College of Design Calls on Pointmaker Annotation System

Over the past several years AV installations for campus auditoriums have become increasingly diverse with regard to the types of source media and displays required for instruction. And that has set up a few challenges for AV integrators in the education market. Like everyone else in the AV industry, they also have to migrate from analog to digital, and many have to be ready to provide both. A case in point comes from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning. Dan Dugan, the University’s equipment applications specialist, was recently tasked with designing and installing a diverse AV setup for the department’s most popular 200-seat auditorium. Here, faculty and graduates needed to display a variety of images, everything from a 4 x 6 printed photograph or a video segment on an historical piece of architecture, to the teacher’s personal laptop displaying the latest graphic arts software. While Dugan was at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) exhibition in 2011, he says he saw the Pointmaker on display and knew he had to have something like that for his installation. He tried it out. “It had great ease of use,” he says. “And it could draw on both Macintosh and PC, which no software option was doing.” He purchased the Pointmaker PVI-4300 HD video marker, and when he discovered he needed the next model up in order to annotate on protected images (HDCP) coming from a Blu-ray player, the company worked with him and his installers to make a firmware upgrade to a PVI-4600 HCDP annotation system. Now finalized and working smoothly, the installation begins with one of a selection of sources (such as the Blu-ray player or Macintosh laptop) connected to a switcher and then to the Pointmaker PVI-4600, which he is also using as a distribution amp due to its ability to split the incoming signal to three different display devices. “From the Pointmaker,” he says, “we output the combined signal to three devices – a local HP L2105tm 21.5-inch widescreen LCD touch screen monitor as a preview monitor and drawing device, a high resolution projector, and a capture device that records the video and annotated image for a podcast we’ll upload on the Internet later for students.” “Boeckeler was excellent in working with,” he says. “And the Pointmaker annotation system is very simple. A few days ago, I was going to show someone how to use it, but by the time I got to them, they were already using it on their own.” The device is being so well received by instructors and students that it’s being requested for use in other auditoriums at the university.