This article will cover how to create, set up, and load content on the USB for the Ross Carbonite Black Solo switchers used at Life.Church. We've found this process to create a stable USB drive which is used for the backup configuration and more importantly, scenic background images.
We purchase a USB drive when we deploy the switchers. If for whatever reason you need to purchase or create a new one here are two notes.
- In a time-sensitive situation, use any drive you can get ahold of for the weekend critical content.
- Long term, our team keeps a handful of drives on hand, and we'd love to provide you a new one, already formatted.
We have found that the Ross Switchers prefer to have a drive formatted FAT32 from a Windows Machine. We have found that formatting via a Mac creates a drive with inconsistent results and read times.
Use the Format application on a Windows machine to format the drive out of the box or to reset it.
Below is a screenshot of the settings we use:
- Right click the drive that pops up in Windows Explorer.
- Verify the settings in the screenshot.
- Name the drive your campus three letter code, e.g. YKN.
- Select Start.
Volunteer or Switch computers can be easily found and used for this task.
After formatting, it's completely fine to stick the drive into an Apple computer to load the scenic content. In a time-sensitive situation, you only need to load the scenic images for the current or upcoming weekend. Don't worry about anything else.
Scenic Images
The image files used for the Scenic projection can be loaded directly to the root or main folder of the USB. No extra folder is advised or to be used.
Check out this article for more information on Uploading Scenic Images
Check out this article for more information on the Scenic Image Workflow
Backup Switcher Configuration File
At Life.Church, we keep a backup of the configuration of your switcher. In Ross Video terms, this is also called a Switcher Set file and it's a backup for the configuration we use at Life.Church. Reach out to Central Tech to get a copy loaded back on your USB drive in the event of a failure.