Earlier this year, the County and District councils of Buckinghamshire County, South Bucks, Chiltern, Wycombe and Aylesbury Vale merged to become Buckinghamshire Council Unitary Authority.
The council approached Public-i for advice on improving their committee meeting webcasts. These are held at The Gateway, Aylesbury, where audio-visual and webcasting systems were already in place. The council wanted to upgrade the cameras in their main meeting room, the Oculus, from where they stream their committee meetings.
The problem
Certain elements of the existing AV installation was outdated. The 10-year-old analogue cameras (Sony EVI D90) were not performing well in the low light conditions of the room; the picture was low-definition and very dark.
The cameras were also slow and noisy: meaning that they were obvious and intrusive during meetings.
Sony EVI D90 previous installation
The solution
After assessing the room, the Public-i engineering team recommended installing the Avonic CM 73 IP cameras from Polar and a new webcasting encoder into the existing AV rack.
Avonic CM 73 IP camera installed
The Avonic CM 73 IP cameras were chosen because they offer an SNR CMOS sensor that delivers outstanding image quality under low light conditions in full HD 1080p60 and a user-adjustable Colour Matrix. They also provide a high quality 30x optical zoom, which was ideal for the project because of the large size of the room.
Old installation image quality
New installation image quality
Another convenient feature of the Avonic CM 73 IP camera is the Tally light. This is a status light on the front of the camera that changes colour depending on the camera activity, turning red when streaming. This little feature is helpful for meeting participants, who can quickly identify the camera which is in use.
Avonic CM 73 IP Tally light
Apart from the major picture quality improvement, choosing an IP camera simplifies installation and cable management as it requires only two cables: an Ethernet cable for network, control and power; and an SDI cable for HD video streaming. These connect directly to the Public-i AV rack, from where the cameras are automated with the Beyerdynamic Quinta Revoluto digital wireless conference microphones and integrated with Connect webcasting.
This means that the meeting operator can use their Connect tablet control to manage the whole meeting at the touch of a button.
Using Connect on the tablet
Public-i also provides the microphone automation technology as a standalone PC application called CameraControl, which can drive Avonic cameras from any conference microphone system (Beyerdynamic, Bosch, Brahler, DIS, RCF, Sennheiser, Shure, Taiden, Televic, TOA). The mixed video feed of the cameras can then be recorded or used with digital signage systems or webcasting.
Camera Control software
