With the advancement of control room technology,integrators and control room managers need to re-plan the control room life cycle.
Reduce the number of video wall controllers and share content with satellite rooms easily and securely
The price of AV over IP cameras has fallen, making them the first choice for surveillance.
But, some systems include hundreds of traditional analog cameras, so it is impractical to replace all these cameras at once.
Assigning mission-critical content from the central control room to a safe location is an ideal function-now a trend
Until recently, this required repeated installation of AV equipment for each room.
iSEMC explores how the control room becomes more scalable, flexible and safe.
Promote changes in the control room
In the past few years, technology has caused changes in user expectations, affecting business.
Users want to be able to instantly share information such as videos and data from one device to many.
Multi-person video conferencing, facial recognition, fingerprints and multi-level user access control.
High-resolution displays are given, and the finger zoom function has been around for more than a decade. Yes, we are talking about smartphones.
Intuitive user experience has become a must-have in today's fast-paced control room.
All the security personnel need to do is to use a mouse or a finger to slide an image from the camera to the video wall, just like they do with a smartphone.
Control room technology such as this is developing rapidly, which can handle the use and sharing of video data more flexibly.
When the operator isolates and shares safety-critical mission visual information inside and outside the main control room, the team can act quickly.
Open architecture and IP technology allow flexibility, modularity, and scale-ultimately changing how AV/IT consultants, integrators and end users conduct today’s control room design.
Seven mission-critical elements of the current control room
1. Share secure content codes and share any source with authorized users securely via IP when needed.
2. Source flexibility ensures that the video wall controller can be compatible with both new and old camera sources, as well as different resolutions.
3. Modularity and scale support easily expand from a small system with a dozen cameras on several displays to hundreds of inputs on up to 64 displays.
4. Flexible layout creation and switching of custom layouts and easy switching of sources make the overall operation more simplified and efficient.
5. Easy to integrate multiple external control interfaces to customize each operating room. Ability to integrate with third-party applications.
6. The roulette input can monitor hundreds of signal sources in turn.
7. User rights management is the same as the corporate network, not everyone should have full access to every area.
Interpretation of 7 elements of today's control room
Many technological advancements and a more attractive total cost of ownership are reshaping the control room. Let's take a look at the elements that brought these changes.
1. The latest advantage of sharing secure content is that it can encode and securely share any source to authorized users anywhere through IP.
The relationship between the centralized main video wall monitor and the control room operator has been established.
Monitor the video wall content to respond to the incident, and the operator analyzes the detailed information on his/her radio display to make an informed decision to escalate the incident to the next level.
New collaborative software tools enable operators to isolate specific sources from the video wall, place them on the desktop and resize the windows to help them make decisions, and then share the content to any location on a secure network via IP.
This can speed up decision-making, especially when key personnel are on site.
Ensure that signals from any source can be securely coded by IP and can be sent to any place where the key person is located.
This peer-to-peer network model can achieve collaboration without the cloud.
The control room communication is protected by the company's firewall, allowing the team to collaborate directly without transmitting any traffic through the central server.
The software uses TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) as the connection and data encryption protocol.
2. Source flexibility As the price of network AV equipment such as CCTV cameras becomes cheaper and cheaper, the control room is turning to an open architecture, enabling some equipment to be upgraded in stages.
It is important to ensure that the video wall controller can simultaneously accept new and old camera sources with different resolutions, such as DVI, SDI, DisplayPort, old IP methods, and the latest IP encoding.
Large devices may have some cameras installed for many years. If they want to add new cameras, some of them will be HDMI or DVI, and others will be IP output.
The ability to instantly switch between signal sources and display them on the screen, and adjust their size as needed, is probably the most important point.
This flexibility makes it possible to install multiple SQX boards and baseband capture cards in the video wall controller chassis.
You need a system that can seamlessly ingest all this information and display them side by side so that the operator does not need to care about whether it is an old system or a new system.
The video wall control system can directly call up real-time camera information from the IP camera, and at the same time extract the recorded signal from the network video recorder (NVR).
At the same time, they can view existing live streams and NVR streams, so that operators can manipulate what they see on the video wall through iSEMC video wall control software (such as np_lite video wall control software).
Don’t be limited to the camera source.
In a crisis event, the control room may want to see CNN news on the video wall, or they may also want to see the weather channel there at the same time.
Being able to grab all these different sources, no matter where they come from, various web pages containing maps, media networks or other content, and being able to display them on the screen is a very powerful feature.
3. Modularity and scale are not the decisive factors of the critical control room for decision-making tasks.
A video wall may include only a few displays, such as a 2×2 video wall controller, which only receives feeds from a dozen cameras, and hundreds of inputs streamed on 64 displays.
With the expansion of the physical size or scope of the facility and the increase in monitoring requirements, the control room system must also be able to expand.
It is recommended to choose a modular system so that you can start small and build according to budget and key requirements. This allows the facility to expand easily, incrementally, and cost-effectively.
The modular system will help expand the main security room, surrounding emergency rooms or small meeting spaces that need to be visited, and share all the same sources from a single control point without the need for additional routing switches.
4. Flexible layout creation and switching. Each control room operator has a preferred workflow. They usually have different opinions on how to view or access the most important source, sometimes depending on whether it comes from a map application, railway station software, or a camera.
To be able to customize the layout and easily switch the source to make the entire operation more simplified and efficient. This is especially important when multiple operators use the same workstation, such as when one shift ends and another starts.
API is available so that an external control panel or system can be plugged into the video wall control system to control the layout, switch source files or source equipment. This is the key. For almost all secure installations, we usually have to connect with other third-party software or equipment at some point.
Being able to quickly change all the customizations when something happens is crucial. For example, if a crisis occurs, how quickly can they obtain the right resources and the right resources in order to monitor and control the situation? The control software may allow them to lock the gate.
5. Easy to integrate. The ability to build a workspace that optimizes the operator's workflow means that it can be easily integrated with third-party control systems. For facilities that already use Crestron or AMX, it is very useful to integrate it into a video wall control system.
So using the control panel they have been using for years, it is now possible to change the source in the'fifth window', or change the entire layout.
As mentioned earlier, easy integration with third-party video management systems is essential. VMS software is the management layer. It stored the recorded video and marked it to make it usable during the crisis.
This increases the functions and capabilities of the video wall controller on different signal sources.
It receives commands from the virtual machine.
If some activities they consider important are going on, regardless of whether someone opens the door in a certain location, the camera will turn on and transfer the implementation content to the video wall under the guidance of the virtual machine.
Whether it is motion detection, unnecessary visits, face or license plate recognition, or temperature changes, there are many event triggers that can be associated with the entire system.
6. It is not uncommon for hundreds of cameras in the roulette input control room to be monitored. The situation does not happen on every camera at the same time.
The roulette input allows hundreds of sources to be monitored in turn.
You want the system to be able to rotate each source, it will enter camera 1, hold for 10 to 15 seconds, then jump to camera 2, and so on, until all your sources are displayed in the loop.
If something does happen, or an event is triggered, the operator can quickly click the button to bring up the source of interest and keep it on the screen.
7. User rights management is like a corporate network, not everyone should have full access to every area.
The video wall control system should have the ability to set user permissions. For example, certain operators may be responsible for certain sources in certain areas of the casino.
There are many subsets of user authority management, and the ability to set multiple levels is crucial.
Let us say that this is a nuclear event.
Some people can access the cameras in the parking lot and the front door, and some people can only access the cameras and other signals that monitor the third floor.
The third floor may be where they conduct research and development. They still need security, but they also need to know who the security personnel are.
They will have different credentials and have access to these sources, while others will not even know that these sources exist.
