Page 16 - Demo
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BUILD
 YOUR OWN
Time was, if you wanted a customized studio you had to literally build it yourself. You needed rows of hardware, spools of cable, and a decent soldering iron. Today, with virtual development tools, you can add on a new studio using li le more than a Windows tablet or screen and your exis ng IP audio infrastructure.
ScreenBuilder talks to elements through a WheatNet-IP audio network control protocol known as ACI, as do third- party products such as automa on systems that have ACI added.
ScreenBuilder widgets come with basic so ware scripts
for performing func ons. For example, faders are able to adjust levels and switches can turn on or o  a microphone. These can  e into LIOs anywhere in the network to control elements, and ScreenBuilder can set up rou nes to check the status of tallies and cross point connec ons to execute if/then commands. ScreenBuilder can query a fader to
 nd out what source it’s connected to – and have the name automa cally appear on the screen in front of you, elimina ng having to manually iden fy and type in the source every  me there’s a change.
Wheatstone’s Script Wizard, which started as a script generator for general purpose bu ons used in the WheatNet-IP network and has evolved as a basic script generator for ScreenBuilder, provides basic scrip ng. Crea ng customized program rou nes is o en as easy
as naviga ng a checklist of salvos, des na ons and sources. For example, you can tell Script Wizard you want to monitor fader 1 on one of the two u lity mixers in a speci c BLADE (we’ll talk about these virtual mixers in a minute), and it writes that script for you automa cally. For a li le more customiza on, you can cut and paste an exis ng Wizard script into a work area and make any necessary
modi ca ons. These “starter” scripts can be useful for developing customized func ons shared by sta ons and more complicated func ons can be added using Boolean and other common commands familiar to anyone who has some programming experience. Scripts and all images for those scripts are self-contained in one  le folder so they are easily transportable from one studio or one screen to the next.
ScreenBuilder can also use third party Windows apps that already exist. Instead of wri ng a script rou ne to capture a weather feed, for example, ScreenBuilder can ask third- party apps to do it for you. “All you really need to do is tell ScreenBuilder to watch the weather gal on this channel, get the weather and put it on the screen,” said Agile Broadcast’s Chris Penny, who has developed dozens of virtual interfaces for broadcast studios. l
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