Noob Guide to Talley Lights?

Hey Team,

I'm new to the Talley light concept. We have just a few cameras and I wanted to price out costs. Switcher is an ATEM, but all the cameras are not BM. We had a send and receive SDI at each camera.

Can anyone give me a a link or a quick rundown on the hardware I would need. Thanks

Well there are not many options out there to have tally lights on SDI for different brand cameras.

What cameras do you have?
We have developed a RCU box that does CCU control over the cameras and also will do SDI tally.

But i guess if you want run cheap. You just need a few wireless tally lights direct connected to the Atem.

I've had pretty good luck with the Cerevo FlexTally system for smaller setups:
https://flextally.cerevo.com/en/

They are wireless but have a decent range (100m line of sight), so it works well for smaller venues and doesn't require an SDI return feed to the cameras. They operate in the 433MHz frequency band which doesn't seem to be that crowded (compared to say 2.4GHz), so I haven't had any significant interference issues.

The base station has an Ethernet connection and direct support for the ATEM protocol, so you just connect it to the same network as your ATEM switcher and tell the base station the IP address of the ATEM. Then you configure each light with the desired camera number, and they'll show both preview (green) and program (red) tally when appropriate.

The lights themselves have an internal battery, which runs for about 6-12 hours (I think this varies depending on the brightness configured for the LED), so it might be enough to get you through a day before recharging. They can also be powered by 5V Micro USB so it works with external USB power banks or even a USB port on a camera that provides power. You could probably also get a D-Tap to 5V USB power adapter if you wanted to power them from a larger camera battery.

Pricing is a little over $500 for a base station and set of 4 tally lights. You can also buy additional tally lights if needed (I think the system supports up to 16 tally lights).

You could probably do something with the SDI Arduino Shield to extract tally information from the SDI return feed, but if you have one Arduino Shield per camera, at 4 cameras you are already reaching the cost of the FlexTally system.

We built our own tally light system using Cat 5 cables run to all cameras with RJ45 jacks wired with 2 or 3 red LED lights. Painted them black and added a 'hot shoe' mount. All jacks are wired the same. The wiring at the GPI/Tally box is where you hook your (-) negative wire to the appropriate connection. Send (+) down each Cat 5 to each location. When the Tally connects the ground associated with the camera, the Tally lights up.

http://a.co/iJiffuT

Works great.

I don‘t know, if the tally parts of the old Skaarhoj-Arduino libraries work with actual ATEM firmware. If yes, this would be cheeper than the original BM tally box and you could design a all in one box based on Kevins cat5 system. By the way. Datavideo sells the original ITC-100 lights and there are circuit diagrams for „testing“ available on their website. With this information, you also can build a working tally....

Tally TD-3
https://www.datavideo.com/eu/product/TD-3

Manual with test circuit
http://resource.datavideo.com/Instructi ... 8B1_A6.pdf

I made wireless tally system. It works on 433MHz, range is about 30m and it have small energy consumption, so it have great battery life (from month to year depend on use) ..

http://tally.pytkin.sk/

Thank you all for the info. I'm going to try out the https://flextally.cerevo.com/en/