Building My New Lighting & Video Timecode Rack Step By Step

I've been using this timecode rack on my shows for the last couple of months and in this video I am NOT going to show you how to build it instead I'm gonna show you how to make this one alright everybody welcome to today's video where I am going to be showing you how to build your very own timecode rack now you might be asking Christiane why do you need to timecode racks and the reason is simple right now I'm working with a couple of different clients who have different show styles like how they actually play the show even though they're technically DJs one of them uses show control and there are multiple streams of timecode that I have to deal with it once and the other is a live show using Ableton so I decided instead of kind of making a one-size-fits-all to I decided to make two separate racks and so in this video I'm going to show you how to make my rack that is going to be more designed as a show control rack with two streams of timecode so let's just go over the different parts and pieces and the tools that's you'll have to use in order to follow along if you want to build one for yourself first thing most importantly the whole point of having a rack to begin with is having a consider it have a consolidated place where all of your complex connections of various little doodads can all happen in one place and the thing that really makes that easy is this this is a this is the actual patch panel and it is one that I specified and had made by Redco audio and they built it to my spec I sent them exactly what I wanted I sent them the text that I wanted printed on there and they built it as I wanted it so we'll just run through this real quick starting from left to right if you can see it we have power Khan in and through so way over on the left there power Khan in and through followed up by timecode in now to the immediate next right of that we have two timecode outs but I'm actually going to switch one of those around so that we have two separate timecode ends and then a single timecode out next to that here we have our USB 3.0 connector and this is reversible so on the back there is the the B side which will actually have to flip around because our host is on the other side in this case then we have our gigabit fiber connection this is a new trick optic on connector right here and it has a little dust cover if you don't know if you can see it in there but when you click on it it opens up and then next to that we have seven normal rj45 Ethernet ports so that's going to be our main main source of connecting everything together it's just going to be in one nice strip along the back of this rack so you don't have to worry about reaching in and connecting different things that's the whole point of having the rack in the first place so what is that patch panel going to be connecting well I've got it all laid out here and we will start from let's start from least interesting and then go up to most interesting least interesting thing on here is probably the UPS it's this CyberPower battery backup unit I've been kind of going back and forth on whether or not I actually want to put ups in my my timecode racks and I've just finally settled even though they're super heavy like it's just a big a big battery inside of here and I haven't been able to find a good solution for like either a lithium or small battery bank that has 120 volt output I haven't been able to find anything like that quite yet so if you know anything let me know down in the comments cuz I'd like to replace this with something later even if it is more expensive but this is just insurance you know even though it's super heavy and it's annoying to carry around it is insurance that specifically the networks which will never go down because the other stuff I'll talk about in here isn't really super critical for power because it's powered by USB a lot of the time a couple of these things but there is no real backup for the network switch and if the network goes down then that can really mess with a lot of stuff because we've got control signal of different protocols going back and forth so I just want to take that risk so it's like 200 bucks cheap insurance and it goes in the bottom because it's the heaviest next most interesting probably be this passive radial Mike level splitter that's just for our second or our first time code input actually just because I need to have a split to go into both this unit here which is our audio card and then hop out to an MA since if we have to timecode slots running we can only have one mini timecode input in the on PC session I'll explain a little bit more about that in probably a different video but I need this to split out to another output which would that go to the MA next most interesting would be the network switch this here is a 8 port gigabit p OE not p OE plus just regular p OE p OE on 8 ports and then it has those two SFP ports as well next most interesting I think is probably the audio card this is I connectivity audio force or audio 2/4 this is just a way of us getting the timecode input to resolume that is this thing's only job it has two XLR inputs right here and those guys are going to feed the resolume composition oh this is a tough one I think I think the next most interesting thing is going to be the myth for this is a Rosendahl myth for it's like a mini district Lizer and if you look on the back that becomes a little more evident we have a couple of XLR ports on the back here and those are simply and then the most important part is this USB port so this connects to a computer and then translates it to MIDI time code and then regenerates our output and then spits it back out so I can use this to not only go into ma but then spit this out into our audio card or excuse me our AR our audio