Designer 4
The latest version of the popular Pilot Designer now allows even complex user interfaces to be designed from scratch in minutes. New Wizards reduce common repetitive tasks to a single click, while new layout features allow professional and streamlined control panels to be created in minutes.
Pharos' centralised configuration system is tightly integrated with Designer 4, enabling any workstation to access any other users panel set for creating, editing and saving the configuration centrally. This provides a fast and fluid disaster recovery by enabling any connected pc to become a workstation in just a few seconds.
The Pilot Designer can be used to combine the control and status of any device in the infrastructure, reducing the distraction and keeping operators focused. This enables administrators to create any screen from small touchscreen control panels to a large system overview and monitoring displays for LCD screens.
UMD and Alias' management
Operators can assign custom names to any cross-point resource in the Pilot system. This is particular useful when dealing with incoming generic sources that can change frequently; assigning ad-hoc alias' suited to that days task can significantly simplify operations by increasing awareness of the content routed around any facility.
Virtual and physical monitor stack control
Pilot provides full control over traditional UMD system such as TSL, as well virtual monitor wall system such as those by Barco, Miranda and Evertz. Full TX and off-air monitoring setups can be instantly switched to suit any operational need. By controlling multiple layouts, multi-line UMD's, source salvos and more, an entire facility can be switch over at the press of a button.
Tie-line and device management
Tie-lines are handled transparently within Pilot, managing the allocation, prioritisation and releasing of tie-lines without any operator intervention. Usage and availability information can be displayed if is required. Re-entrant devices on the router can be managed and bypassed to create manual device processing chains.
Reminders and Task Scheduling
Pilot Reminders allow operators to set up text reminders and machine actions to help manage day to day, non critical yet still important tasks. These could include checking incoming lines are free, changing compliance tapes or triggering 'start of day' presets to reset entire studios.
Preset Management
Pilot Presets offers exhaustive capabilities for saving and recall any setting in the broadcast system. Settings can be saved for any combination of device seeting and routes, allows very complex MCR and studio setup to recalled instantly. Presets are
Router Logger
The Router Logger generates detailed information about device and crosspoint usage for billing systems containing names, durations and owners of routes that have occurred. This makes it ideal for charging customers for router or cross point usage, or analysing device and tie-line availability. The usage information is published in a variety of interchange formats include XML, CSV and Excel compatible files.
Device Bypass
When using device chains, Device Bypass enables you to bring devices in and out of the chain with a single click. This enables fast and simple removal of problem devices which can also be represented graphically. Other information such as device status and current settings can be displaed in the same place to give a very high density of status and error information in a clean and simple to use interface.
Touch screen options
Pilot offers numerous options designed for touch screen environments or for when it is impractical to have access to the keyboard and mouse. This includes a fully scalable and customisable interface, Kiosk modes, features to remove access to the underlying OS, on-screen keyboards and special touch sequences to restart the interface or computer.
3rd Party Application Integration
3rd party applications can be managed from the interface just like native Pilot control panels. They are simply switched to and accessed in the same way as normal Pilot other control panels, including when access to the underlying OS is restricted. 3rd party apps can also be monitored by the Pharos Sentinel to keep them running should they fail. Sentinel's alarm integration - see below - allow operators to be notified if 3rd party applications crash.
Alarm Integration
Pharos Exception fully integrates with Pilot and offers many options for the viewing and manipulation of alarms. Any alarm or group can be brought up to a Pilot panel and system overview screens can indicate alarms within the system. Exception offers many alarm notification options including audio and video notifications, e-mail, sending GPIs and running scripts when alarms are triggered. Any external raw, unprocessed or SNMP alarms can also be brought into Exception, processed, displayed on Pilot panels and forward to other systems via SNMP.