Eric K
Member
In light of coronavirus wiping out our spring season, we are spending some quality time on maintenance projects. We are currently looking to upgrade the way video is distributed to (1) Dressing rooms, (2) Lobby monitors, and (3) Overflow spaces. Currently, we have a crestron system that pushes to the lobby monitors and is somewhat unreliable. The dressing rooms are fed by haivision makito boxes that are run through our building's network. They are low-latency, fairly reliable, but they are quite expensive.
We want to move all our monitors to a single network based system for all our video monitoring instead of this half haivision, half crestron system that we currently have (there is already network in the building, so this makes more sense for the overflow spaces than trying to pull 500' of SDI through a mess of conduit across the building). The goal is low-latency, hd video with audio over cat 6 that will play nice on a network with other traffic (unlike digital lighting or sound). We would ideally have multiple source inputs for FoH cameras at each of the different theaters and a way to "tune" the monitors at different locations into the correct source (even better would be a web interface, but running around the building with a remote control is not the end of the world for the ops team).
The haivison makito system (we have an older one than the newer x series) appears to do this well, and my inclination is to just put these boxes all over the venue: https://www.haivision.com/products/makito-series/makito-x-decoder/, but this is an expensive system, so I want advice before actually going ahead and placing the order.
(1) What system do you have for this in your venue and how would you rate its reliability and quality over 5+ years
(2) If you were in my position, what system would you recommend? the overflow feeds are sort of show-critical so we don't want something unreliable, but we also don't need to spend a crazy amount of money if there is something fairly reliable in a cheaper price range
(3) Is there anything else I should be considering?
We want to move all our monitors to a single network based system for all our video monitoring instead of this half haivision, half crestron system that we currently have (there is already network in the building, so this makes more sense for the overflow spaces than trying to pull 500' of SDI through a mess of conduit across the building). The goal is low-latency, hd video with audio over cat 6 that will play nice on a network with other traffic (unlike digital lighting or sound). We would ideally have multiple source inputs for FoH cameras at each of the different theaters and a way to "tune" the monitors at different locations into the correct source (even better would be a web interface, but running around the building with a remote control is not the end of the world for the ops team).
The haivison makito system (we have an older one than the newer x series) appears to do this well, and my inclination is to just put these boxes all over the venue: https://www.haivision.com/products/makito-series/makito-x-decoder/, but this is an expensive system, so I want advice before actually going ahead and placing the order.
(1) What system do you have for this in your venue and how would you rate its reliability and quality over 5+ years
(2) If you were in my position, what system would you recommend? the overflow feeds are sort of show-critical so we don't want something unreliable, but we also don't need to spend a crazy amount of money if there is something fairly reliable in a cheaper price range
(3) Is there anything else I should be considering?