interface and then finally the most interesting thing on this table some of you're probably wondering why I'm using a piece of ma one gear yeah that's right this is an MA one piece of hardware this is an N SP and it does actually have dmx outputs on the back and it grants 2048 parameters in ma 2 which is important and that's the whole reason we're using this this is annoyingly enough just a big dongle it's a network dongle you have to connect it in with the switch so that's another reason why we need that activated so this is going to go in the rack and allow us to control external software from on PC with the computer that is going to be sitting on top of this rack so this is literally just to unlock parameters and I guess if we needed to although I don't have anything on the patch panel set up to output from it we could in a pinch use this as dmx outputs like i said this is a very purpose-built rack it's for a very specific scenario and that scenario can also include the possibility of having no LD at all so the fact that I can take two timecode streams from show control I have parameters a whole forty-eight of them it means that I can control ground packages of static lights we can clone into basic club shows and the artist can have a time coded show at any club gig they play so that's kind of the goal of this since we're we're moving into a whole new world of of this industry so with that said Oh forgot I should have started off with this Rack shelf is - we rock shelf - which is another super interesting thing and then a couple of vented panels there's a lot of like little tiny things that are also in this stack of stuff over here including this big box of cables which we'll just use as we go through I'm not going to pull them all out and jump to you right now but if you are interested in seeing a full lineup of all the equipment that I am using to not only assemble this but like actually the tools as well so there'll be all the individual items on my website there'll be a link down below of this video's description so you know go check it out I'll probably have some affiliate links down there too so with that said let's go through the tools real quick you're gonna I don't know if you've noticed this here you're going to have to solder so all of your typical soldering tools including the iron itself little helping hands these guys are super handy for super handy for not burning yourself when you're soldering cables together soldering wires rosin paste flux this is just loop rows and paste flux and if I need to remove any any solder I use these little these little wicks I think I got all that stuff from fries when fry still exists and then the the solder as well in addition to that I've got some double-sided tape here this little 3m industrial double-sided tape this is for mounting things to that rack shelf particularly this guy because I don't have any mounting hardware for him good old classic six in one Phillips screwdriver of course I mean how can you do a project without having just a normal screwdriver so we've got that as well as a box cutter wire strippers and weathermen wave plus Leatherman Wave plus because apparently this is more wavy than regular wave I'm not sure why it's a plus but I really like this tool some other little random odds and ends you will need some wire terminal crimps because we're going to be chopping this big old tail off of our ups and you'll also need some zip ties and possibly some heat shrink too so I've got a little heat shrink kit if we need to use it we have that available as well so first things first let's clean up our area here just a little bit I'm gonna get rid of the things I don't immediately need and we'll kind of go through this step-by-step because I think that's what you all came here for right I'm gonna leave the patch panel off for quite a while that'll be one of the last things that actually gets screwed in because we need to have it loose so that we can maneuver it around while we are installing things so let's start with putting this ups in here ups again is just a big heavy battery and the sooner we get it out of the way sooner we can get to actually doing fun stuff so like I said I'm actually going to end up chopping off the grate I already scratched my table I have to refinish it oh man and it is generally a good idea to start with the heavier stuff on the bottom and then work your way up just so that you have less strain on the on the whole kit and when you're doing these racks crews don't tighten them all down until you have done all all four of them and then once I have it kind of roughed in I will flip it up so that it is not putting any more strain on the screw threads as I screw them in [Music] so there we have our first row done congratulations guys we did it but I do want to revisit this idea of chopping the tail off of our ups just because I think it's a little excessive to have this big ol thing flopping around in the air so if we take a look here I'm gonna use my other rack as a model of what I'm going to do on this one and I want to have my patch panel kind of directly in the center and for that to happen that means that our power input is going to have to reach here so if we make sure that we can tuck our power cable underneath our cable for the ups and then we mark off visually where we want to cut our cable so I'll just go ahead and cut that this is also a point where you have to decide whether you want your power column through to be linked to an output off of the battery or if you want to have an on battery backup now why would you want to have an on battery backup if you were to plug this into say an MA it's not healthy to plug a UPS into another UPS so that could cause potential long-term problems but for the most part I don't think I'm going to be using this to power an MA