A Cheap PTZ Camera for Churches and Small Venues?

so as most of us now realize live streaming isn't going anywhere whether you're a church or another kind of smaller medium-sized venue people are now used to receiving you know worship or concerts or whatever over live stream over the last couple of years many of us have invested in technology to kind of get us going and and now a lot of people are asking what's the next step a common upgrade from going from just some still cameras is to move to what is known as a ptz camera which is pilt tan pan tilt zoom camera and what they are are they're basically robotically controlled cameras that you can retro control from somewhere other than right where the camera is and control where they pan where they tilt and how far they zoom in and out now for a long time uh the kind of leader in consumer grade kind of small business grade ptz cameras has been ptz optics uh they make a great wonderful camera um for a fairly reasonable amount of money you can see when i've got one pulled up here on amazon this is their 30x zoom 60 degree ptz camera and it retails for 1800 now that wasn't a bad price and it really isn't a bad price but you can as it happens do better i was recently uh moving through going through amazon trying to find something um to use that maybe wasn't as much money that we could experiment and play with and when i did that i came across these sure we'll go with that um cameras and as i was looking i'm like man these look suspiciously familiar and in fact these cameras look a lot like that camera and as i looked at their specs um and really investigated um the the all the different pictures and even downloaded the manuals for them i found out not only were they similar they were basically identical the only difference being this their 30x version is 850 not 1800 so we took a bit of a flyer we ordered two just to see how they were i can tell you confidently now based on the packaging the remote control the manual and the performance of these cameras is that these are ptz optics cameras just with the ptz optics name removed and another no name put name put on now this may sound weird but the truth is most of the electronics that we encounter today are manufactured in some nameless factory usually in china as these were it's easy to imagine that that factory after completing a run of ptz optics cameras made a few more and elected to sell those under either their own branding or you know through a third party frankly this kind of stuff happens all the time so it's no surprise now this is a pretty significant discount which is nice so i did wonder are they skimping on the materials do these things not as perform as well well we've had them up and running for all of one sunday so far but we've done a lot of testing on and i can tell you that these things perform amazingly they have a great panasonic derived ccd chip in them uh that actually works remarkably well in low light which is a good thing for us we don't have the best lighting in our sanctuary so we need something that does well with low light and i would say the quality that we were getting out of these camera uh isn't really distinguishable from the quality we were getting out of our xc10 and xa10 canon cameras before that with the added bonus that these are both cheaper than both of those cameras were and their remote control their ptz how cool is that it's pretty cool now what you're looking at here on the back is a lot of great features that you're going to want if you're looking for a ptz camera first of all you have an ethernet in that's how you're going to control you're going to control it over your network not all ptc cameras are controllable over your kind of standard ethernet networks you do want to look for that you want to look for one that has control over ip this does so this is going to plug right into your wireless or write it to your wired network just like anything else was another kind of party feature on this one is that it actually can take power over that ethernet port as well over power over ethernet this is not a well documented feature um it's not really documented well at all with the with the instructions that come with this camera you can find some documentation on the original ptz optics link um so but but it is there and it does work i have tried it what we ended up going with is we got a tp-link um you know gigabit poe plus um i am honestly not sure whether this can work over just normal poe or whether it needs the added power that comes with poe plus this automatically switches between the two it knows what the device at the other end needs so there's no harm in just going ahead and getting the plus version for what you need so what does how this basically works is you plug your network connection into one port and then you plug in ethernet connection ethernet cable out of the other port that plugs into the back of the camera that one cable carries the data to and from the camera and also carries power to the camera making things like installation a lot easier now for us we wanted to plug this into our existing live stream system and our existing livestream stream system accepts hdmi inputs so conveniently we have an hdmi out right there and there's actually this this is one little interesting feature there's a little there's a little green scroll um right in here that you need to use a tool to turn to tell it which resolution to send out over the hdmi now the standard is what you're probably going to want which is 1080p it's 60 hertz it's the thing most everything can use so you're probably not going to have to touch it but do hold on to your instruction manual