Went to see the Savant Control System this weekend.
ericmedley
Posts: 4,177
Hey all,
I went to Florida this weekend to see the Savant product. They held what was thought to be a product roll-out for high-end CEDIA dealers. I say 'thought' because after all of us there started ripping the thing apart during the testing lab session, they informed us that they were aware that the product is 'not ready for prime time' and that 'we were not at a product roll-out.' That seemed to be news to everyone in the audience. After all we were at the resort on Amelia Island. Seemed a little too classy a place for what could have eaisly been done at the factory floor.
For those of you not up to speed on this product, it's sorta being touted as the next great A/V control system. One of the founders is a former A/V design business who was AMX. He had many unkind things to say about AMX and C-tron in general.
Their model is a control system that runs from a processor in a box. The box has the various ins and outs to control the A/V/Home appliances. The box also functions as an A/V switcher. (think NI-X100 with HD audio and video switching...)
The programming environment is on a Macintosh. They call their approach 'open-programming' In a nutshell, it's code-less, draw the system out in their program, connect the devices together, hit the compile button, <done> type system. It relies on Savant provided equipment profiles to control the various devices connected to the system. (I'd feel bad for those on the bleeding edge out there... profile turnaround time...) While the official company stance is not to mention other control systems or relate their product to them, the engineers and programmers I spoke with during the lab sessions often referred to it as an AMX/C-tron killer, or some kind of a paraphrase therein.
The graphical interface that you use to wire the system together is fairly easy to use and intuitive. However, for those of us who use D-Tools / Visio / AutoCad, I think they have a long way to go. connecting wires do not go at right angles and also quite often go behind pieces of gear. On the test system I worked on I had one device that all the inputs were hidden. Not so good for the techs... The universal cry was to do away with that. The software people said they thought that was what we were going to say but that to get that to happen would require a major retooling.
The touch panels also use Apple OSX technology for the display. Touch panel layouts are designed in Photoshop. That really seemed clunky to me. I asked one of their graphics people to set up a row of buttons and line them up. You can imagine how that went... However, they can have 3D live rendered motion graphics running as a background image. They can also pretty seamlessly integrate web applications onto their touch panels. They essentiall embed an instance of Safari right on the touch panel. It works well on both wired and wireless touch panels. they also have a very cool heads-up control system that can be displayed on any standard display. a 'touch panel' appears over the video and you use the small hockey puck sized remote to move around the interface.
Some Cliff's notes observations.
The system seems a little under-scaled for most larger applications. You'd have to kluge together several small systems to get to a large installation.
I think they underestimate how much customization AMX/C-tron can do. Their general hatred of all things AMX/C-tron blinds them to what the AMX systems are capable of doing. Therefore, they miss some key components that we all know are really needed to get the job done.
The product is nowhere near ready to hit the streets. My best guess is that they are at least 12-18 months before a possible ver 1 release. The programming environment really needs a lot of work.
It's hard to make an apples to apples comparison due to the nature of the two system's approaches. However, I'd say that for comparable systems, Savant comes in at somewhere around 70-80% of what an AMX system costs. They also alledge that programming time will go way down. From what I've seen, that claim is somewhat dubious. While it is fair to say that the initial programming is all done in the black box, after the complie you have to play a game of 20 questions with each device and help it decide how it should control each thing.
It does have some cool features that I think AMX would do well to match.
I'm not making any predictions about this product. We've all seen many others of its nature come and go. I would be a bit hard pressed to place a bet one way or another.
I thought I'd share what I saw. Anyone else seen it and had any time to play?
Eric Medley
I went to Florida this weekend to see the Savant product. They held what was thought to be a product roll-out for high-end CEDIA dealers. I say 'thought' because after all of us there started ripping the thing apart during the testing lab session, they informed us that they were aware that the product is 'not ready for prime time' and that 'we were not at a product roll-out.' That seemed to be news to everyone in the audience. After all we were at the resort on Amelia Island. Seemed a little too classy a place for what could have eaisly been done at the factory floor.
For those of you not up to speed on this product, it's sorta being touted as the next great A/V control system. One of the founders is a former A/V design business who was AMX. He had many unkind things to say about AMX and C-tron in general.
Their model is a control system that runs from a processor in a box. The box has the various ins and outs to control the A/V/Home appliances. The box also functions as an A/V switcher. (think NI-X100 with HD audio and video switching...)
The programming environment is on a Macintosh. They call their approach 'open-programming' In a nutshell, it's code-less, draw the system out in their program, connect the devices together, hit the compile button, <done> type system. It relies on Savant provided equipment profiles to control the various devices connected to the system. (I'd feel bad for those on the bleeding edge out there... profile turnaround time...) While the official company stance is not to mention other control systems or relate their product to them, the engineers and programmers I spoke with during the lab sessions often referred to it as an AMX/C-tron killer, or some kind of a paraphrase therein.
The graphical interface that you use to wire the system together is fairly easy to use and intuitive. However, for those of us who use D-Tools / Visio / AutoCad, I think they have a long way to go. connecting wires do not go at right angles and also quite often go behind pieces of gear. On the test system I worked on I had one device that all the inputs were hidden. Not so good for the techs... The universal cry was to do away with that. The software people said they thought that was what we were going to say but that to get that to happen would require a major retooling.
The touch panels also use Apple OSX technology for the display. Touch panel layouts are designed in Photoshop. That really seemed clunky to me. I asked one of their graphics people to set up a row of buttons and line them up. You can imagine how that went... However, they can have 3D live rendered motion graphics running as a background image. They can also pretty seamlessly integrate web applications onto their touch panels. They essentiall embed an instance of Safari right on the touch panel. It works well on both wired and wireless touch panels. they also have a very cool heads-up control system that can be displayed on any standard display. a 'touch panel' appears over the video and you use the small hockey puck sized remote to move around the interface.
Some Cliff's notes observations.
The system seems a little under-scaled for most larger applications. You'd have to kluge together several small systems to get to a large installation.
I think they underestimate how much customization AMX/C-tron can do. Their general hatred of all things AMX/C-tron blinds them to what the AMX systems are capable of doing. Therefore, they miss some key components that we all know are really needed to get the job done.
The product is nowhere near ready to hit the streets. My best guess is that they are at least 12-18 months before a possible ver 1 release. The programming environment really needs a lot of work.
It's hard to make an apples to apples comparison due to the nature of the two system's approaches. However, I'd say that for comparable systems, Savant comes in at somewhere around 70-80% of what an AMX system costs. They also alledge that programming time will go way down. From what I've seen, that claim is somewhat dubious. While it is fair to say that the initial programming is all done in the black box, after the complie you have to play a game of 20 questions with each device and help it decide how it should control each thing.
It does have some cool features that I think AMX would do well to match.
I'm not making any predictions about this product. We've all seen many others of its nature come and go. I would be a bit hard pressed to place a bet one way or another.
I thought I'd share what I saw. Anyone else seen it and had any time to play?
Eric Medley
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