as well through the through port so I'm going to instead take a little bit of our newly cut cable and we'll repurpose this as an output from one of our battery backups we'll chop the other end of this off and put it on to our power con through our true one through throughput so we have our ground are neutral and are positive and all we need to do now is add crimp terminals so to strip back enough from each lead here I missed a little bit [Music] I'm sure to give them a nice nice firm crimping and of course always test make sure they're not going anywhere and there we have our three leads for getting power into our ups from the rack so let's tuck this away for the moment and work on making our through so again like I said this this we are going to cannibalize from the other part of that same cable that was connecting the UPS so again I'm just going to make sure that our length from our battery output to where our rack is actually going to be connected in the rear its long enough remember you can always you always cut the cable shorter cable stretcher has not been invented yet and don't throw this part away yet because I'm going to use it to create our actual input cables for the rack and the output so we'll do the same exact thing with our tail here [Music] more crimp connectors got a whole bag of them here it's funny I've had these sitting in in my closet for probably two years this was way back from when I was doing other types of repairs and I haven't used them and I thought so many times about throwing them away look who's laughing now didn't have to spend money on a whole bag of crimp terminals just for this project you know since this rack has surged or sorry since this UPS has surge outputs as well that aren't battery backup you could just swap this you could take the back panel off and swap this to a surge or a non surge connector and that would change the behavior of your power con through so there is our input and our output for our power and we are cruising right along doing pretty well I think again just gonna double check here oh yeah we're golden golden goose so I'm gonna kind of call an audible on this one because I haven't built this specific rack yet and let's throw the NSP n stands for network signal processor these were like the original n P use so this was like a ma one version of an NP u but we're not using ma one we can use it with ma two just fine looks pretty in there I like it so we'll throw a couple rack screws in there oh not a whole handful just need a few grab one grab two let's flip her up [Music] okay NSP is mounted ready to process some network signals okay next up let's get our little shelf here see how exactly we're gonna move a whole table here easy Christian it's gonna kind of mock it up and make sure that we have the clearance that I'm expecting what everything looks pretty good the one kind of wild card is gonna be this I'm not exactly sure where we're gonna fit it or if I'm gonna mount it exactly or if I'm just gonna kind of throw it in there and wedge it in between something we shall see so I want to kind of get a feel for where I can put this exactly I kind of want to put it where my dmx outputs would be but since i'm not using them that might be a convenient spot for the DI or sorry it's not a DI it is a splitter which i don't even know they made these I've only used only use their D eyes so we got to think here for a second how do we want to arrange everything on this tray put our patch panel to the side in my other timecode rack it worked pretty well to have the eye connect up against the right hand side and then this time the myth will have to be in kind of maybe no I do want the myth to be facing forward so I can read everything on it properly there is a little bit of a concern for me about I don't know if you can see it I'll show you on this camera so I am a little concerned about these buttons getting pushed by the ledge push me to the ledge so I will I'm sorry I'll probably just double stick this tape to the side so that there's enough of a gap where you can still physically access the buttons this is kind of cool because it kind of protects them from being hit accidentally so I like that positioning and then we also have to consider our big-boy switch you cannot forget the switch in the other rack that I built there is actually room above the top the top unit of space and I ended up just tossing tossing the switch here which worked actually really well I might here I might do this even might even throw it here I hate how that connects like that it just kind of falls down it might double stick tape it here and then use this little tunnel right here for all of the XLR connections that have to come through the front because keep in mind all of these rj45 ports need to connect to that back patch panel so I'm gonna toss this in here as it sits see if I see any immediate clearance issues shouldn't be though a nice thing about the myth is that it's USB powered but the bad thing about that is that now we have to put a USB hub inside I also have to make sure I have enough physical room inside of here so I might end way I'm using this I don't actually need to power this the bus will provide enough power for the myth and the audio card so I don't think I will need this little amazonbasics hub but I sorry I won't need the power adapter for it so we'll count on not using this for now but we still need to get power to or switch which I think will fit so I'm going to take this and go the other way which worked in my last rack but for some reason Oh up there is you just hear that hear that tiny little pop so the switch is now mounted in here for the most part actually so I could really yeah this will work and the front lip prevents it from being pushed forward you can't this is a purely a feel thing I'm sorry I can't really