Picture this: The morning jock gets up from the board to make a quick run down the hall and the studio cameras are rolling. It’s nothing but an empty chair and maybe a few blinking lights, feeding right into your social channels during your highest billing hours of the day.

It happens.

Camera automation software typically “reads” your console’s mic tally so when the mic turns on, the camera starts to roll video. That’s good, but even better is to integrate camera automation with the IP audio network so it can catch situations like the above before they happen.

Camera automation through the WheatNet IP audio network, for example, ensures that the camera only rolls if the mic is on, the mic fader is up, and there’s actual audio coming from the mic. These logistics are already tracked by the WheatNet IP audio network and can give camera automation that little extra data point to know to turn off the cameras when, say, a jock walks away from a live mic with the fader turned up.

It’s all fed through Wheatstone’s Automation Control Interface (ACI), our control protocol that enables native IP audio communication between the camera automation and the studio elements within the WheatNet IP ecosystem. This fully automated control takes away one more thing the producer has to do during a busy show, and can be beneficial for editing packages after the show as well. That same ACI integration that you used to automate the studio cameras can be used to control lighting and can be especially useful for post-production work, such as logging, skimming and tracking audio from a specific microphone.

Automating graphics insertion. One WheatNet IP visual radio project for a station targeting “digital natives” required live-streaming the radio program in progress along with relevant graphic elements. The integrator added visual radio software, the logic of which was slaved to the mic channels on the main studio console for setting level and audio duration thresholds controlling the cameras. They also slaved the visual radio software to the VoxPro audio recorder/editor channel to cue the system whenever a caller went on-air. When the VoxPro is on, the software knows to pull up a graphic for the website and social media channels, eliminating a lot of background work by operators.

Getting audio under control. Managing audio levels from the inevitable assortment of questionable audio files that are part of social media is the perfect job for the IP audio network. For example, WheatNet IP audio network I/O Blades have audio processing built in for level adjustment of WAV or MP3 files, and streaming appliances can be added to the network at any time to get the best sound possible across any link. Streamblade and Wheatstream use audio processing techniques designed specifically for streaming to keep audio smooth from one cut to the next without overloading the streaming codec and causing distortion, yet keeps programming well within the codec’s 0 dBFS limit.

Lookin’ good. Simply moving bulky gear from the studio to the rack room or onto a software app, so it’s out of the way, yet routable through a CAT6 cable, makes for a much more camera-friendly studio. “The best studios I’ve seen of late are by some very smart people who line the walls with tube all around to mount cameras or lighting or hang microphones on to make these multipurpose rooms, and they just move stuff around as they move the talent around…they can put branding on certain walls and   video feeds on opposing walls…You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a good result,” commented Chris Penny with Agile Broadcast during February’s Radio Week panel discussion on studios in general and visual radio in particular.  Broadcasters use our custom ScreenBuilder app, for example, to replace a hardware intercom panel with a touchscreen panel. Even the hardware that remains in the studio looks better than ever before. Our TS-4 and TS-22 talent stations are a prime example of how IP audio networking can transform a wired maze of buttons and panels into a compact workstation with microphone, headphone, timer, and talkback functions, all connected to the main studio console through one cable.

As for the console itself, there’s no doubt that it is still very much the centerpiece of radio, if not more so. And that’s okay with us, because we happen to make the best-looking IP consoles on the market.