Intercom audio levels between UMP and Atem TVS HD

Okee we are in a testing phase were we hook up the Ursa mini pro to an Atem TVS HD and trying to make good use of the intercom setup.

But we ran into a few points of level issues.

On the Atem TVS HD we have a nice audio control panel with settings for your headset monitoring.
In there there are 3 sliders and a knob.
Knob is total volume of the headset,

• Master (Amount of audio of the master audio mix)
• Talkback (Amount of audio of the intercom talkback)
• Sidetone (Amount of audio of your own microphone that you hear on your headset)

But now we have 2 different Aviation headsets and with both the camera operator says it is a bit soft.. He likes it to have more audio on his ears...
Can be solved by adding a mic volume to the Atem.

He can turn up his main volume but then his mic is gaining to much so he hears him self so loud..
And if he turns down the mic volume. We can not hear him at the Atem side..
Can be solved by adding a Sidetone control on the Ursa to adjust microphone feedback on his headset.

In my opnion the best way would be both of the above controls.
This would allow for fine tunning on both sides to compensate for different headsets on both sides..

Wow, you really like banging your head on the wall don't you...

No Greg, But there is a purpose of testing this.. Something like low budget production set for a client

If the function excist on the hardware and this will save then 2K spend on a Clearcom intercom and also running extra xlr lines for the clearcom.. Yes then i take a try to get this system up and running for them!

For my own company we use matrix intercom systems etc etc.. But that is way too fancy for a client that wants to run 3 ursa's on a Atem tvs hd.. And discovering that it just lacks that 1 thing to finetune the volume to make it use-able for the client to work like a system.

I get it...but until BMD changes their idea of intercom you are going to have issues.

I've stated this here before, but the real problem is the way the intercom is generated. currently it seems all talk signals are summed, and the total mix is fed to all headphones. this is just a terrible way to go about it.

the better way would be to generate a mix for each listen destination, that includes all other talk signals excluding its own, then adding a local mix level for sidetone. additionally, as you stated, a talk level adjustment for each user to compensate for different headset types would be beneficial as well. to me, this is the basic level that ANY production intercom should strive to attain.

I also wish they would settle on ONE type of headset connection across the product range. I hate having to have different headsets/adapters, just more stuff to complicate things.

and a final gripe, they have never made any provision to extend the intercom beyond director/cameras. what about graphics, recording, transmission, audio-how do these positions join into the show comms??

in the meantime, we have had great success with Mumble or Intercom for Android/IOS running on cheap android hardware. inexpensive, wireless, and great sound quality. you can run this standalone, or I have it interfaced to my RTS Zeus as well.