems. IP control is a tool that we are pleased to provide to our no less ingenious customers and partners, to allow them to build from our processing system to create the best-LED video experiences on the market.
The endpoints and protocols exposed in 3.1 is just the start of the process of providing a complete API for processor controls and we look forward to expanding them to provide what customers need to get the best from their processing.
