AJA Control Room Software Installation & Operation Guide Version 1.
Table of Contents Notices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Trademarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Copyright. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Contacting Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Notices Trademarks AJA®, KONA®, Ki Pro®, KUMO® and XENA® are registered trademarks of AJA Video, Inc., TruZoom™, TruScale™, Ki Pro Mini™, Io Express™, Io HD™, Io™, AJA Control Room™, and “Work. Flow.” are trademarks of AJA Video, Inc. AirPort, Apple, the Apple logo, AppleShare, AppleTalk, FireWire, iPod, iPod Touch, Mac, and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Final Cut Pro, QuickTime and the QuickTime Logo are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.
Chapter 1: Introduction Overview AJA Control Room™ is a simple software application for professional quality video and audio capture, conversion, playback, and output. With AJA Control Room you can master-to-tape using a single application. You can configure your video/audio I/O via an AJA edit device using the AJA Control Panel launched from the AJA Control Room application. AJA Control Room is available for Mac OS X and Windows.
User-interface Overview This section discusses the general layout and functions offered in AJA Control Room application menu bar and user interface screen. The application, by default, opens to the Viewer page shown in the following figure (the default Viewer Tab is Playback). Figure 1. AJA Control Room Screen Layout • Playback—the playback pane loads files from your computer and plays them out through your AJA hardware.
Application Menus These top-level application menus provide information and control of the workspace panes and the overall application performance. • AJA Control Room (Mac menu only) • File • View • Device • Help NOTE: Menu contents vary between the Windows and Mac menus. The following, first describes the menu items contained within the same menu across the platforms and then notes those that differ between platforms.
Show/Hide Bin: Viewer Mode: NOTE: Located in the left column, the Bin lists and allows selection of the clips you are working with. The last three options select one of the three workspace modes. For more on keystroke shortcuts, see “Keystroke Commands” on page 12. Device Menu If you have more than one AJA hardware device installed or connected to your computer, this menu allows you to select the one that AJA Control Room will use. Figure 4.
Viewer Prefs: Display and Timecode format option settings Figure 7. AJA Control Room Preferences–Viewer Serial Prefs: Settings for serial control via selected timecode source: • AJA Control Panel timecode settings • Tape deck control via RS-422 port. Figure 8. AJA Control Room Preferences–Serial For information on using Capture and Output offsets to adjust Tape Deck frame accuracy, see “Tape Deck Timing Adjustment” on page 20.
About AJA Control Room: In the Windows OS the About AJA Control Room screen is found under the Help menu. In Mac OS it is found in the AJA Control Room pulldown menu. Figure 10. About AJA Control Room Screen In This Manual Chapter 2 Provides detailed instructions for operating the product Clip Bin and each of the three Viewer Tabs: • Playback • Capture • Edit To Tape AJA Control Room v1.0 9 www.aja.
Chapter 2: Operation This chapter discusses the details of using the Bin and each of the Viewer Tabs. Reset to Defaults: Scripting AJA Control Room Operations: AJA Control Room settings can be restored to factory defaults by holding down the Control and Shift keys during startup. AJA Control Room supports Python Scripting. A detailed reference document is available on the AJA website. See AJA Control Room Preferences>Scripting to enable this feature (refer to “Preferences” on page 7).
Figure 11. AJA Control Room Bin Flyout menu Meta-data header Right-click header to display meta-data menu Moving Clips and Meta Data: The Bin panel can be expanded by dragging the right-edge to display a wide range of meta-data for each clip. Right-click on the Bin meta-data header to select the specific information columns you want to display (refer to Figure 11 on page 11). To further organize the bin, you can drag and drop Clips in the list and do the same for the Meta-data headers.
Playback Tab The Playback Tab view screen is the default tab screen. When this mode is selected, AJA Control Room allows you to playback, view and trim the clips in your project. Use playback functions for any clips that are loaded in the Bin. Double-click on a clip in the bin to open it in the Playback viewer pane. Figure 12. AJA Control Room Playback Tab. Playback Dashboard In Playback mode you can use the dashboard to jog through the clip and set IN and OUT points to trim the playback region.
• Option + O = clear set OUT • Shift + I = go to IN point • Shift + O = go to OUT point Dragging Markers: You can also drag the marker elements along the timeline to set edit points. Note that active elements will display in yellow. The timeline markers (shown below) include: • IN slider icon • OUT slider icon • Current Playhead Position Indicator Figure 13.
