alt Hacker NewsThe X32 is a series of audio mixing consoles[1] to combine the signals from multiple microphones and/or musical instruments to a venue's speakers or to a recording/streaming apparatus.
In this case, there are multiple points of interest on the stage which are sometimes used, and sometimes not. When an area of the stage is unused, the microphone(s) at that location are manually muted to eliminate unwanted noise. The remaining unmuted microphone is at a location of interest, which is also the logical thing for a motorized camera to point toward and zoom onto at that moment.
This project uses the muted/unmuted states of microphones as a cue for camera movement, although it takes some upfront work to set it up. It also could cause trouble for looser or more improvisational shows where such rigidity might actually get in the way.
[1]: https://www.behringer.com/series.html?category=R-BEHRINGER-X...
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That's interesting, I'd assumed that they were using the controls for inactive channels on their console to literally jog the camera like they'd pushed the button on the remote. If a few controls on the last 3 of 32 channels happened to line up in an inverted T configuration or something like that, you'd relabel the buttons up/down/left/right and instead of muting/unmuting they'd be bound to those functions.
I understand how the automation of "point at stored location when something happens there" could be useful on some sets, but it also looks like you could do the jog button automation with this toolkit. Vary the speed of the movement with a volume slider, use fade in and fade out to smooth out the motion...
To paraphrase Malsow, I suppose it is tempting, when the only tool you have is a customizeable digital mixing console, to treat every problem as if it were an audio channel!
Thanks for explaining! Just posting to add a link to OSC (Open Sound Control) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control
Excellent and precise explanation, thank you:)
Just to clarify, the x32 mixers are digital mixers (not analog). So they have non-trivial computing power (for some definitions of “non-trivial”), reasonable amounts of onboard storage/memory, and network connectivity.
This allows them to be programmed as general purpose computers.