Video routers often sit at the core of a flexible video setup in a DIT cart. Video routers have multiple input and output ports and allow to easily switch the connections between these ports.
LiveGrade Pro comes with the ability to control a video router and to apply pre-defined configurations of connections – either manually or on certain events such as switching slots in LiveGrade Pro’s user interface.
You need to have a working network connection between the computer running LiveGrade Pro and the video router. For setting up the network, please refer to the manual of your video router.
Managing Video Routing Configurations
From the main menu, you open the Video Routing Configurations window by choosing “Video Routings -> Manage Configurations…” from the “LiveGrade Pro” menu.
Video Routing Configurations panel
The Video Routing Configurations window shows a list of your configured configurations, and options to edit, duplicate, and delete a selected configuration. You can also test the selected configuration by clicking the “Apply Configuration…” button.
You can rename a configuration by double-clicking the entry in the list.
Creating a new video routing configuration
By clicking the “New Configuration…” or choosing “Video Routings -> New Configuration…” from the “LiveGrade Pro” menu, you open the dialog for creating a new video routing configuration.
In order to be able to create connections between in and out ports of your router, you need to connect to the router first. This is needed, so that LiveGrade Pro can fetch a list of ports and their names from the router.
Enter the IP address of your router and click the “Fetch IN/OUT Information” button. If the router’s information has been fetched successfully, the controls below the connection table get enabled and you can start create new connections.
Editing a video routing configuration
Click the “+” button to create a new connection and “-“ to remove the selected connection.
When clicking the “+” button below the connection table, you can choose which input (IN) port should be connected to which output (OUT) port. Choose the ports according to your setup and click “Add”. You can edit the connection at any time by double-clicking the connection.
Only connections of shown OUTs will be changed when the routing configuration is applied. All other output ports of your router will remain unchanged when applying this configuration.
You can test your current configuration by clicking the “Apply Configuration” button. The configuration will become active in the connected video router.
You can sort the connection table by IN our OUT ports, and you can choose if the selected column is sorted by name or port number with the “Sort Criteria” controls below the table.
When clicking “Load All Connections…” you can fill the connection table with the current, complete routing configuration of your video router. This can be useful as a starting point for complex routing configurations with lots of connections.
When clicking “Save…”, you will be prompted a name for the video routing configuration, and the configuration appears in the list of configurations in the Video Routing Configurations window.
Applying video routing configurations via the menu and keyboard shortcuts
Once a video routing configuration is saved, it will also appear in the “LiveGrade Pro -> Video Routings” submenu. When choosing one of the stored configurations in the menu, the configuration gets applied to the connected router.
You can assign keyboard shortcuts to the menu entries for individual video routing configurations with the Keyboard Shortcuts Manager. This allows you to easily switch between video routing configurations with keyboard shortcuts.
See the article about the Keyboard Shortcuts Manager for more information.
Automating video routing configurations
You can automate video routing configurations by using them as actions in the Automation Manager. This allows you to for example change the routing configuration when switching slots.
See the article about the Automation Manager for more information.
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