Educational Tech for Lecture Capture & Video Communications

hi guys today we are going to meet an innovative college professor who is using the audio visual technology installed in her classroom to create a hybrid learning experience for both in-person students and remote learning we are going to get the chance to see how remote students are engaging in this hybrid learning environment and we'll see how the professor is using two ptz cameras to keep remote students and in-person students engaged the remote students will be coming in via zoom [Music] how have the ptz optics cameras helped me to lead class for both in-person and remote students well i don't think i could lead class for both in-person and remote students without them because i need the cameras to keep everyone engaged and feeling connected at any given time when i'm teaching i do have students in person in the classroom and i also have students coming into that same class through zoom through the big screen at the front of the classroom so i use the ptz optics cameras to help the students to see one another while we're having a class discussion to possibly you know using the camera in the back of the room i can have the remote learners see me standing in the front of the room lecturing if their classmates are speaking i can use a different camera so that the remote learners can watch their classmates speaking i definitely need those cameras to keep the remote and in-person students engaged in the one class keeping remote students engaged in this hybrid learning environment has been a journey of discovery for me as an instructor and i have to say i think i'm just starting to feel that i figured out a way to keep the students engaged and i should probably start by telling you that when i first had the experience last fall of having you know being here in the classroom but having some of my students coming in remotely through zoom i wasn't i feel like i was forgetting they were there sometimes you know i was speaking to the physically present students and i felt like i had my back to the screen so if you think about it the screen is at the front of the classroom so i would forget to turn around and then i realized i have cameras in my classroom i have these great ptz optics cameras and at first i had not used them for like the first month i didn't realize that it would change everything then i started using the cameras and i realized i didn't need to be turning around turning my back on one population of in-person learners to look at the screen to see the remote learners up on the screen i could use the cameras and i could stay in one position and keep everyone engaged by having different views of the classroom with with using the front and back cameras i think that's the best way i can explain that i use them to to keep the remote learners engaged [Music] what have my students said about this new way of attending class you know what's interesting i my students really haven't made any comments and and now that i think about it it seems so natural for them you know they show up to class on time everyone logs in to the zoom or enters the classroom they have never commented on the fact that you know i'm switching the cameras around and sometimes they're seeing me sometimes they're seeing their classmates sometimes i'm zooming into something and i wonder if they even realize that i'm in my mind while i'm trying to teach the course i'm also thinking about their experience and trying to make sure they feel part of this one big happy family in the classroom even though some of us are physically present and some of us are virtually present i have i wonder if they even realize that i'm constantly thinking about that and using the cameras to create that experience the only time they really ever said anything was when we did breakout rooms in so i had the entire class break out into groups of two to discuss something so i used you know obviously the people in class were just you know six feet apart of course our desks are six feet apart but they were able to talk with their masks on in groups of two and then for the remote learners i used zoom and breakout rooms to let them talk quickly in groups of two and then we came back to a lot as like one big large group and using the ptz optics cameras in the front and back of the room we were able to have this like big one group discussion and share our ideas [Music] what have i learned i've i've learned about using these cameras right i have never done anything like this before as i said even in the fall when i entered into this experience i kind of thought okay it's just students on zoom and students in this in the seats in the desks and we've got to make it work and even though the cameras were there i hadn't even thought about the role they would play now after teaching week after week after week i've come to learn that they play a critical role in the engagement of the of each student remote and physically present i've learned how to use them how to not use them you know like you don't want to be moving things around too quickly because people they lose their train of thought if you're uh zooming in too fast or too slow so i've learned to kind of be very careful about when i do that there's so much i've learned in in the time of the pandemic and being an instructor and using technology but specific to the use of the cameras in the classroom those are the things i've learned all right well thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video