because it tells you what the different options are now if you have more advanced live streaming equipment that takes an sdi input you also have an sdi output which is nice sdi takes your video signal and sends it over a coax cable which is sometimes a lot easier to get into places it's got a little bit longer distance to it and is the connection type that a lot of professional audio video equipment works or this the nice thing about this is that means our cameras are quite kind of kind of future-proof if we move beyond our current live streaming equipment which currently works over hdmi and move to something more professional we've got an sdi right there now you also have some additional ports in here that are for more traditional ways of doing um things like security cameras and conference room cameras and stuff like that you're probably never going to use that the ports that you care about on the back of this thing are the ethernet port the power jack if you're not using poe and then either the sdi or the hdmi out and it is quite frankly that simple to get it plugged in and get it running now um these are not consumer grade products you're not going to download an app onto your phone that helps you set them up they are a little bit of a pain to get configured and that's one of the things you'll read about in the amazon reviews the information that you need to get them set up are actually right here on the bottom and so on the bottom it's going to tell you the default ip address that the network connection has and then the default username and password for logging into it so what you're going to do is you're actually going to connect this camera probably straight from this ethernet port to the ethernet port on your computer skipping your network completely because this is set up to use um a particular ip address that probably isn't the ip address you're using on your local network and that's fine because once you've got logged into it and gone through the little website setup web page set up inside the camera you can change it to whatever you want to so we've gone through and we've changed the ip addresses on these cameras to match ip addresses on our actual network now you're going to want to give them static ip addresses which means you're going to want to assign them an internet address that is just theirs so in our case that's 192.168.42.42 and 43 and that's going to be important later when we talk about the controller but overall i'm incredibly impressed with the performance about these now we actually have two different models here we have one that is the 12x zoom and one that is the 30x zoom now one of the problems right now on the amazon listing is the one that is the actually the 12x zoom is listed as actually a 20x zoom it is not um uh it is actually it's listed both as saying it has a 12 20 x zoom and a 72 degree field of view which means how wide it is the 30x zoom is listed as a 30x zoom with a 60 degree field of zoom field of view which makes sense this is one you're going to put further away and probably zoom further in so this is the one that is in the back of our sanctuary um you know this one we want is up closer so you're not going to zoom as far as and you want a little bit wider shot now ptz optics doesn't make a 12 or a 20x with the wide field of view they make a 12x with the wide field of view which is clearly what this thing is um so just know that um the the what it lists on amazon for these cameras as the field of view is correct um what it lists as the zoom rate not so much the 20x they offer another 20 smurdoff offers another 20x that is listed as that narrow field of view and that's what you want this is a very compelling setup with these two cameras the 12x1 was about 700 bucks the 30x1 was 850 bucks this one sits in the front of the sanctuary slightly off to one side this one sits in the way back of the sanctuary slightly off to the other side so we can get a wide shot of the whole sanctuary we can get closer up shots of you know just the the uh you know something close up and it gives us some variety to play with now once you've got these cameras um set up you're going to want to control them they come with remote controls um that you can use to do kind of basic functions um with them to you know control them as far as the tilting and the panning and the zooming and all that kind of stuff that would be good if you were just going to set them up and point them in a given direction and probably leave them there maybe that'd be a way to go but as far as like something you would want to use you know during the context of a concert or a worship service you're not going to want to do that that's not going to work you're going to want something a little more advanced now here's where we went through a couple of iterations you will find several control boards like this one for sale on amazon and they also vary in price you can spend up to many thousands of dollars on it if you want to uh we initially bought one for about 180 bucks um and didn't have quite the features this one had and and simply just really wasn't workable um we didn't it just didn't work so thankfully amazon has a generous return policy which we took advantage of and instead we purchased this one which is a keyboard it's it's another basically no brand name thing i'll put a link in in the description to it but it's again kind of a no name brand thing but it actually has some pretty nice features now on the back you're going to find a power port you're going to find an ethernet port and then you're going to find some of these older style connectors that you may use for more traditional systems you're not going to