Control Multiple PTZ Cameras in OBS at the Same Time!

hi everyone in this video i'm going to show you how to control and switch multiple ptz cameras with obs at the same time with a click of a button this is something that it's really cool and i can't wait to show you guys so essentially obs has the ability to be a multi-camera video production switcher that is totally free you can use it on a mac you cannot use it on a pc i'm a huge fan i even wrote a book called the unofficial guide to open broadcaster software you can download for free and i'll put a link to it below but i wanted to quickly show you a little presentation to talk about how to control multiple ptz cameras with obs at the same time we've done a lot of work with obs in order to do this here's a kind of cool picture that you can see of somebody who's actually controlling multiple cameras with two different joysticks they have the ipad app and the huddlecamhd serial app and that's great but there are ways to automate camera control of multiple cameras with the click of a button so essentially you will need to have your cameras on the same local area network as your favorite live video production software i will create a video about vmix and how to do this but this video is all about obs of course you can have an ip joystick or an ipad those are still great for manual control but when you're issuing presets just in between like scene changes it's a great idea to use automation to make your life easier so when you're changing scenes between a band and a crowd or a play that is in one place or another or at a church when there's a presentation and then you're switching to a band or a baptismal area one click you can move multiple ptz cameras and that's the awesome part of what we're talking about so manual control is still great you're still going to want manual control for a lot of different reasons and i want to mention that you can put manual control directly into obs using our dockable plug-ins so we're going to be talking a lot more about customizing obs for your experience and you can put multiple controllers like this into your obs you can put two or three of them in there if you'd like and i'll briefly touch on that we've got a couple different sizes we have a small joystick controller and a wide a medium sized joystick controller a large controller and it's up to you whether you'd like to just have some pan tilt zoom controls some preset controls you can change the images inside of these they're totally open source or you can decide to use the obs plug-in which is available for obs for ptz optics cameras as well and that has the ability to add hotkeys to obs but also um live you know preview xbox camera control and a lot of other stuff but if you do not have your ip address of your camera set up watch the camera setup video guide first and look read through the documentation because you will need ip camera control to do any of this you're going to need a ptz optics camera you're going to need obs and you're going to need a network now you'll find that you can use our camera upgrade tool the ip address settings tool to search for all the cameras on your network and if you're using the dockable ptz optics camera controls for obs it's totally open source you can download it here and for the second third and fourth cameras that you might want to control you need to create separate html files for those and they're in the dockable plugins so there's a video about that today we're going to be using http commands with obs browser sources so you can see here and i'm going to open it up and zoom into it so you can really see what i'm talking about here essentially a browser source in obs is the ability to enter an http command for ptz optics cameras and we're going to tell it to call a camera preset the important part here is to make sure you have refresh browser when scene becomes active checked so every time you switch to that scene it calls that browser so let's take a look at this really quickly as we just switch between one camera we've got two different browser sources for two different ptz preset calls now i've shown this before in other videos today we're going to take it a step further and we're going to be looking at how to do this with multiple cameras to do really cool scene changes now essentially what you're going to want to do and i just noticed i got to really quickly go down to this slide this is the slide i want to go to here not this one is you're going to want to understand the http commands which you can find at ptzoptics.com downloads and download the http commands but essentially that probably the only one you need to know is how to recall a preset and so really quickly the way that i'm setting this up is i've got four cameras and i'm have two scenes one is a music scene we're just pretending that there's a band in here and then we have scene two where we're assuming there's a presentation going on now i have the ip address of each camera listed i have my computer as well just because and then i have the commands listed as well now i really suggest you do a table like this to set this up because you're going to once it's done you can copy and paste all of the information directly into obs and i'll show you how to do that so essentially the command is http colon slash the ip address of your camera slash cgi dash bin slash ptz control dot cgi question mark and then this is where the you get to insert variables for what you want the commands to be but it's ptz command pass call meaning position call and the preset number which is one now we basically have the exact same thing with our second scene but now we're using preset two you can use any preset that you like and to set these presets up i like to use the little ptz optics camera control app i'll show you why this is our multi-view here and i can just go through and quickly you know move a camera set the preset so i can just move it in here set the preset i can even name it if i want to but for this we're just using preset one and preset two and i see that i have kind of already messed this up because preset should be our scene that we're doing over here but this is a good example this is going to be scene 1 this is our presentation scene so i'll set that as preset 1. you can see i've already done this for some of the other cameras and these cameras are part of this presentation so twos over there one's over there so we're getting four different cameras to move to four different locations just like that but we're going to automate it with a single click so just to look at this with one camera is we have one camera and we have one browser source so this browser source is issuing one single command so we've got one camera here one browser source the browser source has the ip command telling the obs to tell the camera where it wants it to go and it goes there it's that simple so if we apply that idea to having four cameras moving at the same time we can automate scene switching and this is so easy to do if you've got two or three four ptz cameras you can now move all the cameras to a known location that easily so back to our presentation i highly suggest that you draw all this out and then you're going to copy and paste these commands changing the ip address and possibly the preset depending on the scene set all of your presets for your cameras and then enter this information into obs it's that easy if you're learning about networking essentially your router has an ip address it's connected to your network switch all of your computers and cameras have ip addresses and we're using those ip addresses to send these commands using obs don't forget to subscribe to our youtube channel i hope that was helpful it's also worth mentioning there's a ton of http cgi commands available that do other things that maybe you might want to check out if you'd like to set your camera very simply with a dhcp address meaning automatically send the camera a ip address from your router if your router is dhcp capable you can hit pound star 4 and the camera will reboot and accept an ip address from your router to if you don't know what your ip address of your camera is you can hit star pound 4 and show the camera's ip address on the video feed of your camera so quick little tip there you can learn more about ip networking for your cameras at ptzoptics.com ip you can learn more about computer programming for ptz optics cameras at ptzoptics.com robotics and remember we've got a great support team who is here to help you all the time thanks for watching bye guys

Channel: PTZOptics

Views: 16,544

Keywords: Live Streaming Camera, PTZOptics, Broadcast Camera

Id: EiyuHqmv2Wg

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021