show you but dang this thing is heavy see if I can turn it around here so the switch is wedged up here above the audio interface so I think that'll work so let's yank this out secure these to the shelf mount the shelf and go on with our lives how about that double stick life this stuff is wickedly strong I'm just gonna score the backside here so I don't actually cut the metal and then same on the other strip two strips is seriously more than enough like this stuff does not come off I had to spend probably a whole 15 minutes trying to unmount one of the ER not one of these but and I connect from the bottom of my desk so it was hanging upside down and I had to use all sorts of tricks to get it undone I got to be careful because I've already used half of that roll on the other rack and I have half left so if I mess up I've only got about one strips worth of mess up here that I can afford before I have to be a brave soul and go to Lowe's or Home Depot some other hardware store take this guy oh I kind of need this for reference I guess so let's just go ahead and but him up against the side now the other side I'm actually going to pry these little feet off so we can have a more level adhesion surface when I do these strips because right now these feet these four little rubber feet are the only things those the only surface area that's contacting I don't want that so we'll toss those and run a strip along the edge here because that's the most raised part which is kind of annoying I wish it had a really flat flat bottom but it alas it does not and that's just so that the front strain relief doesn't stick out too far to the beat of stayin alive at I knew CPR you know I want to configure our network switch a little bit I mentioned before that it has to fiber SFP module ports so these right here that's where the fiber transceivers connect and we're going to hook those up using some fancy blue cables now just like with cat5 and cafe and cat6 there are different standards for everything this particular standard that I'm using is om3 which is indicated by this blue cable nice little cyan color and it's just a it's like a grade of cable it's it's how how fast it can transmit and how far it can transmit so I picked om3 because I'm typically in like 100 meter scenarios and any of the fiber connections that are going to be coming to the rack are going to be around that length and this is a multimode as well if you don't know a whole lot about fiber join the club because I don't really either I just know enough to get it all configured and set up it's there's no difference in a protocol you're still sending the same Ethernet protocols you're just sending it over a tube of glass or tubes of glass instead of copper so it just depends on your application but I do have these oops these little SFP modules and again these are the same story right you need to have the appropriate one the reason why these are separate is because there are so many different use cases it's not like with rj45 it's just it works with everything these are specific to the form factor and your needs for transmission so I've got two of these transceivers transceiver because it both receives and transmits come on be smarter than the sliding box Christian so we've got our two transceivers here and those are going to you see if I can show you here those are just going to go into our network switch I'm not going to put the om3 fiber-optic cable in there yet I don't know if it's still technically called a cable just fiber fiber optic I think it's people still call it cable though so remove our little safety covers here prevent dust from getting in and we'll go ahead and that's satisfying do the same with the other one oh yeah now we're talking so we've got our SFP my gosh oh so we've got so we've got our SFPs connected here next up I want to mount this switch but I want to again check our clearances on everything so don't get too far and then have to undo stuff that is not fun not fun at all get somewhere okay so if I put that exactly where it was directly in the centre I think I'll have enough room let me mock it up here you guys again won't be able to see this so I'm sorry but maybe at this point I guess I could I don't want to screw it in just yet sorry I don't I keep going back and forth but building these little compact racks is not yeah not something you can just plan out completely you have to kind of get in with it and experiment a little bit check what clearance on the other side here because there is a unfortunately on these switches and the most annoying thing about these switches is the power is on the opposite side of the of the unit got my other om3 here where are you there you are that other one was missing it's dust-cover it's kind of concerning toss that toss that and the one thing I didn't really like about my other rack is it was kind of hard to see the indicator lights on the switch but I'm just marking out where it should sit okay I'm just kind of feeling it with my fingers where I want to end up take him back out oh my goodness this is like literally the last strip that's literally how close we are to not being able to do this job and I would have had to wait until tomorrow and I've been promising that I was gonna upload this video on Friday after delaying this video for so long that would have been rough I hope I don't need that stick tape anymore can figure something else out if I need to so let's take a second to think about our cable routing here one of these maybe I can actually fit this here yeah look at that guys you can fit the if I had any more dental stick tape I could fit the di here and I think that would maybe work I might have enough clearance to to work with that that would be cool I'm gonna aim for that and then we'll see if we can actually make this work so our time code