use those this also supports power over ethernet so that's actually what we've done so we've run the cable we run to this is just an ethernet cable and it takes its power and its network over that otherwise you can plug in a it does come with a power adapter you can connect to it now what's great about this is you get it you you set this up in a similar way um right where you connect it straight to your computer you connect to the the lan settings that it gives you um uh when it first boots up it'll tell you what its ip address is so you connect uh to it that way you log into its little website and then configure it to be on your network however you need it on your network to be um once you've done that there's basically a search function there's basically a button you push called search and then it will search your network and find any other cameras on your network that it can talk to and then it will list them um for you um and then you can go through and then it'll list them on the screen and then you can go add so i'm gonna add this camera add this camera say whether it's camera one or camera two whichever way you want it to be once you've done that once you've done that and set it up it's really really straightforward there's a lot of features and buttons on here a lot of them you're not going to use because you can use this as a security camera you can control security cameras you can use it to control conference room cameras you can use it to for all sorts of things that frankly you're never going to do the most basic function you want to be able to do is select the camera you want so you hit cam the number enter and then it goes to the camera you want and then it gives you on the screen a preview of what that camera is seeing now it's important though the preview that shows up here is pretty low res um and it's going to be the colors aren't going to be great or anything like that and it's that's fine because it's not for that it all it's four is for framing the shot and then you can use the controller here to move it left move it right move it up move it down or twist it to zoom in and zoom out once you've got something set the way that you want it to be set um you know and and you've got a shot that you like and you want to keep that shot well that gets really easy because it has a series of presets up to a hundred of them in fact and setting one is pretty easy so once you have the camera set the way you want you go set preset give it a number enter and then later if you want to use that preset you go call preset the number of the preset enter so we we've done is we've set preset one through five on both of these cameras and you know preset one is a spot on our spot up in our on the front of our sanctuary um you know that focuses on the two chairs that i tend to sit on and then there's the then there's a preset for where i tend to preach from and then there's a preset for um where our musicians tend to play uh and so when it becomes time you know when we're when that's the next thing in the order of the list or whatever we can go ahead and the operator can go ahead and just pull up those presets and the camera is going to go automatically there now the process of moving between the presets um is not something you're going to want to watch from home right so the nice thing about having two cameras is you can have one camera streaming and then you can set the neck other camera to the next preset for what you're going to do um and then use your video switching solution whatever that happens to be maybe it's an atm uh mini pro maybe it's a sling studio you know whatever um you know to to switch between them uh but you're not the process of moving it it does happen relatively quickly which is nice but it can be a little jarring to watch so it's not anything anybody at home is going to watch you can also just if you are want to you can just control the whole thing manually the nice thing is you can actually control the speed of basically how fast it zooms and how fast it pans and tilts based on this thing so you can turn that really down low and then no matter how far you move this it's only going to pan so quickly and the nice thing about that is if you want a nice tracking shot where you're tracking uh what's going on um you can have it if you want to have you know a nice slow zoom in um you know at a certain point during the service for what you're going on you can have it um you know you can do whatever you want or if you just want to get there quickly you can turn them up and move them where you need to go um so this whole setup here um you know this camera about 800 again 850 this camera uh 700 this this was you know 200 um dollars um for this so you can basically see where for less than two thousand dollars almost less than the cost of just one of these if you bought it as a ptc optics camera we got all of this um and this is frankly all you need um to uh to have a two-camera ptz complete setup um in your again in your church or small venue um assuming you have something for the you know either the hdmi or the sdi uh signal to connect to now another party trick with this is if say you only want to buy this and you don't want to buy any other equipment there is another option these cameras are capable of generating their own rtmp source meaning they're able to stream their video that they're taking over your network at reasonably good quality so you're talking 1080p and 4 megabits which isn't great but isn't bad it's actually pretty good you're going to get more performance out of either the sdi or the hdmi connection you know up to probably 8 or ten megabits um but you can do that and software