A familiar face at NAB
Years ago at NAB, a friend and I stopped at a booth where a Chinese manufacturer was showing a piece of video gear. The front panel looked so much like a Folsom ImagePRO that the two of us got to talking about the resemblance. Someone from the company overheard us and came over to set us straight.
The resemblance was deliberate, he explained. From his point of view, they hadn’t set out to copy an ImagePRO. They wanted an operator who knew how to use one to be able to walk up to their unit and get to work without opening a manual.
I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since then, especially when designing our own products at Azimuth Digital.
What an operator already knows
When you’ve spent years behind a piece of gear, you know more than which buttons to push. You know what you can change while a source is live. You know how to check the next cue without putting it on screen. That familiarity leaves you free to listen to the show caller while your hands get the next thing ready.
An upgrade can take that away surprisingly quickly. Say a new player starts loading a clip the moment you click its thumbnail. On your old system, that click just selected the clip. Now even browsing for the next video is something the crew needs to be trained on. The software may be faster, but the operator has to slow down until they can trust their instincts again.
Cue, preview, take
That’s the thinking behind Azimuth Player. If you’ve worked a preview/program switcher, you already know the rhythm we build around. Cue the clip. Check it in preview while the current content stays on the wall. When the show caller gives you the go, hit Take. We can keep improving what happens behind that button while preserving what it means to the person pressing it.
There are good reasons to change a workflow. When we do, I want the operator to gain something worth learning. And when someone sits down at Azimuth for the first time, cues up a clip, and says, “Okay, I know what to do from here,” that’s a win. It’s what the guy in that NAB booth was trying to tell us all those years ago.