PROJECTS
YARRA CITY COUNCIL CHAMBERS
Designing a council chamber AV system is tricky enough without having to figure out how to take it ‘on the road’. Converged Technology’s original design spec was for Yarra City Council meetings in its Richmond town hall site. Admittedly it wasn’t a permanent install – it had to be wheeled into its multipurpose function space – but it wasn’t until after the design was complete did the council break the news: they were going to meet in the Fitzroy town hall as well. “It was quite a variation,” noted Converged Technology boss, James Frost, with a healthy sprinkle of understatement.
Reprinted with permission from AV.Technology (07 November 2025)
Fitzroy town hall is a heritage site and a magnificent (if drafty) location. Heritage concerns caused a large change to the scope, necessitating a move to 65-inch displays on trolleys rather than installing one large projection screen.
The AV system had to check all the usual council chamber boxes – for the nine councillors (including the chair) to hear and be heard in the room; for contributing council staff to hear and be heard; for the public gallery to hear proceedings along with anyone making a public submissions to hear and be heard; for all on site to see relevant content; for councillors off site to play an active role in the meeting via Teams; and for the live stream to provide the public with high quality audio, video and meeting content. Given the system was to be set up and torn down every meeting, the AV systems had to be easy to put together without the need for expensive specialised help. Finally, with the council meeting convening in the Fitzroy town hall, as well as Richmond, the system had to be robust and be packed down in flight cases for transport between sites.
ROAD READY
Converged Technology has been on an iterative journey, determining how best to crack the council chamber nut. There are some preferred technology platforms – Bosch Dicentis for the discussion system, Lumens for PTZ cameras and lecture capture/streaming, Q-SYS for audio DSP and control, Crestron NVX for media transport, Crestron Flex for VC, Epson projection – but each council will present unique challenges that require a bespoke approach. Converged Technology’s James Frost runs us through the fundamentals of the Yarra City Council design:
“Every seat has a Bosch Dicentis station and a Marshall lipstick camera, which we’ve integrated – we designed and fabricated a base plate that clips onto the bottom of the Bosch unit, and then we designed the Marshall camera bracket and had them fabricated. It all clips together as one unit and, of course, it disassembles and goes into the transit cases.
“Each station has its own colour-coded loom (power and SDI for the camera and network cable for the Dicentis base station) which go into a local stage box, which supports each table. So, depending on the table, that’s up to five different stations. Those stage boxes act as the aggregator. And then we have a big cable loom – combining all 19 positions – that goes back to the main rack – again, all beautifully colour-coded and labelled. Soldering those 20-metre cables took our guys a month in the warehouse.
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James Frost: “We’ve got a really comprehensive Q-SYS control system that sits over the top. That provides the essential controls, like streaming controls, what’s showing on the confidence monitors, and some audio processing.”
STREAM THE KEY
The live stream output of the Lumens LC300 places a four-way PIP of the active speakers (from the Blackmagic SDI switcher) in the top left corner, a wide shot provided by a Lumens PTZ camera at the back of the room (or on a tripod at Fitzroy town hall), presentation content, and space for councillors to chime in remotely via Teams. Currently, all councillors are required to attend in person but the provision is ready to roll.
AV: How does the quad view for active speakers work?
James Frost: We’ve got a Blackmagic SDI matrix switcher. With 19 cameras we needed something big enough, so we’ve gone with the ATEM 2M/E Constellation SDI switcher with 20 inputs. If there’s only the mayor speaking – or any one active speaker – they’re given the full screen in that quad. If more than one speaker is active, up to four, it layers them in. All of that is driven by who’s muted or unmuted on the Bosch Dicentis discussion unit. On the Bosch side, the number of active speakers is limited to four anyway. If more than four people unmute, they go into the queue to talk. That’s a council decision – they don’t want 10 people trying to speak at once.
AV: What are the benefits of going with SDI as opposed to NDI?
James Frost: The main benefit is it’s a cabled solution. I don’t have to rely on an external network. When I’m moving between Network 1 at Richmond and Network 2 at Fitzroy, we wanted to contain that to the rack. If the camera’s not physically plugged in, then it’s not working. If it is plugged in, it’s working.
That’s the first benefit. The second is it’s blisteringly fast. And the third is SDI is an industry standard. There are a lot of equipment from vendors like Blackmagic that manipulate SDI feeds and do things like quad views. You can do it with NDI, but it’s all in software and requires programming. And with software comes additional Windows machines or Android boxes that have to be patched, and it becomes a whole different conversation.
We learnt that while NDI is very capable and can deliver a wonderful experience, it is a more complex solution. We wanted to remove those layers of complexity and keep it really snappy. So we integrated the camera switching natively through Q-SYS into the Bosch. We know who’s talking and when, and we can then build up the quad that way.
AV: If I’m a councillor attending the meeting remotely, what am I seeing on Teams? Would they get a quad view?
James Frost: We’re sending the quad view through the Blackmagic switcher. To do that, we’ve got a Lumens OIP – the new OIP AV-over-IP decoders. Teams sees that as a webcam input, and then we can route any source into it that. We take the feed out of the Lumens LC300 – we can take the quad out of that and send it to the Lumens OIP USB converter.
“Then the racks had to be built. We take a lot of pride in our work, but when it’s an integrated system, you do it once and it’s hidden away. In this case, these heavy cable looms are getting packed up and moved around, so they have to be bulletproof. It required a meticulous level of planning on the physical aspects of the system.
“We’ve got a really comprehensive Q-SYS control system that sits over the top. That provides the essential controls, like streaming controls, what’s showing on the confidence monitors, and some audio processing. But then we spent a lot of time on value-add features. So if you want to manually route cameras to confidence monitors you can, or if you want to look at diagnostics, you’ve got a traffic-light system to do that really easily. That’s all through Q-SYS.
