Month: July 2021

Tally Arbiter 2.0 now available!

About a year ago, I released some camera tally lights software because we desperately needed it at my church. Since that time, a ton of new features have been added, both by me and by the community.

It’s now in use in hundreds of places, from churches to event venues to sports stadiums.

Version 2.0 was silently released a few weeks ago, which includes a compiled application that can run natively on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, without the need to install Node.js and other dependencies like the command line. And, of course, it still runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Lots of people in the community have shared how they are using it, made their own tutorials, and added to the existing documentation.

It’s truly becoming a community project, and I love that. We now have an official Facebook user group to help facilitate conversation amongst users, and I’m excited for the new features on the roadmap in the coming days.

Someone from the community designed a new logo! Isn’t it nice?

A few features to note since version 1.5:

  • An entirely new User Interface and native applications for the Big 3 OS models
  • Easily installed for command line via new NPM image or Docker image
  • 1-second updates function for TSL Clients (provides compatibility with certain tally products like Cuebi)
  • Recording/Streaming statuses for OBS and VMix now available for tally states
  • Generic TCP Device Action improvements
  • TSL 5.0 source support
  • New Ross Carbonite source type to monitor any bus regardless of the “on air” settings
  • Web tally page can now be loaded directly by Device Id, and chat can be disabled
  • Pimoroni Blinkt! Listener Client
  • TTGO_T Display Listener Client
  • Improved Outgoing Webhooks – support for https and content-type selections
  • Roland Smart Tally emulation for use with STAC
  • Panasonic AV-HS10 support
  • Support for ATEM super sources in tally states
  • Bug fixes and performance improvements

If you’re new to Tally Arbiter, go check it out! You can also join the new Facebook user group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/tallyarbiter

And to everyone in the community who has helped to make TA what it is, thank you! Your contributions are helping everyone.

PresentationBridge Client now in public release!

I shared back in the fall about my new Presentation Bridge Client software. Since that post, the software has been in a private testing period as I was getting feedback from users. And now, thanks to some help from the community, it’s ready to release!

My hope is that this software will help you be more efficient in your tech ministry, especially when you need to do a lot of things without a lot of people.

Go check it out! And, as always, feedback and contributions are welcome.

You can get the latest release here: https://github.com/josephdadams/presentationbridge-client/releases/latest

Controlling a Canon XF Series camera using a stream deck and Companion by reverse-Engineering the Canon BrowSer Remote

It’s been awhile since I posted! Earlier in the year, we had a few unexpected expenses come up in our family. I started spending my spare time in the evenings doing custom freelance programming to help meet the needs. I have been doing this for a few months now which has helped us out.

God continues to bring new visitors to this blog and I have been able to return emails, phone calls, Zooms, and help so many people implement the ideas and software that I’ve created here. It is truly a blessing to see how God has used this little blog I started a few years ago.

I’m excited to share a new project that I have been working on with my team: Control of our Canon XF cameras through a stream deck. We have a couple of these cameras here at my church, the Canon XF 705 series:

I have been mentoring the guys who work part time in A/V here with me on how to write code and specifically code modules for the Companion project that we use so heavily here. We decided it would be great if we had control of these particular cameras at our shader station alongside the shader control of our Marshall cameras (I wrote about that here) and our broadcast cameras.

These Canon cameras come with a LAN port (you can also use wifi) and it runs a little web server called the Browser Remote which allows you to have full control of all the camera functions, from focus/zoom/iris/gain all the way to recording, white balance, and shutter control. If there’s a button on the camera, chances are you can control it from the browser remote. You can even see a live preview of the camera!

The built in browser remote functions of the Canon XF series.

So we started doing some digging, and realized that there is an internal API on the camera that returns a lot of the data in simple JSON sets. Once you initiate a login request to the camera, it returns an authentication token, which must be sent along with every future request.

For feedbacks on the camera state, we simply poll the camera every second or so. The browser remote page itself seems to do this as well, so we just emulated that.

The browser remote unfortunately only allows one user at a time to be logged in, so when our Companion module is in use, the actual browser remote page can’t be used. But for our purposes, that’s not really an issue since we just want to have button control of the iris/gain functions when we use these cameras during live services. Now I don’t have to ask my operators to iris up or down, I can just do it right from the stream deck!

Here’s a little walkthrough video that shows the module in action:

The module will soon be a part of the Companion beta builds, so if you have a Canon XF series camera, go check it out!