Remote and in-building commentary on the SYGNAL intercom matrix. Each commentator joins from a browser link and gets MIC ON, COUGH, talk keys, a true on-air tally and a personal headphone mix. Production admits guests from a green room and records every voice.
The position page is laid out like a hardware commentary unit: Cue and Air, Mic, talk and listen keys, chat. MIC ON latches the mic to air. COUGH cuts it while held. A talk key takes the mic off air for as long as it is held. The tally reads the air chain, so it shows what is on air, not which key is lit.
Each position is a port on the SYGNAL intercom matrix. Five pages run it: Sessions, Templates, Position, Workspace and Listen.
One link per position. It opens in a browser, with nothing to install. A link admits anyone who holds it as that position’s guest, or one named user who signs in. Turn a link off, or issue a new URL if it leaks: the old one stops working and its guest is signed out.
A guest runs a device check — camera, mic level, speaker test tone, network — and waits. Production talks to them, pre-hears them, then chooses Admit or Not yet. Nothing from a guest reaches air before Admit.
Each commentator sets their own balance: Programme, Own voice, Master and a level for every other person. The programme feed never carries the session’s own commentary. IFB runs as duck, interrupt or mix on top.
Football, language voice-over and podcast templates are built in; edit them or make your own. A schedule starts and stops a session on its own, once, daily or weekly. Run a session per language side by side. Licensed by concurrent sessions.
A booth on the unit’s own audio I/O — Dante, AES67 or USB — sits in the same session as the remote guests. Bind a SYGNAL control surface to a position for MIC ON, COUGH and TALK keys with lamps that follow the air state. The control interface is documented for GPIO boxes and third-party commentary units.
Production starts a countdown to one position or to all of them, and cues a position with a CUE lamp. Session chat carries direct messages and quick replies. A position can show a prompter, with scroll control set per link: production, the commentator, or both.
Record a session as one multitrack WAV, or as a file per person. Each commentator has a Raw track, taken before processing, and a Clean track, taken after processing and the air gate, beside the Full mix and the commentary Stem. On stop, a Broadcast WAV stem per commentator is written to the session folder. With the double-ender on, each guest’s browser also records its own camera and mic locally and uploads the files during and after the session.
The Workspace page is where the session is run. The rest of the system sees a session as ordinary sources.
A running session publishes its Full mix, its commentary Stem and each commentator’s Raw and Clean as router sources, named after the session and its language.
A position that is allowed a camera becomes a vision mixer source for as long as the session runs. Voice activity from the air chain drives speaker-follow in the multiview.
Each remote commentator’s round trip and voice lag are measured and reported, with opt-in compensation on the full mix. A listener link lets a client or rights holder hear the air output, with or without off-air talk.
Book a walkthrough with the engineers who built it.
