Designer Basics

Welcome back. Now that we know the basics of video, let’s take a look at wiring the NV-32-H in

the Q-SYS Designer software.

As always, we recommend you follow along as you watch, even if you don’t have any

hardware. So, come with me if you want to live. 

We’ll start by going to the Inventory panel and selecting the Video tab. You’ll find the NV-32-H

near the top, and let’s click twice to add two of them to our design. We’re going to simulate a basic

setup in which we have three HDMI sources in one room, and we’ll deliver those to a single HDMI

display in another room. These sources and displays are represented by these items: “Generic HDMI

Display” and “Generic HDMI Source” in the software, so let’s add those to our design too. We don’t care

what manufacturer or model these devices are, we just need something in the Schematic to represent

those devices.

However, a nice benefit to having these devices in your inventory is that their statuses can be

delivered to the Q-SYS Reflect Enterprise Manager, so you can get all the information on these sources and

displays from your cloud-based monitoring system. Pretty neat, right?

Like any Q-SYS networked peripheral, you’d want to make sure you give this inventory item the

same name as an actual device that’s connected to your network. If you’re emulating this without

hardware then obviously you can’t do this right now, but I’ll use the Q-SYS Configurator to find my

devices on the network and name them appropriately in my inventory properties. And don’t forget to do

your good housekeeping and give all your items a Location name, and particularly for your HDMI

components you may want to label them so you know what they represent. Mine will represent a

Rackmount PC, a Laptop, and a BluRay Player for the sources, and a Projector for the display.

Once everything is named and organized, you have a very important task for your NV-32-Hs. By default

they start as encoders, so be sure to look at the properties and change the “Device Type” to “Decoder”

for any devices you’re using in this manner. For me, I have one encoder and one decoder. Now, let’s

drag the most pertinent components of each item into our design so we can wire them together. Your

Generic HDMI devices only have a single Status/Control block, so we’ll grab each of these. The NV-32-Hs

have an “HDMI I/O Encoder” or “HDMI I/O Decoder” component, so drag these into your schematic as well.

You’ll notice some new pin types you might not have seen before. The HDMI pin obviously represents a

local HDMI port, while this other pin represents the encoded stream that goes across the network

between two endpoints. We’ll call this an AV port, since it contains both the audio and video in the

stream, and because the icon kind of looks like an A and a V that got fused together at their corners.

However, rest assured that the HDMI pins also carry both video and audio. You’ll notice that the

Decoders have an HDMI pin as well as audio pins, but these audio pins can be sent to the Core for

routing and processing, especially if you’re using local reinforcement. These audio pins automatically

follow the selected video, so there’s no need to write any extra control logic for that. But if you’re not

reinforcing this audio with other loudspeakers, you don’t need to wire these pins to your display

component at all. We’ll talk more about breaking audio away from the HDMI streams in a later video.

Before you wire anything together, I want to point out that if you open these components’

control panels right now, there is very little inside. In fact, the Decoder will even tell you that it’s useless

because no display is wired to it.

So, let’s wire them up! Wire your three HDMI sources to your encoder’s local HDMI inputs…

Don’t forget that these generic objects in the designer are just “dummy” blocks. If you

physically wire the BluRay Player into Port 1 but you label it a PC here in the software, you could get

very confused later when you try to troubleshoot.

To make the connection between the encoder and the decoder, you could wire these AV pins to

each other, but I’m going to recommend that you use signal tags for this.

It’s important to note as you do this, that on the Encoder side there is a direct one-to-one correlation of

the HDMI inputs to the AV streams. HDMI Input 1 will always go to AV output stream 1, HDMI input 2

will always go to AV output stream 2, and HDMI Input 3 will always go to AV output stream 3. However,

once they’re encoded on the network, you can deliver them to a decoder in any order you like.

Also, note that the Decoder has a default of three AV inputs, which in my small example is perfect. But if

you have lots of video streams on the network, don’t worry—you’re not limited to only three options.

Simply select the decoder and look at its properties, and adjust the “AV Input Count” field. This lets you

add a lot more options for your encoded AV sources to select from for your Decoder’s outputs.

Finally, wire your Decoder's HDMI outputs to your HDMI Display.

Once this is wired up, the last and most important controls you’ll want to know about are here inside

the Decoder’s control panel. These are the routing options for your displays. Most installers will simply

drag and drop these buttons into your UCI to give the user the ability to do simple switching. That’s

definitely the easiest route, however you can get pretty crafty here if you know a little Q-SYS Scripting.

By the way, you probably noticed that there are more input options than you probably expected. The

first three options, labeled Graphics 1-3, will display one of three static images you can upload using the

Core Manager, which are useful for displaying color test patterns, business logos, or standby screens.

You can also select any of the three local non-encoded HDMI sources of the Decoder unit, if you have

any sources located near this device. Finally, your encoded AV streams are listed at the end. If you’re

curious why they’re listed last even though they seem like the most commonly used buttons, I’ll tell you.

The graphics and local HDMI sources are fixed at three each, but you can customize the number of AV

streams. This means you can add new AV streams later without breaking any logic you’ve built for

activating the graphics or HDMI sources.

If you were following along with real hardware, congratulations—you currently have a

functioning design! Your media enters Q-SYS through an HDMI port on the encoder, and you can select

to display that content across the network with the decoder.

However, this was a very simple scenario. In the next videos we’ll get more complicated and show

multiple displays, different source types, and breaking away the audio out from your HDMI streams.

One final awesome feature I wanted to show you is you might have noticed a label called

“USB Bridging” in the NV-32-H’s properties panel.

In addition to managing HDMI video stream, NV Series doubles as an bridge for Q-SYS conference

camera video and audio for use with soft codec conferencing application like Microsoft Team, Zoom, GotoMeeting, etc.

This eliminates the need for an additional Q-SYS bridging endpoint device that needs to live at

the table … less cost and less hardware. 

If you want to learn more about how to do USB Audio and Camera video bridging, we have a

different tutorial for that. Alright! So take a quick break and move on whenever you’re ready.