The MIDI Association didn’t have booth at Infocomm 2024, but there were certainly a lot of MIDI Association members with booths at the show.
We sent Athan Billias, Exec Board member and he visited with members companies and met with a number of potential members as well.
There were two consistent themes to Infocomm – the move to AI tracking for cameras and the move to cloud based control and production.
Here is a quick roundup of Infocomm 2024 from The MIDI Association’s perspective.
Roland Pro AV Group
The Roland Pro AV Group introduced the V-80HD Direct Streaming Video Switcher. It’s the baby brother of the V160HD that The MIDI Association used to record all of the MIDI Association sessions at NAMM 2024!
Check out the short video below.
PTZOptics
PTZoptics was showing off Hive, a browser based platform for video production.
Connect. Control. Create.
PTZOptics Hive revolutionizes video production by merging professional-grade camera control with real-time switching and recording. This unified platform allows for seamless connection, control, and creation from anywhere.
Check out this short video interview with Paul from PTZOptics.
Connect, Control, Create…..Sounds like MIDI!
Did you know that PTZOptics was the first company to offer MIDI control of PTZ cameras.
The MIDI 2.0 Camera Control Profile
Geoff Robinson, lead developer at PTZoptics is also the chair of the Camera Control Profile.
Grace Murray Hopper said “The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from?”
That is certainly true of video standards. There is Sony Visca, PTZOptics Visca, ONVIF, UVC, a number of HTTP protocols, etc.
They are almost like DAW plugin formats (AAX, AU, VST3, Clap and VST3) in that they all have common features, but they control protocols are all slightly different.
Many switchers like the Roland switcher we used at NAMM have to embed all those protocols in their firmware.
So we came up with the idea that it would be cool to have a common mapping of MIDI commands to camera controls.
Check out this demo we put together of controlling PTZ cameras from Sony and PTZOptics over distance (PTZ cameras in New Zealand and Poland controlled by a MIDI keyboard in California!).
Canon
We caught up with an old friend from Yamaha days, Ronnie Foster who is an amazing B3 player. His trio was playing every hour at the Canon booth. Canon was showing off their new 8K camera and using both their own video switcher and a Roland video switcher at their booth.
Audinate
Audinate is a market leader in networking audio protocols and recently added cameras and AV to their networks. They introduced Dante Director- Remote Cloud-based Dante Device Management.
One Connection. Endless Possibilities.
Audinate
Dante replaces all audio and video connections with a computer network, effortlessly sending video or hundreds of channels of audio over slender Ethernet cables with perfect digital fidelity.
Adopted by hundreds of manufacturers in thousands of products, Dante is the de facto standard for modern AV connectivity.
We updated the Audinate team of the work that is being done in MIDI Transport Network Working Group. How would that relate to Audinate’s networks for Audio and Video?
First, because the new MIDI Network transport under development by The MIDI Association runs over Ethernet cables, you could run MIDI 2.0 data over the same wires as Dante AV is run over.
This is exactly how the newest Yamaha Piano Labs work. The Yamaha MLC200 is actually a MRX7-D rack mount audio mixer combined with MLA-200 Teacher and Student boxes that run Dante Lite (2 channels of Dante) and MIDI over the same Ethernet cable. So running Dante and MIDI 1.0 over the same cable is already being done by Yamaha. The new MIDI 2.0 Network transport under development will run UMP packets that can contain either MIDI 1.0 or MIDI 2.0.
The folks from Audinate were intrigued by the possibilties of MIDI 2.0 and asked us to arrange to send TSB member and Developer Relations Working Group chair Andrew Mee down to the home office of Audinate in Sydney, Australia (Andrew lives a few hours away) .
Analog Devices
Analog Devices is perhaps not a name many people associate with MIDI, but they have been a MIDI Association corporate member for many years.
Analog Devices’ A2BTM is a simple, flexible, and lightweight solution for audio connectivity, targeting automotive, consumer, smart building, and emerging applications including musical instruments. A2B is a high-bandwidth, bidirectional, digital audio bus that enables next-gen audio and acoustic applications.
Analog Devices has implemented MIDI 2.0 so now an A2B network can connect 32 channels of digital audio AND MIDI 2.0 over the same network.
The advantage of A2B is that it was designed for automobiles and can use very inexpensive twisted pair wires.
Analog Devices in planning on driving the creation of a MIDI Association A2B Special Interest Group to bring A2B solutions to the musical instrument market.
Some of the possible uses cases for A2B in music are guitar effects, edrums and music labs where you want to connect multiple small peripherals together in one local area network connected by very inexpensive cables.
Infocomm highlighted how much MIDI can continue to expand and grow and what a central place it already plays in the world of Audio and Video.