don't forget to hit that like button if you enjoyed it and share this video with someone that you might think finds it useful the professor here was actually included in my book technology tools for online education where she helped me understand how she's using some of this technology so you can download that book for free at the links below thanks so much for watching hello and welcome to the ptz optics educational webinar i'm julia sherwin with ptz optics well it's been about a year since we all hunkered down in our homes and tried to connect remotely and if schools have learned anything it's that preparation is key we are getting vaccinated but some colleges are actually requiring vaccinations so we're in this flux of um still uncertainty but um you know we're going to take you through some technologies today that will help to get you that high flex hybrid classroom that that word we're hearing all around us right now is hybrid high flex just having that flexibility for students who may want to retain a remote status and those who are able to come back into classrooms so um i know paul's got a lot to share with you for uh technology today we've got a video to share with you from an installation that ptz optics was involved with with rosemont college which is a a smaller liberal arts college outside of the philadelphia um in the philadelphia suburbs here in our area so um i think you'll you'll really enjoy today's um presentation don't forget to join in zoom there's a link to the gleam there's a giveaway somebody today will win a huddlecamhd pro and at the end of today's session we'll have some time for q a of course feel free to drop your questions here into the chat and we'll try to get to as many of them as we can today so without further ado i'll introduce my co-host today paul richards with ptz optics hi everybody so excited to be here thank you so much for joining today um we're gonna go ahead and jump right in to our presentation all about instructional technology and i'm gonna demonstrate all of these cameras for you guys today and answer questions as well so ask your questions on youtube or the zoom chat and we will get to answering them so i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here and you can see that we have instructional technology for online education so this is going to be pretty cool and let's get started so first of all if as julia mentioned mike if you can show my presentation here we have a qr code that you can scan i want to make sure everyone does get the opportunity to let me hide the video panel here show video panel hide there it is hide floating meeting controls um if you scan that code you can enter to win a huddlecam hd pro that's one of the webcams we're going to show off today such a great usb connected zoom certified webcam for online meetings and collaborations so we've all been tasked with reinventing the classroom and luckily there are is funding available from the government to do so and uh you know a lot it's just a really important portion of what we're all been asked to do when we asked when we were asked two-thirds of professors said their experience teaching remotely this spring was positive so that's a really good good sign and i've talked to a lot of professors saying that you know they can do this they're just going to need some help and they're willing to be flexible they're willing to learn and we're really excited to be part of that now uh what are some of the technologies that people are using well auto tracking cameras is a really popular one that we're going to show the reason why it's so popular is because uh it really reduces the need for a camera operator and a teacher can just walk into the room and the camera will follow them obviously zoom is very popular touch screen monitors sdi cameras in many scenarios are being used from ptz optics which we'll talk about usb plug and play cameras and technology and then devices for capturing streaming and recording lectures so we'll look into all that the focus today will be classroom cameras and we'll talk about different workflows and answer a lot of questions that i'm sure will come up now the first scenario i want to show is our affordable setup from huddlecam and this this setup is very affordable um let me try to hide this again um it's 3x optical zoom and it it is we pair it many times with our wireless huddlepod air and together these two units are only 698 so a pan zoom camera you can see on the back here it plugs right in via usb and then the huddle pod air again just plug and play wireless usb technology so that's really where huddlecam our sister company at ptz optics comes into play and you can see that these these together for a very small affordable classroom can work really well another simple uh product is called the huddlecam 3xa and we took really one of the most popular web conferencing cameras that's usb connected and we added audio so it has beam forming microphones here built into this camera so there's two microphones the reason why this is very nice for a lot of classrooms and we have a lot of school districts who've standardized on this camera a single usb 2.0 connection for your ptz camera and your microphone and that's ideal if the classroom already has a speaker which might be built directly into a television or a projector that's already in the classroom now i want to show how this works here because you can see in a normal classroom setting it's nice to be able to have optical zoom so the huddlecam 3x