a if I think through this mentally I want time code a to always be coming out of our rows and Dom if so this guy is going to plug in to our LTC out oh my gosh it's just barely not enough I don't think I can make it work it's very very tight back here so we have to have I wonder if I could just move the myth over by that much but I already double taped it down oh my gosh here we go I wonder if we could do that I'm not gonna worry too much about the DI right now we'll move on from that but we for sure need to connect to the output of the myth and then this myth needs an input using another XLR cable I'll grab another XLR and the myth is going to get its input from let's write the patch panel so the patch panel if I just mock this up here is going to be sitting somewhere in here these can stay in this general vicinity and so this I'm going to have to snip do a little snip job here and then connect it to our input our timecode input with solder solder so that's one job we need to do I'm gonna go ahead and mock it up and then cut where I need to cut let's see let's do uh yep that should be the only one I need to cut right now I'm going to need to cut right around right around here and then I'm also going to need leave us in our boneyard pile over here I'm also going to need to swap out my second XLR port I realized after ordering that port that I needed to have a second female connector on the back instead of two males I just didn't think through it all the way when I built the rack online and I just kind of shipped it and if you noticed or not but I do have some writing on here that indicates that you can only plug this in 220 volt because a lot of people use powercon for 208 or 240 volts in other countries and if this was to get plugged into 208 it would fry the UPS would not be good so I'm gonna keep this little plate just so that I can remember remember where it is and we will toss this one on and screw it back in and then we'll turn on our soldering station you believe they trust me with the soldering iron I still don't believe it okay so now technically we have to timecode ends and then one timecode out this is supposed to send to another MA station another thing I need to do while we are on this panel is switch out this USB 3.0 let's swap it around to the other side which takes really no time at all but I think I might have to swap over to my micro precision kit nope I can do it right here hey again these are purposefully made so that you can swap them around and I used USB 3.0 just again to future-proof a little bit and if I wanted to put storage inside of it like if I wanted to put an SSD to store content on it then I could do that a little more easily and make it a little more discreet of a package so see it separates like this and then you just flip it around and screw it back in there is one tool or I guess material that I'm missing from this build and I spent like 30 minutes trying to find it in my apartment it's room temperature vulcanizing silicon silicon silicon I usually use that on all these type of screw connectors on the backside just so that they don't get vibrated out but I couldn't find it so I'm not gonna use it this time but usually I do so I'm sorry sue me unsubscribe and next up while I am back here I might as well tin tin the cups as they say so all these little holes for solder in here those are the cups and we will need to fill them up with some solder to promote adhesion oh my gosh can I please just like find something to set this on that's normal ish yes No it's a silly there we go alright so we're gonna flip the soldering iron on remember be safe when using soldering irons if you are not if you're not used to using them you should find someone who is good at soldering and ask if they will supervise you or show you how to do it I'm not an expert I'm again one of those self-taught YouTube guys so this could be dangerous [Music] again you should not be doing this without proper ventilation which I obviously totally have this will get you worse than coronavirus that's for sure well I had to fast forward there a bit because I didn't want this to be a soldering tutorial but we are all soldered up we've got our our three tails connected here and heat shrunk I actually had to go to the other room because I'm pretty sure I would have blown the circuit breaker for my little office here if I would have plugged in the 1300 watt dryer with a heat gun with all the lights in here so we've got our XLR is connected moving on down the line we will go ahead and connect our om3 fiber on one end the thing about these new trick Oh wrong way so the thing about these little new trick quad Opticon connectors on the back side they're passed through but you have to remove you have to remove all of the extra plastic around the connectors for it to work properly so go ahead and do that it's a little sketchy at first because you can't quite tell where they pop out of but they do pop out of these little clips and you just have to be careful to not manhandle the fiber too hard so there that's one end off and I'll go ahead and prepare our other side in the same way we don't have we only have to do this on the side with the this is where you have to really be careful because that protective cover on this one got taken off I'm not sure how that happened that's the thing is you have to be very careful with allowing dust into your optical system because it's a lot harder to troubleshoot a bad optical cable as it can be very intermittent and cause all sorts of weird problems so you need to just make sure that you don't ever have them to begin with so I'll remove our little plastic dust covers make sure we got the right sides so they do have to be paired correctly and then these guys just like everything else kind of click in click click and you should see you