“Component-wise, we’re leaning on Bosch Dicentis. We looked at whether we could do this project wirelessly, and while we could have done it with Bosch Dicentis Wireless, the cameras can’t really be wireless – there’s no practical solution for that. So we decided: if we’re going to go with wired cameras, we might as well go with wired Bosch units and save some money.
Each of the five tables has a local ‘stagebox’ that aggregates the cables and runs to the central main rack in the room. The processing rack houses the Blackmagic SDI switcher, the Netgear switch and Lumens LC300.
“We’ve got Samsung 13-inch confidence monitors on each of the desks, which work well in this scenario. Crestron Flex MTR system for the video conferencing element, predominantly for when we have remote councillors, which isn’t a day-one scenario, but the system supports that automatically. In other words, when you start up the system, if it detects there’s a Teams meeting running, it changes the quadrant layout. If there’s no Teams meeting, and there aren’t any remote councillors, then the quadrant layout automatically readjusts – you get one less quadrant on the screen and it’s replaced with a council logo. Again, all that’s through Q-SYS, integrated into the Microsoft Teams Room system.
“Media transport is all via Crestron NVX. From an input perspective, we’re encoding the Crestron AirMedia wireless presentation, encoding the Crestron Flex MTR, and encoding the HDMI inputs. From an output perspective, we’re decoding to all of the Samsung tabletop confidence monitors, the Epson projectors, and the content inputs on the codec. There are 20-plus endpoints in this system. For Richmond, NVX is obviously the right solution in this sort of system because it’s flexible. For the Fitzroy town hall setup, it’s more point-to-point so we use an AVPro Edge HDMI extender system.
GREATER TRANSPARENCY
Converged Technology’s design, planning and integration may have been meticulous, but the first meeting at the Richmond town hall still had everyone on tenterhooks. We spoke to Yarra City Council’s Phil De Losa (Manager Governance & Integrity, and main project stakeholder) and Ross Sparks (Project Manager) about the results.
Phil De Losa: “I look forward to using the system to its full capability, but certainly the first meeting was a great result – we couldn’t have been more happy. We fielded a lot of positive feedback back from the CEO, councillors, staff, and the public who’ve noticed the uplift in the quality.
“I’ve been amazed at how our venue staff have taken to putting it all together. The training provided by Converged Technology has been fantastic. I think the first time our staff connected it all up without help, they only had one pair of leads plugged into the wrong place, which was pretty easily corrected. That’s not a bad first effort.”
Ross Sparks: “One of the best features of the system is being able to see and hear the public contributions on the stream. The initial design brief was to only have cameras for the nine councillors, which we changed to all key stakeholders given a camera – 19 in all. That’s made for a much better experience, improved transparency and better governance.”
GREATER TRANSPARENCY
ADVANTAGES OF A DISCUSSION SYSTEM
A council meeting isn’t a boardroom meeting and requires a different approach, as explained by Converged Technology’s James Frost: “Councils tend to say: ‘why don’t we just use ceiling microphones?’. You have to explain why that’s a terrible idea. Then the follow-up question tends to be, ‘why can’t we just use a gooseneck microphone?’ ‘Why do we need a discussion system?’
“A purpose-built discussion system like the Bosch Dicentis will manage queuing; it’s giving you the mute and unmute status; and it’s managing your audio channels, so I don’t need to buy a DSP that’s got 20 channels of AEC in it, because it sends it to the DSP as one channel. Additionally, depending on the model, you’re getting Chairman Mute Override, you’re given some advanced features that aren’t possible with a gooseneck mic. We’ve done all our council chamber systems with Bosch so far.”
ADVANTAGES OF A DISCUSSION SYSTEM
The entire system racked up at Fitzroy town hall. Yarra City Council Project Manager Ross Sparks: “There are a lot of different parts here, so tearing down the system, moving it, reassembling it and fine-tuning it could have been a real nightmare. I’ve done data centres and other complex installations but the difference here is it’s being put together by venue staff, not IT or technical people, so the way Converged Technology has designed the system with such a simple colour-coded approach has made all the difference.”
LIPSTICK CAM COLLARED
If a Converged Technology council chambers AV design differs in one significant way to most others, it’s in the use of individual cameras. Whereas most council chamber designs rely on a One Beyond-style PTZ approach where groups of three individuals are in shot, Converged opt for more of an e-sports approach where every participant is captured full frame when they contribute. Part of the rationale is around providing meeting ‘equity’ for remote participants – every contributor to the meeting (remote or in-person) is given near-identical space on the live stream.
The Yarra City Council system is ready to accommodate at-home councillors but they’re yet to pull the trigger on that feature, hoping to get councillors fully comfortable with the in-person experience first.
Yarra Council’s Manager Governance & Integrity Phil De Losa: “I can’t wait until we start using the system for people who can’t attend meetings in person. We would rather councillors attend in person, so we have pushed back on anybody who wants to do it remotely, but I don’t know how long we can hold out because there are legitimate reasons why a councillor may not be able to attend. I’m looking forward to seeing that functionality in action because I think it’ll be fantastic. Converged Technology has taken me through the Teams functionality and the capabilities are top class.”
AV: What are some of the advantages of using the Marshall CV228 cameras?
James Frost: The compact, lipstick form factor is important. They’ve got the colour balancing capability on board. The lighting conditions in Richmond versus Fitzroy are very different so it’s important to get the balance right. Currently, we have to do that manually and individually but we’d like to propose a solution that auto-balance four cameras at once, to reduce setup times.
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