Production switchers have made great advances over the years, but lately all the rage in production switchers is touch interface. Vaddio has the Production View, and last year Ross Video released its View Control software update, allowing the use of a touch panel as an interface for the Carbonite. All of these products have a few things in common: they are easy, intuitive, and just plain fun. They all give you access to everything you see right at your fingertips. It's as close to the movie “Minority Report” as we are going to get for a while.
This past year at NAB, Sony launched its AWS-750 Anycast Touch Live Content Producer, an all-in-one production switcher that sets a new precedent for expectation for the standard switcher. The Anycast Touch is another example of manufacturers producing products that offer a multi-faceted production solution. The days of needing a video switcher, audio board and streaming box for a production are giving way to the all-in-one solution, and the Anycast is the latest example of this paradigm shift.
Doing a double take
Right off the bat, the “wow factor” of this switcher is extremely high. The touch
interface is so amazingly intuitive I think that even teaching pastors could use it. In all seriousness, think about using your smart phone. It doesn't really require much “training” to use, simply touch what you want. The Anycast Touch is exactly the same. One of the more compelling reasons for this type of interface is that it removes the barrier of a hardware interface. A standard 2 ME 12-input production switcher could have as many as 70 buttons on the control surface, which for volunteers can be an intimidating piece of gear. The touch panel, on the other hand, empowers everyone who knows how to use a smart phone to become a proficient user in no time.
The Anycast would also play well in a student ministry; students, who are way savvier with technology, will be right at home due to the familiar form and function. Imagine pairing fast-learning teenagers with professional production equipment and then removing the training time, learning curve, and hostile user interface. Essentially, with the intuitive Anycast Touch, that is a possibility. The majority of the interface is made up of two touch panels, so all the interface is soft key except for power and optional hard key for taking preview live to air.
The intuitive nature of this product really needs to be experienced to be appreciated. It’s one of the things that makes this a great product for a church market that is reliant on volunteer operators.
Personal impressions
Moving past the interface, the switcher itself has six channels of mixed format video inputs. The inputs range from HD/SD-SDI (BNC) x 4, HDMI (Type A) x 2, and RGB (D-Sub 15-pin Female) x 2, down to composite (RCA) x 2. All of these inputs are located right on the switcher itself, giving it a very small form factor: 16.34 x 3.74 x 13.23 inches and only 13 pounds. making it perfect for flypacks or small production spaces. The Anycast also has an onboard audio mixer with five inputs, giving the option to mix audio levels along with video.
One of the more exciting features of the Anycast Touch is the internal graphics generator. This allows you to build key-on titles or full-screen graphics. It's no substitute for Photoshop, but as a built-in option, it's really powerful. Where it really excels is when used in combination with Photoshop: use Photoshop for the graphics portion and the character generator (CG) for the text. This gives you a great combination of Photoshop-quality artwork for sermon or series branding, and the flexibility to change details on demand. The CG gives you all the standard text controls—font size, color, and location. It is a great option for keeping graphics that you will use frequently, like name supers, easily accessible without tying up a volunteer and a CG asset. The Anycast can also control up to seven cameras using Sony VISCA camera commands.
The last feature that really makes this product standout is the fact that it can record internally 10 hours of program on the solid state drive (SSD), stream h.264 files, or both. It's basically plug and play; plug the Anycast, and point it at your website or CDN, and then during the production, simply tap the button to start streaming. The clips that are recorded internally are also accessible, giving you a replay option without a dedicated playback machine.
Having a product that can serve multiple purposes is great, because in the church, tech space usually competes with seating space—and we all know who wins in that circumstance. No one wants their church to have fewer seats, but it means church techs need to be smart about how they use space. Having a product that gives you the option of cutting cubic feet of the body fat out of your production space is a huge win.
While there is a lot to like about this product, it's not without its faults. The Anycast Touch, like many recent switchers, has HDMI ports on it. While many professional cameras have HDMI ports on them, they are not a great connector for cameras. There are many reasons for this, but the big ones are: no locking connector, not easily field repaired, and the maximum effective length of HDMI is between 15-45 feet, depending on the cable. Therefore, since HDMI is not great for cameras, it could be great at getting a computer signal from the presentation software on your Mac into the switcher. The problem there becomes high-bandwidth digital content protection (HDCP), which can stop the switcher from receiving content from a computer over this connector. The way HDCP works is the source sends a signal that checks for a license before it passes a signal, thus, hooking a Blu-Ray player to a TV, which has the license, is no problem. However, if you connect the same Blu-Ray player to something like an SDI converter box, which will not have this license, it will not pass signal. This renders the HDMI ports unusable in most circumstances.
The AWS-750 Anycast Touch is also limited to 1080i 59.94/50 as the system output. While this is a high-quality output, it was surprising to see that it as the only option. It also begs the question about what the switcher is doing with input signals that are not 1080i? It can ingest SD signals, but if you can't change the system output, is it scaling the signal or will it pass the signal as is? Also, because it is so electronics-heavy, the power brick creates a lot of heat—enough to be concerned about where you could place it without danger of melting something. Not to mention that, typically, that much heat isn't really good for the longevity of electronics.
Parting thoughts
At the end of the day, the Sony AWS-750 Anycast Touch is a solid piece of gear that is super user-friendly. If our church had a dedicated student ministries venue that required video support, I would spec this switcher for the job. I think the easy interface combined with students who are interested in production is a recipe for success. There are also setups in some small churches where HDMI can be used: if the switcher and the cameras are in the same location, and if the cameras are on tripods and are unmanned static shots, it's a very functional option. Beyond that, I think this product could be an excellent solution for churches that want better production quality but simply don't have the budget to hire a dedicated video person.
With this switcher, volunteers or even audio guys should have no trouble figuring it out. That said, it's not a silver bullet. This ease-of-use comes at a price: $19,995 to be exact, making the Anycast Touch more expensive than many small switchers on the market, but still cheaper than most industry-standard professional production switchers.