Capture Tab When you have your AJA edit device (Io, or KONA) installed and running, the Capture and Edit-To-Tape tabs become active. Figure 15. AJA Control Room Capture Tab Using the Capture Tab, you can create a new clip from the input of your AJA device. IMPORTANT: Remember to verify that your AJA edit device frame buffer is set (via the AJA Control Panel) for the expected video format and no unexpected conversions are taking place.
Capture Clip Settings: The Capture Tab provides the Clip Settings pane (shown below) that allows you to enter meta-data and library information for the clip you will create.
Capture Dashboard The dashboard offers standard tape deck play controls (as described previously) and adds the jog control slider. AJA Control Room can control a Tape Deck via RS422 or can do manually initiated captures.The Tape Deck Control icon indicates the communication status of the deck. If no active RS422 connection is present, the icon reports OFFLINE.
Next, in the options screen you can set the Capture type to: • All Selected Items – captures content for all selected bin items, or • Offline Items Only – captures content only for items in the bin with “footage offline” Under Options, Use Logged Clip Settings is for future use. You may enable Add Handles to add pre- and post-footage to your captures. After setting Batch Capture Options, click Continue. Figure 18. Batch Capture Options Screen 4.
Edit-To-Tape Tab Using the Edit-To-Tape tab you can output your current clip to a tape deck or recording device using remote control. A tape deck connected via RS422 and set in remote control mode allows AJA Control Room to send an Insert Editor Assemble Edit with timecode VTR IN and VTR OUT or Duration designated. IMPORTANT: Remember to verify that your AJA edit device frame buffer and output is set (via the AJA Control Panel) for the expected video format and no unexpected conversions are taking place.
Edit Settings Pane In the Edit-To-Tape settings pane, you can choose Operation Type: • Insert – lays down selected video and audio tracks using timecode VTR IN/VTR OUT or Duration maintaining existing control tracks on the tape. • Assemble – erases previous content and records all video, audio, timecode, and control track information onto tape according to the timecode information (VTR IN/VTR OUT/ Duration) set in AJA Control Room.
Tape Deck Timing Adjustment Both Capture and Edit-To-Tape operations employ Timecode for executing seamless frame-accurate operation. Latency in communication between devices can cause delays of several frames depending on the signal format and tape machine being used. To finetune timing between the tape deck and your computer and AJA edit device I/O, open AJA Control Room Preferences and select the Serial screen. Figure 22.
6. Compare the first two frames of the burned-in timecode of the capture with the timecode values in the dashboard’s Current Position Indicator (CPI). 7. If the capture resulted in a timecode beginning a frame before the CPI, adjust the offset by adding a frame. Conversely, if the clip was late, decrease the offset. As you perform more trial captures, you may see a variance in frame accuracy.
Appendix A: Python Scripting Tutorial AJA has implemented a Python Scripting interface for the AJA Control Room application. Under Python script control you can: • Name the file to be captured • Start Capturing • Stop Capturing NOTE: Our implementation is based upon Python v2.7. Version 3.4 will not work. This tutorial and the example files are available as a download from: http://www.aja.
AJA Control Room Setup for Python Scripting 1. Copy the python folder to your desktop. It can be copied anywhere, but for this example we will expect it to be on your Desktop 2. Launch the AJA Control Room application 3. Open the AJA Control Room Preferences and A. Select the Scripting pane i. Make sure Enable Scripting Server is checked ii. The Scripting server port defaults to Port 8080. NOTE: You can change this if desired but our example code expects it to be set to Port 8080.
Windows Instructions The following instructions expect the AJA Python folder to be on your Desktop. Make sure the AJA Control Room application is running. 1. Open up a Command Prompt 2. Type cd %HOMEPATH%\Desktop\python\examples 3. Type testcapture.py to run the testcapture Python script. The testcapture script tells AJA Control Room to capture a 1 second clip called “testClip”. The captured clip will appear in the bin. Figure 25.
This script is meant to control the AJA Control Room app on the local computer, however you can control an AJA Control Room app on a different computer on the network by replacing ‘localhost’ on line 22 with the IP address (e.g. 10.192.168.40) of another computer on your network. If the Scripting server port in the Scripting Preferences has been changed you must match that port number in line 23. An instance of the AJA Control Room app must be running on the remote computer. Figure 26.
