DMC 2.106, 5.102, 5.208 embedder
Camera 2 signal is fed into a DA, which feeds into the Sonifex AVN-DIO10-12G Dante embedder de-embedder. LAITS productions use the same embedder if you have questions. This signal is then fed to the switcher and the ISO recorder which is capable of recording the embedded 16 audio channels.
Why embed?
It’s a cleaner signal with a single analog to digital conversion onto the dante network and then into the SDI stream. Another reason is for Multitrack ISO recording. While you can record the ISO tracks in protools, you will not need to if you hit record on the 2nd camera recorder. The first two tracks are left and right, tracks 3-12 are the wireless mics and XLR inputs from the stage, tracks13 & 14 are audience mics (behind the flanking TVs), tracks 15 & 16 are crestron (originating HDMI and converted directly to Dante.) Finally, dante clock is another reason. This particular embedder lets you clock from the video source, meaning that if you do record ISO on ProTools, it will be sample accurate over hours of recording. Drift is no longer a problem.
Here is the manual.
Things to note:
The dip switches (1-8) on the front of the unit should all be in the on position. Dip switches 9&11 should also be in the on position.
Dip switch 9 tells the unit to use the incoming video source as the clock, bypassing Sample Rate Conversion (SRC) in the unit.
Dip switch 11 tells the unit to insert the chosen embed channels. If you leave this off, and choose not to embed a channel, silence will be there instead of the previous embedded signal. Why do you care? If someone shows up with an ENG camera and wants to use their XLRs on the camera for lav and boom. With dip switch 11 in ON position, you could turn off dip switch 1 and their audio would come through. With the dip switch 11 OFF, no audio would come through on channels 1&2 and you might feel silly later for not recording audio.
Dip Switch 10 in the on position puts 1KHz tone on channel 1, 2KHz tone on channel 2, 3KHz tone on Channel 3, and 4 KHz tone on channel 4, and repeats that up the channels to 16. Channel 5 get 1KHz, Channel 5 get 2KHz…and so on…
Dip switch 12 should stay off. We’re not doing 96KHz and plus it cuts you embed channel count in half.
This Unit has two ethernet ports on the back of it. Within the Dante Controller software we have turned off the redundancy and made the secondary a ‘network switch'. The IP address for this is found on box under the “2016 AV ACO Audit.xlsx” file. Hopefully this link still works later, we like to rename things. This unit is unique in that the primary Dante port has two IP addresses. One for Dante and one for configuring the device. They can be configure independently static or DHCP. From the factory, the Dante side is DHCP and the config side is static 192.168.0.100. We have given the Dante and config sides static IPs (see audit file above).
Web server config
To get to the web page config, type the IP address in the URL bar of your favorite browser, chrome seems to work fine. Above is a screen grab from the manual, do not set up our embedder this way. The web config allows you to over ride the dip switches, by turning on the “local override” switch…you may also have to hit a “submit” button to save your changes to the unit before it takes effect.
Finally, we are choosing to enable the signal generator and leave it in Auto Gen mode (the above pic is taken from the manual and is not correct). Enable should be on, Auto Gen should be on, packing should be interlaced, and pattern should be 100% bars.
We have enabled this, so that if we loose signal from the camera, we will not lose clock sync to all the Dante devices. This embedder is the clock leader and external sync has been chosen so we are sample lock step with the SDI video stream.