should hear that click and you should see that they have a little bit of springiness to them and I'll flip this around we'll do the same thing on the other side again just double checking we have white on the left this time remove our dust covers protect your caps and there we go there is our quad multimode optical connector and so then that will go to our SFPs so there we have our three XLR tails and our fiber optic now let's go ahead and connect our cat6 cable I ended up using the neutrik pass-throughs instead of the punch down connectors I accidentally ordered the punch down connectors for my last patch panel and that was not very fun to strip back a bunch of these and do this manually I don't think I would ever recommend you not just doing the pass through option because this is just so much easier and there we have our seven ports and we can set our soldering stuff aside as well because we are all wrapped up with that thankfully I'll use our last little bit of double stick tape for this tiny little amazonbasics USB 3.0 port or kind of keep calling it a port it is not a port it has ports on it because it is a hub alright stick our little amazonbasics hub in here and we've pretty much got a layout going in this shelf and then I just need to make sure that our tale for a USB is long enough to reach to our patch panel which it is it should be just long enough in fact like literally just long enough it looks great I wish I would have had the foresight to get some shorter USB a 2b also known by boomers across the country as a printer cable we should have gotten something less than six feet but we're sitting here with it I don't really want to make my own so what I'll do is I'll probably just end up zip tying these into a little bundle and then we've got another one for our audio interface get these excel arse out of the way for just a moment and then we can do some cable management it would be a lot more convenient if I had those shorter cables now but zip tie this together zap strap it get all shove a DJ style fantastic so we've got our USB hub connecting our USB devices now we just need to worry about getting power to our switch which unfortunately has this big ugly brick and an IEC cable so like I said before the power for the net year switch it's on the wrong side as far as I'm concerned that's okay so we're finally getting to a point where I feel comfortable I feel comfortable placing the shelf into the rack so we'll go ahead and do that clean up my work area just a little bit just have to be a little bit delicate with how I route this because I want to be sure to not put hardly any strain on that goodness I might have to might have to do the old switcheroo here I think we have to take out just because the way I've did this switch it won't clear the plastic panel front fascia but it will fit in there guys have to take out the NSP temporarily so we'll yank out the NSP [Music] the yank out said NSP and I'm going to drop this shelf in in the bottom and then raise it up so we'll pretend this is going in this way route our power brick tell him that he's going in the middle slot it's pretty nice of us huh nice and cozy middle slot then wouldn't you know pull a fast one this way I can slide it up I know you can't see this but I'll show you in due time just hang out chill out relax geez lookee there okay we're really getting somewhere now I'm a I'm pretty satisfied with how everything is shaping up so far I just want to make sure that I have enough room on the top and it looks like what happened was there was an XLR that snuck up on top of the switch and it was kind of giving it some grief so I think if I just move this out of the way yes there we go so now I have should have a couple loose XL ARS in here yep there so there's our timecode a input for resolume for our eye connectivity interface and back here I have our USB cable right there and that's gonna land perfectly right where that's gonna land perfectly where the rack IO panel comes in settle and there this will plug into here just like that this is shaping up to be a pretty cool little kit the only thing I'm upset about is I kind of visualize this wrong in my head with the patch panel when I was tracing it out in my mind it'll still be fine I just forgot that I was thinking about putting the switch on this side because wouldn't you know it all of my rj45 s are on the right and I just had it flipped in my head it'll still be fine it's not like a an issue or anything it just would have looked a little cleaner okay so around the back here around the outside we got to do a little bit of work on our power situation remember we still have to power the switch in fact let's just lay out everything that we need to power get it plugged in to where it needs to be plugged into aka our battery backup unit it looks like I need an extra IEC because I forgot that my NSP needs one all right we are back with a freshly pilfered IEC cable that I borrowed from another piece of gear I couldn't find one laying around but an IEC is an IEC right so we'll get power into our NSP from our IEC you know me the one thing I will do that I forgot about until I started making this video today is in my other timecode rack I use locking IEC cables just cuz it's one less thing to vibrate loose and I forgot to grab some at the shop the last time I was there I've got like a whole pile of them that I used with the DJ equipment but I just forgot to bring it so I'm using regular IEC s for now but I am gonna open this back up and you know do the RTV silicone thing and swap out the IEC s for locking ones just in case you were curious I know you were so we are sitting pretty we got a whole extra battery slot available if we need it I don't think we will though so here's our in and our out that'll land pretty perfectly right where I need it to now