With the expanded use of video in today's churches, the video staff and volunteers need a way to select from a variety of inputs and direct them to the video screens or your live internet video streamer quickly and easily. When you start getting into switching between multiple cameras, you need more than an inexpensive "fade-through-black" switcher, and way more than selecting between different inputs on your projectors.
Roland has a new entry in the video switcher space-the V-1600HD high-definition 1ME (mix-effect engine) video switcher. To summarize its features, the V-1600HD provides for 16 input channels, an image store, one program output, one preview output, one aux output, a downstream keyer (DSK), chroma/luma keyer, sync in and pass-through, tally light output, and built-in monitor.
The Ins and Outs
For output, the switcher can be set to operate in standard definition mode (SD), at 480i or 576i. HD modes include 480p, 720p, 1,080i, and 1,080p. RGB output modes include 640x480 through 1,920x1,200.
The input channels can handle a wide variety of formats, anywhere from 480i through 1,080p for video sources, and 640x480 through 1,920x1,200 for computer video. The switcher handles scaling a selected input up (or down) to the required output format, enabling you to connect a wide variety of equipment to the switcher without the need for buying format converters (some switchers require all inputs be the exact same format). This is good news for churches who often need to use consumer-grade gear in their video systems.
The V-1600HD has frame synchronizers, enabling it to use unsynchronized sources and switch between them. This does introduce a small amount of delay in the output, however. If you'd like to make your video switching more efficient, the V-1600HD does have the option of accepting a synchronization signal, to manually sync it to all your other video equipment in more professional installations. It's nice to have this flexibility, so that as your budget and needs grow, the switcher can grow into a synchronized environment with you.
The input connectors for the channels include DVI and VGA connectors for computer-type connections; and BNC connectors for SDI (both HS and SD) inputs as well as composite/component inputs. You can connect HDMI sources to the switcher as well through an inexpensive HDMI to DVI adapter-I bought two of these from a local source for about $7 each to use for this review.
The switcher's control surface starts at the bottom-left with a row of preview selection buttons; above that is the row of program selection buttons; above that are some memory buttons used for saving the operating settings of the switcher; above that are setup buttons and monitor source selection buttons, and then the built-in monitor.
On the right side are controls for managing the transition between inputs (which includes a nice T-bar transition control), Picture-in-Picture controls, chroma/luma key controls, and DSK controls.
Connecting the inputs and outputs was a breeze, and the switcher booted up in about 20-30 seconds. I set the built-in monitor to show the preview channel (the input I intend to switch to). If you used any sort of switcher before, operation of the V-1600HD was obvious. Selecting an input button in the preview row of buttons brings that channel up in the preview window; moving the T-bar control (or pressing the "take" button) transitions the program output to the selected input source.
The V-1600HD has several transitions to choose from. Typically, you will use cuts (hard, immediate transitions between inputs) or crossfades (a gradual fade from one input to another) for 99.9% of your switching. For the rare times when you need something fancier, several other transitions, such as a wipe from left to right, or one corner out to the full frame, are available.
Transitions worked very well, with no delays or glitches. The T-bar control lets you manually control the rate of the transition; for using the "take" button, you can dial in the length of time you want the transition to take via a rotary control, and press the "take" button to automatically execute it.
The DSK section also worked well. The DSK takes channel 12 (by default), removes a re-defined background color, and superimposes the result over another input channel. Through this operation, you can add worship lyrics on top of your live video. To test this, I created some PowerPoint slides with black backgrounds and some graphics and text to use as my DSK source. I found that in removing the black background, my DSK graphics started to fade out, and I wasn't able to get a level that satisfied me. I then changed my background slide color to 100% green, and changed the DSK color to green. This worked much better, and I obtained very good results. What color you need to use will depend on your specific graphics-if your graphic contains the DSK color, you're going to have issues, which is probably what I ran into when using black as my DSK color.
The switcher can also load still images from a USB device into the switcher, and have this assigned to an input channel. This is handy for having a church logo or a general church information slide to fall back on without having to use your graphics computer. This function worked quite well.
I did run into an interesting issue when connecting a Blu-Ray player to the switcher through its HDMI output. Apparently, Blu-Ray players are designed to recognize what sort of device it's being connected to, and if it's not a display device like a TV, it will not output the video. This is part of the HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Copy Protection) system that HDMI interfaces (among others) implement. As a switcher is not a display device, it can't receive the HDMI signal from the Blu-Ray player. I ended up having to connect the Blu-Ray player to the switcher via a component input, but the component output of most consumer Blu-Ray players is not in HD-it's an SD signal. So, Blu-Ray disk playback looked pretty poor through the switcher. This is not a problem with this switcher -you'll run into this with any HD switcher and HDMI outputs from Blu-Ray players. Connecting my video camera through its HDMI connector worked perfectly, however.
Summing it up
This switcher would be great in a volunteer-heavy environment like a church. It's simple to use, and anyone can learn how to work it in a few minutes. I have only a few complaints about it.
First, at 1,920x1,080 resolution, the switcher can only store one still image. And, the still images are stored in volatile memory-once you turn the switcher off, it "loses" the images. Flash memory is pretty cheap these days-I don't understand why Roland would have so little memory for this feature, and not use flash memory to store it permanently.
Second, it has no multi-viewer capability. If you want to preview each input channel (and when switching cameras, you need to do so), you need to use the pass-through connectors on the switcher to route each input to an external monitor. It would be nice if they included an option to connect one HD monitor where you can view many of your input channels side-by-side. There are products available that give you multi-view capabilities, or (for example) four low-resolution LCD monitors side-by-side on one rack-mount enclosure that would be worth looking at. These can easily be connected to the V-1600HD through the pass-through connectors available on each input channel.
At an MSRP of $16,995, this isn't a cheap piece of hardware, but it's in line with other switchers in its class. And you'll need to budget additional dollars for individual preview monitors for the input channels. But it is a solid switcher, with very little latency-you have to really look for it to see any delay in the output.
If you need a switcher with great flexibility of input formats, and one primary output, it's well worth looking at the Roland V-1600HD.
