What’s new? Ferncast is introducing the Multi-Reporter Panorama Control widget (formerly known simply as “Balance Control”) which has been designed to improve the quality and the usability of its portable touchscreen-controlled audio codec fernReport.
How does it work? Thomas, developer at Ferncast explained: ‘Quite often, up to four people are sitting in front of a single reporter unit: the main reporter, co-commentators, two guests. Each of them may want to have an individual mix in terms of level and position on their headphones, more left or more right, either as a matter of taste or because the reporter needs to have a feed from the studio while the guests do not. Typically, the studio producer feed is set very far left. Current hardware devices available in the market are built with a variety of knobs for adjusting level and panorama to manage this requirement. However, having four people at the same time working on these knobs is impossible. Therefore, Ferncast created the Multi-Reporter Panorama Control feature.’
What are the benefits for the user? With this new widget the user can adjust his personal volume and position by simply pushing, holding and moving his avatar button. He can also adjust he volume and balance of up to 4 signals all at once in a single window. Each participant is represented by a photo or an avatar, which simplifies the operation. Every signal is represented by a dot in a 2-dimensional space into which the user can think themselves. Moving a dot closer to the user (i. e. down) increases the volume of that input, the reverse lowers the volume (as if the sound source had moved farther away). Likewise, moving the dot to the right or to the left changes the balance as if the sound source had changed places spatially. The different signals are displayed with the names of the associated PIPEs, which also means they can be named after the respective interview partners, colleagues or production team members. With this new update, the responsiveness of the widget is improved and the option to upload images and assign them to the signals as avatars is added, allowing even easier identification of the people involved in the production.
When will it be available? This update is expected to be released in Q1 2020.
