In Broadcast - October 2012 - 34

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

N E W S

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 13 - OCTOBER 2012

InGEAR

TSL TallyMan Provides Routing Efﬁciency & Improved Productivity
By Tony Orme, Products Development Manager, TSL
Efficiency, cost-saving and improved productivity are the new mantras of today’s modern broadcast facilities providers. Tallyman steps up to the challenge by providing systems engineers with a highly configurable tool that integrates with existing router and vision mixer infrastructures, improves workﬂows, saves money and empowers production staff to focus on their creativity rather than ﬁghting the technology. Sitting at the centre of your broadcast facility, with connections to all of the system’s critical infrastructure components such as cameras, vision switchers, routers, talkback systems, power distribution and audio monitoring, Tallyman is in a unique position to have visibility of your entire infrastructure – knowing which sources and destinations are routed on all of your routers, knowing which cameras and vision switcher sources are routed to transmission, knowing which GPI’s are on and off. Tallyman provides a real-time unprecedented whole view of your broadcast system. Protocol conversion is at the heart of Tallyman with hundreds of different protocols and variants available to connect to any of the leading broadcast manufacturers’ routers, visions switchers and talkback systems. In today’s cut-throat commercial world, the ability to stick with one vendors’ routers or vision switchers is often unachievable, as broadcast systems naturally expand to meet the demands of producers and new channels requirements. All of these protocol implementations are provided in Tallyman out of the box. As new protocol drivers are written by TSL Professional Products’ team of software engineers, they can be downloaded for free directly from our website, quickly loaded into your Tallyman controller and used immediately. Using Tallyman’s new 16, 32 and 48 LCD mnemonic button control panels, engineers can quickly conﬁgure systems out of the box so that one control panel can control many routers, even if they are from different vendors. This is a powerful feature as it saves money by reducing the number of vendorspeciﬁc control panels that need to be purchased, and improves workﬂow by giving operators and producers access to only the specific areas of the technical infrastructure that they need to do their job efficiently. Using the virtual panel takes this technology abstraction one step further by allowing systems engineers to ﬁne tune the operational tool to improve the workﬂow. This reduces the technical knowledge required by production staff to use the system efﬁciently and safely using a touch screen PC. With its roots ﬁrmly established at the core of a broadcast infrastructure, Tallyman easily provides the traditional red-light tally systems for camera and slo-mo operators. Using the engineers’ conﬁguration tool, the names for “under monitor displays” and multiviewers associated with a particular camera can be easily changed and displayed. This gives production staff greater visibility of the person actually operating the equipment, and using Tallyman’s unique ﬁle loading system, this can be changed on a show by show basis within seconds. The Tallyman design benefits from the combined knowledge of applications that are individually tuned to the broadcasters needs. For example, motor racing is associated with fast, invigorating, adrenalin fuelled action. Near misses and collisions generate excitement as cars race past each other at high speeds. In a traditional outside broadcast system, if a camera operator sees a near miss about to happen, they would call in the shot over talk-back to the director, who would then instruct the vision switcher to cut the camera to line. All of this takes time and the highspeed action could easily be missed. With Tallyman, a camera control button on each of the strategically placed cameras around the circuit can be used to send a signal to the Tallyman controller, which will then override the vision switcher and route the camera directly to transmission, thus saving valuable fractions of a second and getting better action shots. TSL’s range of horizontal and vertical intelligent modular power distribution units can be conﬁgured to send out alarm information if power is lost, equipment is drawing too much current, or the temperature or humidity is too high. All of this information can be sent either using GPI’s or SNMP messages to a Tallyman

Tony Orme

TallyMan TM2 Plus offers relay out isolation

34

controller. Using virtual panels, or its own integrated monitoring software, Tallyman now acts as a central alarm monitoring solution, providing uncompromised reliability and intuitive ergonomically pleasing control interfaces, or even integration into other monitoring solutions. Soon to be launched is the integration of TSL’s award-winning high-end audio monitoring solutions and Tallyman. This gives units such as the popular PAM2 and T-Mix the ability to control third-party routers so that audio sources can be pre-selected without the need for an external control panel, thus improving workﬂow and reducing the need to purchase another control panel. Monitoring information provided by the PAM2 and T-Mix can be sent to the Tallyman thus improving the centralised monitoring capabilities of Tallyman. Available in four different form factors, Tallyman provides a variety of connectivity using opto-isolated GPI inputs, relay or open collector GPI outputs, RS422 serial ports and high speed Ethernet connectivity. Ethernet multicast connectivity allows multiple controllers to be networked together over a WAN to increase the connectivity of a Tallyman system to near inﬁnite capabilities. Tallyman’s ease of use, versatility and reliability has proved its worth over many years of worldwide operation, and continues to be the ﬁrst choice for international broadcast professionals w h o d e m a n d re l i a b l e uncompromised solutions. ■

TallyMan UMD and Tally systems
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In Broadcast - October 2012

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