we just need to what do I want to do right now we could put oh you know what I totally forgot the NSP needs its own link into the switch because it's not an external piece of gear I just totally forgot about it so I'm going to use up that seventh spot to just do a quick little loop over to the finally the last port of the switch so that'll be our number seven or excuse me number eight so that's golden let's figure out where we can place our little splitter here I think with any luck we will be able to just set it inside like that and if you can see in there I think we'll be able to just set it in between this shelf and then the back panel and we'll see actually no that will not fit there we're gonna have to figure out something a little more a little more creative than that maybe along the bottom row here and then it'll be wedged in between let's mock up the let's mock up the rear i/o for a minute here this is the the tedious part [Applause] I could totally switch up this rack I might end up putting this i/o on the top the top slot the reason it worked and the other one is because the de stripper was a little longer and I needed to have it in that orientation but we might be able to this might be a little bit cleaner to have this timecode rack have the i/o on the top I don't like how it looks exactly but I think it'll buy us some space that we can use for that yeah it'll buy us some space and I think I think that'll be the winning move in the long run so I'm going to loosely screw this in and see if we can get it working with that splitter I'm also going to plug in my fiber at this point just so that they're not flailing around again those are going into the SFP modules out of the switch are good a little click there same click as before leave our XLR is dangling for a second and I'm actually just gonna pick you guys up show you what we got going on here oh excuse me so our om3 fiber is connected into our SFP modules on the switch right down yonder right right there and I am going to go ahead and route all of these cat6 cables into the switch all right we have made some significant progress here still gonna take a little finagling but putting the i/o on the very top rack space is going to be the move for sure so I'll get a little further with routing all these wires and be back in a sec I am I'm happy with how everything's gonna fit with this in the top rack space now I'm going to wire up our power and we'll give it a little test and see where it sits right so I'm just wiring up the power come on it through setup and good old green to ground white to neutral and black to hots for North America anyways then we'll do the same thing on our power inputs green to ground and we'll do white neutral and black to our hot leg hot hot hot leg make sure those suckers are on there good so when we're all done it'll look something like this got everything except for the USB connected and the power is run to the true cons so let's let's box our up here look at that she fits like a treat and surprisingly or maybe not surprisingly I seem to be a 1 XLR cable short for making my my jump between the splitter and the front panel for the audio input for timecode slot 2 so I'm going to figured that out shouldn't be too much of a problem so now I have loosely okay we are almost there I have loosely placed pretty much everything in here only 2 screws are holding this top panel in for the moment because I will need to get back in through the front in a little bit but not for not for too long so it should be good for a second here shove these cables back in here I mean a neatly secure them I need to find an XLR real quick just a tiny one be right back well I made a lot more progress I took a little bit of time to clean things up before I came back to you to show you everything here we're just about ready to power this thing on for the first time I still haven't powered it on but everything is wired up and I wanted to walk you through kind of the signal flow of how I designed this in my head I didn't really design it on paper or anything like that I was just like okay I need this this this so let's let's walk through that real quick so if I flip this guy around we can see here that on our left side here we have our power con true one input that input is feeding power to our ups the uninterruptible power supply which is then conditioning the power and then giving it a battery backup and then sending power to out of here and here to the network switch that is connected to all of these ports plus the NSP and the UPS is also powering the NSP which is in the middle back there continuing on to our timecode let's talk about this for a second we have two timecode layers like left and right or 1 & 2 whatever you want to call them so number one timecode number one comes into here it then goes directly to the Rosendahl myth the myth four over here so the myth four over here has an LTC output as well so it buffers it and then relays it that output then goes over into input one or the left input left channel whatever you want to say on the I connect and then that goes to resolume so the computer will sit on top here and then resolume and that's it so as soon as that gets sent into resolume the signal ends there for MA on PC that myth is connected via USB through that little hub that we installed in there and the myth is also translating that timecode slot into MIDI but we still need one more time' code slot for ma so back around on the back again our second XLR timecode is going into this splitter out of this splitter it's coming back out of this guy here so it's coming in here into the splitter one of the splitter outputs is then coming back out here and this will then go into the symptom of an MA or a command wing anything that has a timecode receptacle and the other side of the splitter this