Roland has developed a good reputation in the church A/V industry, particularly with their V-Drums and other musical instruments, and of late the success of their V-Mixer audio mixers that have seen strong acceptance in the church market. There is probably less awareness, however, of their video product lineup. Roland was kind enough to send to CPM one of their LVS-800 video mix/live switchers, and we're going to take a peek at it here.
According to Roland, the LVS-800, with a list price of $3,795, is designed for live event video production and IMAG (Image Magnification-putting close-up live video of what's taking place on the platform on the projection screens in the same room) for SD (standard definition) video. It's worth noting that if you want HD inputs and outputs, Roland offers V-440HD and V-1600HD switchers. It features eight video inputs; one through four accept only composite video signals; five and six accept composite or S-Video; seven and eight take either S-Video or computer (VGA) connections.
The switcher features a loop-through video out for each input channel to enable monitors to be connected to show each input signal; there's a preview monitor output connection, and a program out connection.
The LVS-800 also features DSK (down-stream keying) capability, which enables you to take the graphics output of a computer and superimpose it over the main output of the switcher to accomplish a lower-thirds type graphic overlay, or a logo "bug." More details on this later.
The unit enables you to seamlessly switch between inputs with either a cut, dissolve (called Mix on the mixer panel), or a variety of pre-programmed wipes.
To test the system, I connected a system utilizing a video camera, DVD player, and a laptop computer.
Setup was simple, and fairly intuitive. The only setup change I needed to make was to put the unit into preview/program operation mode instead of A/B bus mode. This makes your lower row of buttons what you use to select your next video input, and the upper bank of buttons to select or indicate what's currently live.
The switcher operated flawlessly and smoothly, cutting, dissolving or wiping between any of the inputs without a hitch. You can set a time for the transition and push a button to have the switcher automatically switch; or, there's a standard T-handle if you want to control the rate of the transition yourself, or pause part-way through a dissolve and let both inputs come through for artistic effect. The LVS-800 includes three frame synchronizers, which ensure that each potentially active video input (A bus, B bus, and DSK input) will be in sync with the others. This is important, because in consumer and most prosumer grade equipment, there is no option for ensuring that when camera No. 1 starts outputting a frame, that each other camera (or other video source) is starting its new frame as well. Camera No. 3 would be 2/3 of the way through putting out a frame, and thus if you switched to it, the frame would be out of sync, and the video display device would likely roll or do some other undesirable thing while it tries to re-sync to the new input. The synchronizers delay the output of each frame until it would naturally be in sync with the output of the switcher, ensuring clean, accurate results without the substantial cost of equipment that syncs itself to a master clock signal (which is what high-end broadcast equipment would do).
I was expecting to be disappointed with the output of the computer input signal due to scaling the higher-resolution VGA signal down to SD resolution, but even there, it wasn't bad. Taking a 1280x1024 video signal and scaling it down to SD video quality does have an impact, and overhead slides containing small print may become unreadable. But overhead slides with small print generally aren't considered good design, and the PowerPoint decks I tried for this review looked acceptable. Not as good as if it was kept at 1280x1024, but acceptable.
So, what's this down-stream keying feature I mentioned earlier? If you have attended a church that does IMAG already, they probably put scripture references or other short notes up on the lower third of the screen, perhaps with a graphic background behind them. This is called a lower-third graphic. To do this, you need a method of superimposing that graphic and text over the live video going to the screen. This is what the DSK feature does.
While there are a few different configurations you can use it in, for simplicity, I'll describe what I did to test it, which is probably the more likely used scenario.
The DSK keyer has two inputs-the background input, and the foreground input. For the background, one of the three options is to take the output of the A/B bus mixer. For the foreground, I selected input seven, which was my laptop computer.
The DSK takes the foreground video input and removes the video wherever it sees a specific color (by default, black), allowing the background video to show through (which is called ‘keying'-thus, the down-stream keyer). The DSK includes a knob which adjusts the sensitivity of the keyer.
So, to achieve this text and graphics over video effect, you can create a set of PowerPoint slides (for example) with black backgrounds and your lower-third graphic and text at the bottom of each slide. When you activate the keyer, it removes the black background, and puts the remainder on top of the output of the A/B mixer section. You can continue to switch your inputs using cuts, dissolves or wipes to your heart's content while the DSK independently places your graphics and text over that video. This worked very well in my tests. The only things that would be nice is that being a video editor, I'm used to using motion graphics like those from Digital Juice in my video editing, and those graphics include transparency to allow some of the background video to "bleed" through the motion graphic. There's no way for the LVS-800 to understand transparency in the keying video signal, and so you have to do graphics with hard edges. But that‘s not a flaw-just a reasonable limitation which keeps the cost of the product down.
So, what are my final thoughts? The LVS-800 does exactly what it's designed to do, and does it well. However, with HD video becoming the norm, you really want to think through whether SD is the way to go, and I would have preferred a higher-than-SD output resolution option to have the computer graphics stay in a higher resolution through to the projectors.
If SD is what you need, then the LVS-800 is worth a look.
