The amount of audio, video, and lighting systems in today’s classrooms is ever-increasing. At Campbellsville University (CU), the new E. Bruce Heilman Welcome Center was designed with state-of-the-art AV equipment—a vast array in the building’s classrooms, lecture hall, and boardroom that still needed to be simple for faculty and staff to operate. It was particularly important that they not experience any roadblocks to getting classes, presentations, and meetings started quickly and easily. Long-time integrator for CU, JCA Media, knew RTI control would be able to bring simple control to the complex AV systems.

The new welcome center houses two classrooms, a lecture hall, and a boardroom. Each of these environments offers a distinctive AV design to fit the room use. The classrooms include an Epson short-throw projector, Da-Lite drop-down projection screen, Martin 8.1T ceiling speakers, Earthworks podium mics, and an AJA Rovocam streaming system. The 80-seat lecture hall is designed for intimate TED Talk-style presentations with an Epson short-throw projector, a 5.1 Danley Sound Labs PA system, a DMX lighting system, Barco ClickShare, and Shure microphones. In addition, the room is set up for the film department to screen films, using an Apple TV, laptop, or Denon Blu-Ray player. In the boardroom, the room is outfitted for seamless videoconferencing and features a 98-inch and two 86-inch NEC flat-panels, a Barco ClickShare wireless presentation system, two Panasonic PTZ cameras, and a Shure ceiling microphone system. All of the classrooms, lecture hall, boardroom, and building zone audio is ran by an Allen & Heath DM64 mixrack with a C1500 surface.

Four RTI XP-8v control processors integrate each room’s equipment for seamless, simple control from an RTI touchpanel, programmed and customized with RTI Integration Designer software, which speeds up design and programming with preconfigured pages, auto-generated macros, built-in driver library, reusable programming, and more. For this project, success began with the staff being able to turn on the room’s AV systems at the touch of a button.

In the classroom, the faculty member simply taps a button on an RTI touchpanel, which turns on the projector, lowers the screen, and defaults to the classroom desktop machine at the podium. There is also an HDMI input should the user want to plug in their laptop to present. The RTI user interface enables control of the Allen & Heath mixer, allowing the user to adjust the volume for two video inputs from the touchpanel.

In the lecture hall, when the staff member hits the On button on the RTI touchpanel, it turns on the projector and defaults to the Barco ClickShare video input for wireless BYOD support. Since the film department would be a big user of the room, JCA Media also programmed the system to give them control of the Apple TV and Blu-ray player from the touchpanel. This way they can stream films during classes without going into the control room to change the projector source and select the film.

The boardroom has a similar setup; when they tap the button on the room’s touchpanel to start the meeting, it turns on the displays and defaults to the Barco ClickShare. They also can select an HDMI input available at the front of the room. In addition to video control, it gives users audio control of the video inputs and quick access to a privacy function, which mutes the mics and turns off the camera sensor for confidential conversations.

“In this day and age with so much technology available, classroom AV can get complex super quick. Having RTI simplify the control and make it user friendly has been extremely beneficial for us and for our clientele,” said Alex Peake, Integration Specialist, JCA Media. “The first day with the system, we were on hand to show the faculty how to use it, but they didn’t require any instruction. It was intuitive and simple — just what they asked for.”

As the future of learning and technology evolves, it was also important the CU Welcome Center be ready to adapt and expand as needed.

“RTI and the XP-8v processor gives us expandability in each room,” said Peake. “Down the road we plan on adding shade control and other updates. The system is prepared to grow with the space as needed — without changing the customized user experience or adding a ton of programming time.”