packages like obs um studio um can take rtmp sources as video sources so you can have a software product like obs that's you know uninstalled on a computer that's on your network that is taking the rtmp feed from these two cameras that's just going over your network um and use that software product to switch your video you know and do all those sorts of things and then of create the final stream that will get sent out to either youtube directly or facebook directly or to a service like restream so if you really just want to do it with just this hardware and a laptop and some free software through obs you can you can do that um it's obviously less expensive obs is also very powerful but notoriously not the easiest thing to use so it will take a little more time to get it set up but if you already have your art if you already are in obs shop you're already doing it that may be something to look at before you go buying some dedicated hdmi you know encoder hardware or anything like that and see if that quality is something that you like one of the ways you can maximize that quality is making sure that the the cameras are you know connected as close you know connected to your local network as close as you can get we actually because of where we wanted to put these cameras we actually cr bought some hdmi or some some wi-fi adapters that will basically take um what will allow you to connect something that has just standard ethernet jacks to your wi-fi um that works fine for the low-quality stream um that you know it does on the preview app that does fine for the controlling software i'm not sure i would do that for broadcast i think you'd want to stick with the hardwired ethernet connection between the cameras but also remember that's the only cable you have to run to these cameras if you're going to do it that way because you can run your power over it as well all right so why don't we head over to i'm going to re-hook all this back up in the sanctuary and give you a little taste for how it works in there all right so as you can see we have our cam installed uh right here so i'm just gonna go ahead and remove the lens cap off of it and turn it on did i mention it does a little dance for you turn it on it does it's kind of neat all right so that gets set i'll come back around here we'll see how we have it hooked up um i'm not using the power over ethernet i'm just using a standard plugin there's my hdmi and then there's my ethernet that goes down into our network connection down here that hdmi actually comes down to our sling studio box which is what we use to actually do our video controlling now as you can see we're a good bit from the front of the sanctuary so it's got to do a pretty decent throw um probably probably about 30 40 feet right there and if you can see way down there is our other camera that's set up up front so that's the 12x with the wider zoom or with a wider wheeled field of view um this guy right here is the 30x with the um sliding arrow or field of view now let's come over here to our little controller so here we got our controller box and as you can see it is set up to uh it is receiving that front camera signal that's our camera one and you can see down there it gives you the id if you can quite see that there's the id id camera one the ip address of that camera if i want to switch to the other camera i just go cam 2 camera 2 sit right there enter boom there's the other camera if i want to zoom up i can if i want to zoom down i can if i want to zoom in so let's see how far we can go zoom up a little bit more keep zooming keep zooming keep zooming keep zooming as you can see oop we're going all over the place here you can get pretty far in um with that zoom so if we had a special musician up there in the special musicians corner uh you'd be able to get pretty darn close on them um even from all the way back here which is great now if we are um moving around let's say we go call preset one enter boom see how fast that was call preset two enter okay that was our special music preset call preset three enter a little closer in call preset four enter that goes over where we sometimes have our musicians uh where we are where we have our um our pianist call preset five enter a little wider shot right there so then we go cam one enter we can do the same thing we got that preset call preset two there's a little spot where i preach from call preset three and on down the line works pretty slick and of course you can always manually adjust however you want to do it yeah so i think that's it all right so just in kind of some closing thoughts i am really impressed um by these cameras they are seem to be every bit as good um as the name brand ptc optics versions they are based on um they are giving us great quality seem to be very well built um and despite a little bit of challenge initially getting configured i mean they are um a more uh professional grade thing they're not going to be as easy to configure as you might expect like a consumer electronic to be but once you get over those hurdles um they they actually work really really well and i found that the instruction manuals that are included do a really good job of walking you through that whole process so i would actually give this a pretty strong buy recommendation for anybody who's looking to get into the ptz world for either their church or similar small venue i hope you appreciated this i really enjoyed sharing this with you thanks for sticking with it you

Channel: Foundery Development

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Id: vY6mVk79ay4

Length: 23min 53sec (1433 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021