The San Francisco chapter’s January meeting was hosted by Euphonix in Palo Alto. VP of Engineering Steve Milne discussed the capabilities and design details of Euphonix’s latest product, the MC Intelligent Application Controller and the EuCon protocol. Afterwards, Ozzie Sutherland, Digital Product Specialist, gave demos in the System 5-MC tour truck to the 35 attendees.

Milne stated that the MC controller is the result of 2.5 years of work and is a response to the need for a computer workstation based audio/video production system. The MC is part of a family of 3 products: the stand-alone MC, the System 5-MC, and a soon-to-come System 5 main-line digital audio mixer.

Milne explained that the MC is a user interface which allows the operator to control anything that can be connected to it via Ethernet, including PCs or Macs running audio or video production applications. The control surface incorporates a keyboard, 2 mice incased in jog wheels, sliders, switches, a touchscreen display, and several banks of buttons. Most of the controls are user-configurable and can be customized for whatever task is needed, e.g. running Nuendo or Final Cut Pro. Sequences of keystrokes can also be programmed. To aid in the workflow, some buttons have 36x24 pixel displays which can be set to show GIF images or text. Other buttons can light up in different colors based on what functionality they represent. Except for its talkback feature, the MC does not process any audio.

Euphonix developed the EuCon protocol for controlling any studio equipment. EuCon is written in the object-oriented C++ programming language and it consists of 12 models of control surface objects such as the knob, slider, LED, mouse, etc. The basic functionality is provided to OEM engineers who can adapt these objects to drive their products.

Latency is deemed to be below user detectability. Controls such as knobs and faders (which have 1024 steps) are much slower than buttons and will not generate latency issues.

Ozzie Sutherland further elaborated on the hierarchy of banks and subbanks that are necessary for accommodating, for example, 1100 Nuendo commands. He mentioned that Hollywood producer John Ross is customizing an MC controller to run two Nuendo mix engines fed by a ProTools system. Ross is also programming the MC to control a projector, the room lighting system, speaker crossovers, the security system, as well as an RS422-based cappuccino machine.

Thomas Merklein