Audiovisual Systems Planning and Design
Audiovisual over IP – Ward is a subject matter expert on this, presenting a well-attended lecture at the BICSI fall conference in San Antonio in September 2018.
Although this looks to be an AV thing, it is really a network application of low buffering network architectures in order to support real time streaming media. Although AV over IP is at its core just standard Ethernet, the implementations are all requiring a Software Defined Networking (SDN) Controller overlay.
All of our five star hotel work depends on networking video and audio over Ethernet, usually Dante for Audio and Crestron NVX for Video. Security camera video is typically standard H.264 or H.265 multicast streams. These worlds are quickly colliding – Audinate announced Dante for Video in June 2019 and Crestron announced embedded Dante Audio networking within their NVX Video architecture at Infocomm 2019. Although the AV vendors don’t really use the term, many of their implementations are compliant with SMPTE ST 2110, which is extensively detailed in Wards media presentation linked above. The idea is that dis-aggregated essence streams are sent out over the network and synchronized with IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP).
Our recent design work for the large Video Wall at Suncor’s Global Security Operations Centre (GSOC) in Calgary is a case in point. We have implemented a video processing environment that is chassis based, but the inputs and outputs of the video wall are all networked AV over IP endpoints. The Calgary system is compliant with the Software Defined Video over Ethernet (SDVoE) Alliance, which provides interoperability at various network speeds.
Audiovisual Systems – This is a catch-all term for the corporate and education AV that we do regularly
AV is the hardest discipline to make money at because the projects vary so much from one client and project to the next. Every job ends up being unique, and senior time is needed to distill the client’s vague requirements into real systems. AV equipment is also constantly changing, so a solution that we used last year may not even be available this year. R&D is necessary for every project, along with extensive interviews with user groups.
Although we have lots of CAD blocks of devices and techniques to get things done, the client requirements drive the systems. A 500 sq. foot room could have $5,000 of AV in there or it could have $100,000 of AV, depending on the client/user requirements. It is therefore impossible to quote AV on a per sq. foot basis, but instead we need to write up what we call a “Phantom Design”. This is a narrative description of the systems that we understand or assume will be placed into the various spaces. This usually takes Ward from 15 minutes to 2 hours to write this up and it is included in the Fee Proposal under “Scope of Work”. Extremely rarely does an RFP include detailed descriptions of the level of AV that the client requests.
Ward started working for Shen Milsom & Wilke Inc., out of New York City in 1989, when there were 21 employees in one office (SM&W now has 260 employees in 15 offices). He spent 3 months in New York at the head office, in order to learn the SM&W ‘method’, going back to Hong Kong in 1990 to open the branch office there. At that time Ward was doing Audiovisual and Acoustics, as SM&W was first and foremost an Acoustics consultant. See below on Acoustics knowledge. For the next 3 years Ward did Acoustics and AV.
In 1993, at our annual company ‘off-site’ meetings, Ward was told by Fred Shen that he needed to learn Telecommunications and Networking, as AV was moving in this direction, and that it was a profitable discipline in itself. Ward continued to do Acoustics and AV work right up through leaving SM&W in 2003, although Telecom occupied about half of his billable time.