How a gallery is wired, tested and handed over as one system

Every integration job we take on begins with a drawing, long before a vision mixer arrives on site. I sit with the producer and the technical staff and ask a simple set of questions. Which sources must reach which destinations? Who needs to hear whom on intercom? Where does the programme go once it leaves the gallery? The answers become a signal flow diagram that shows every camera, playout source, monitor and return feed as a line between two labelled points. That diagram is the contract between us and the studio. If the producer wants a guest remote feed added later, we can see exactly which router input and which monitor wall tile it will take, rather than discovering a shortage once the rack is full.

We also walk the rooms. A gallery that looks fine on a plan can have a conduit run that is already crowded, a ceiling void with no access, or a desk position that puts the director with their back to the monitors. These are cheap to fix on paper and expensive to fix after cabling.

• List every source and destination, including the awkward ones
• Mark which signals need a backup route
• Note cable lengths and conduit capacity per run

Where we can, we build the equipment racks in our own workshop in Perth and not in the gallery itself. Mixers, routers, converters, intercom frames and power distribution are mounted, labelled and cabled to each other on a bench where there is good light and nobody is waiting for a programme to start. Faults found there cost an hour, not a day. Callum's habit, and I admit it is mine, is to label both ends of every cable with the same short code that appears on the drawing. It feels slow on the first day and saves a great deal of time over the next ten years, because whoever opens the rack in a rush can follow a signal with their finger.

Power gets the same attention. We separate clean feeds for sensitive audio and vision equipment from those for general loads, and we check that a single tripped breaker cannot take down both the mixer and its monitoring.

• Label both ends of each cable with the drawing's code
• Keep audio and vision power on separate circuits where possible
• Leave rack space and spare router ports for growth

On site, the order matters. Cable routes and power come first, then the racks, then the desk and monitoring, and only last the cameras and intercom beltpacks. This sequence means that when something is wrong we can narrow it down quickly, because the layers beneath it have already been proved. We try to keep the studio's own people close during this stage. A technician who has watched the router being configured will understand its behaviour far better than one who is handed a manual afterwards. We ask them to take notes on anything that surprises them, since those surprises usually point to something the documentation should explain more clearly.

Autumn brings its own small problems. Cold mornings in an unheated studio affect how some cables behave, and damp in older buildings can reach connectors left uncapped overnight, so we cap and cover as we go.

• Cabling and power before racks, racks before desks
• Cap open connectors at the end of every working day
• Keep a studio technician beside the installer for each stage

Testing is where an integration job is won or lost. We work through the diagram line by line and prove each route in turn: every camera to every mixer input, every source to every monitor tile, every intercom channel in both directions, every output to its recorder or transmission path. Each one gets a tick on a printed copy of the drawing, signed and dated. We test the unhappy paths as well. Pull a cable from the primary router output and check that the backup takes over. Unplug an intercom panel and see whether the rest of the channel survives. Switch the mixer to its fallback and see what the viewer would see. A system that works only when nothing goes wrong is not finished.

Finally we run a long soak test with everything powered and passing signal for several hours, watching for drifting levels, overheating or a device that quietly drops out.

• Tick off each route on the printed drawing
• Pull cables on purpose to prove the backup paths
• Run the full system for hours before calling it done

A gallery can pass every technical test and still frustrate the people working in it. So before handover we run a full rehearsal with the director, vision mixer operator, sound supervisor and camera crew, using a rundown close to a real programme. We watch where hands reach for a control that is not there, where the talkback is hard to hear, and where a monitor is hard to read from the director's chair. Most of the adjustments are small: moving a tally lamp, renaming a router source so it matches what the crew calls it, changing a default intercom mix. They are also the changes that make people trust the room.

We note every request and decide together which are done on the spot and which wait for a quiet day, rather than promising everything and delivering half.

• Rehearse with a realistic rundown, not a test pattern
• Rename sources in the crew's own words
• Record every request and agree what is done now or later

The handover pack is part of the work, not an extra. It contains the final signal flow diagrams, the router and mixer configuration files, a cable schedule, rack layouts, power notes and a short fault-finding guide that begins with the symptoms people actually report, such as no picture on a monitor or one-way intercom, and not with a list of equipment. We keep a copy in Perth as well, so a studio that mislays its paperwork after a staff change can ask us for another. A year or two later, when someone wants to add a camera or replace a monitor wall, they can start from accurate drawings and not from guesswork.

If something does go wrong on air, the person on duty should be able to find the cause with the pack and a torch. That is the standard we aim for.

• Final diagrams, configuration files and cable schedule
• Fault-finding guide written around reported symptoms
• A spare copy kept with us for future changes