has to output well the splitter itself has three outputs but I'm using two of them the second output that I'm using then goes back over to our good friend well yeah back over to our good friend the I connect and and then that's where the signal ends and resolume gets its second layer of timecode there so I think that's about it I think now we can power it on so let's try to do that I'm gonna wait to button this all up I'm not gonna put the cables in and put the last put the finishing touches on it until I know for certain that it works so we've got our powercon input do you hear that no of course you don't because we have to turn on our ups are you guys ready wait let's count down together 3 2 sounds like it works let's flip on the NSP and if you guys can see that it's working so the NSP is booting up and now let's get a laptop and test it out ok so it sounds like empty is working just fine I pulled up show control here and I'm going to use this as our timecode source by taking a 3.5 mm out of our trusty headphone jack and now whoops I'm going to take our left and right XLR s so we'll just plug the other end of that 3.5 into a and B ignore the improper label fix that eventually I swear then we take our handy USB 3.0 a 2 B remember this is just the regular 3.0 printer cable style and that will plug in directly to our razor blade which is running resolume so let's pop over here and we see that the MIFF turned on just fine let's pull up resolume and I'm going to just play timecode look at that so we've got timecode operating it is sending to the myth the myth is translating it and let's see if we can grab it in on PC okay look at that we have timecode in on PC as well on the same slot so that's good for our left side right so let's check in here and we can see that you guys can't see it maybe I'll be able to i can't zoom anymore I don't think but it is it's showing-up in resolume just fine so a is showing up now let's check for B and B is showing up as well so B is no longer on the myth NIF is only going to show a timecode is running and you can see if I hit pause if I hit pause timecode pauses and if I hit play again timecode plays again and this is true if I switch over to layer a as well I can't play them both simultaneously I don't think although maybe I can I can so a is coming into here B is going into B and resolume is receiving both at the same time so if I copy this and do the same thing and trigger the clip and bring the opacity up to change our offset to zero we have both of them that is so cool you can see the opacity of the top layer right so there's our a and there's our B both running at the same time in a three you rack that you can take to any show and it has parameters we didn't even check that part yet let's check the parameters so if I go into MA let me save our advanced output first let's see if we can pull up this node shouldn't be under nodes ad present maybe okay I got to configure it a little bit give me a second all I'll configure the node and I'll be right back oh you guys are gonna laugh I was so excited about it all working on the first try but I forgot to just plug in an Ethernet cable to the computer and the switch in the back so I connected one to the back let's see here connect our Ethernet cable to the razor and then let's see if our in SP a there it is so we got a green indicator meaning that it is in session we have nothing else connected right we just got this laptop scared of everything no consoles delete delete delete and if I go to nodes here I'll grab I'll grab the other camera to show you so here we can see that I only have a laptop no consoles no NP you and get rid of that random 3d DMX nodes anos if I go to patch only oh there we go it's 2048 yeah so there's our available 2048 parameters it's funny I planned this whole Rack build out in my head and everything seemed to work when I thought about it but it's cool to see that on the first try no less everything is talking and working beautifully it seems well I wish I could say that we are 100% finished but we still have to add the panels on the back and add some zip ties to organize some cabling and then we can call it a day [Music] [Music] thank you guys so much for sticking around for my video I put a lot of work into this one and I truly hope you enjoyed it these are two completely different systems that are made for their own type of show the one on the left here is designed more for live shows that have just one stripe of simp t-that runs for the duration of the show whereas this one is kind of more meant to be for DJ sets using show control and it's meant to be something that I can just send off with an artist and their management and the show just runs they both have their pluses and their minuses and I learned a whole lot building both of them but I'm kind of pooped out on this video probably gonna make another video talking about all the things I learned about building both of these things in the whole process behind it but I hope you enjoyed this one in the meantime thank you so much for watching make sure to LIKE favorite and subscribe to stay tuned for more videos I have a way more regular schedule now I don't know if you noticed or not but you can get my schedule while all this kovetz stuff is going down at christian - jackson.com slash live where you can see my livestream schedule and maybe suggest some ideas for future videos like this hope you guys are having an awesome day stay safe wash those hands and I will see you in the next video thanks you

Channel: Christian Jackson

Views: 42,939

Keywords: MA2, Event Production, Lighting Design, Timecode, rack, SKB, MA lighting, NSP, Tutorial, Build vlog, How To, showkontrol, DJ, VJ, festival, sony, A7III

Id: hyRfUiNpU58

Length: 79min 51sec (4791 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020