Bridge Technologies developed a customisable new interface that improves how users organise and interact with the comprehensive features of the VB440 IP-based production probe.
Bridge Technologies has developed a new interface called Canvas to improve how users organise and interact with the functionality of the VB440 IP-based production probe. The VB440’s features are complex, and with Canvas, an operator can completely customise the workspace, combining video and audio previews with a very wide variety of graphs and visualisation options.
The aim is to help production professionals – camera shaders, audio engineers, network technicians and others – quickly access the tools that directly support their roles. The VB440 works by gathering network data in an IP production environment, and converting it into usable, essential information that informs operators about most aspects of the production process.
Most important, it makes the information available with minimal latency, using only an HTML5 web browser, and allows up to eight users access to the VB440’s features at once. A diverse team of professionals can use the tools to guide production work – simultaneously, live, from anywhere in the world.
Role and Function
Previously, the various aspects of the VB440 were broken down into tabs, according to the role and function being performed. Users could click-through to access elements including the Gonion meter, which shows incompatibilities in sound fields composed of multiple microphones, LUFS meter to visualise the audio dynamic range, and room meters for audio.
Other tabs gave access to previews for HDR content on SDR screens, colorimetry with CIE, vectorscopes and waveforms for video (which now includes both YRGB parade and overlay view), and various modifiers that allow users to save their selected scopes together with their own designs.
Bridge HTML5 monitor
Instead, Canvas now gives users a single screen option where they can fully customise what tools should be displayed in the UI, adding as many or as few scopes, meters and displays to the page as necessary, re-sizing and arranging to suit a specific workflow. Users can group together video previews and associated scopes to correspond with a single channel input, using colour coded markers, and set these to either lock to a specific channel, or automatically change with the channel selected.
Visualisations can be stacked separately or imposed as overlays on the video preview, with adjustable transparency, scale, gridline density and so on. All these new features add precision when viewing scopes that specifically addresses colourists and their need for a heavily detailed and full-screen scalable display.
Portable Configurations
Configuring the Canvas takes a few seconds. Each block on the user’s constructed workspace can be added, moved, toggled, locked in place or deleted using a mouse or keyboard shortcuts. The interface has also been optimised for use on a touchscreen with an iPad. Users can create multiple Canvas screens as presets, with different arrangements depending on the task they are focusing on. These can be displayed as changeable tabs.
Any of these tabs can be copied and pasted out of the VB440 – for example, into a Slack chat or email – and then used to automatically access the preconfigured screen on another device. Users can quickly jump between a fixed monitor and tablet when on the move, for instance. Alternatively, the entire Canvas can be saved – with multiple tabs – and exported to use on a different VB440.
Bridge Technologies’ Chairman Simen Frostad said, “The Canvas interface has been in development for some time while we developed the flexibility and efficiency that it grants users. It reinforces the VB440’s purpose – to allow all types of production specialists access to the information they need at-a-glance, to complete their role on a remote, distributed, live basis, from any HTML-5 web browser anywhere in the world.”
Canvas is now available to all VB440 customers. www.bridgetech.tv