and 10x have a little bit different optical zoom 10x can zoom in further and we have a tool on our website which will show you kind of what that field of view looks like but it also has a wide microphone pickup range and the beam forming microphones start at the camera and they go out in a kind of beam to capture the audio for the whole classroom so it's a very easy to use software plug and play with zoom it works with zoom rooms and the remote zoom control so we're going to look at the we obviously talked about the 3x and the 3xa i'm also going to do a live demo of the simple track 2 in a moment which is our auto tracking camera we're going to kind of dig into that a lot but i wanted to take a second to talk about webcams uh at huddlecam we have three webcams kind of a good better and a best and our starting webcam is just a simple usb 2.0 webcam that works with zoom and it's plug and play it's 1080p and the ptz optics cameras now include a free webcam whenever you get a ptz optics camera then the kind of the big brothers the better and the best here is the huddlecam hd pro which our producer over here is going to show to you guys today um this camera is a 4k camera and you might think well zoom really only supports 720p why would you need 4k well take a look what a 4k camera can do when you can digitally zoom in and so here mike is this is our producer he's got a ir remote control that comes with the huddlecam hd pro and it allows a teacher to be able to zoom in and pan tilt and zoom and be able to show things more clearly to a remote student so if you have a whiteboard behind you you can actually set presets like a ptz camera and you know the price of this camera is only 299 dollars so it's a very great camera for that teacher that wants to upgrade their experience or who is maybe teaching from home maybe two or three days out of the week i know a lot of schools are starting to share classrooms so you get these ptz presets that work just like a ptz camera and it's zoom certified so it works with all of the zoom integrations there's also an ndi version which is powered over ethernet so if you've run out of usb ports if you want to you know extend a camera a long distance away from your computer that maybe you're using the ethernet connectivity is really nice and that's a power over ethernet ndi webcam very cool product there so we wanted to show those off and show some examples of what electronic pan tilt zoom can do the cool thing about electronic pan tilt zoom is it doesn't require any uh motors right so it's no motors it has a five year warranty and it really lasts for a long time it's a 4k capable camera now the next camera that is actually pretty popular is called the huddle view or sorry the huddle pair and the huddle pair is a wireless usb speakerphone that includes a camera so this camera here is a wide angle usb camera that can be put on top of a monitor and it is only 4.99 and it's paired with a wireless chat pod so again a lot of our customers were saying hey look can we get just a single usb connection we're running out of usb connections on our chromebooks on our macbooks on our windows computers the let the lower amount of usb ports that we need the better so the huddle pair came from the very popular huddle pod air and the huddle pod air duo the huddle pod air is a wireless usb speaker phone has eight hours of battery life and it can cover roughly a 12 foot radius or three meters the or physically four meters the huddlepod air duo is just double the coverage for slightly larger rooms they use 2.4 gigahertz wireless radius is there so that it's a really cool product line for making wireless plug-and-play video communications easy so today i'm going to be showing off the simple track 2. and the simple track 2 is an ai based auto tracking camera with a lot of connectivity so i'll show the back of this camera here we've got usb for plug and play directly with any computer we've got sdi which is great for longer cable runs because this camera can be up to 50 feet from a presenter a dvi which comes with the dvi to hdmi converter we have ethernet which allows you to manage these cameras when you deploy them on your network audio for streaming and then an sd card slot for recording lectures directly to the camera or directly to the hard drive of the computer connected to this camera so we're going to take a really deep dive into this camera because it's so popular for education i want to do a live demo but i also wanted to talk about a couple of these features as well so the first thing is the adjustable tracking zones and so i want to show this off with two different simple tracks so this simple track that i have set up gives me a almost a full head and body shot right you can see my feet you can see my head and more importantly when i come to a presentation space you really want to make sure that the entire presentation space can be captured so if there's a television or there's a whiteboard or blackboard the nice thing about the simple track too is it allows us to customize the height and width now let me show you another auto tracking camera here this one is more of a head and shoulder shot right and so this one does a really good job of letting the teacher kind of be eye level and everybody has different uh opinions on how to do this you can see in this presentation space over here uh you can basically see my whole television here but you might want to you know adjust that framing so that adjustable tracking mode and framing is a big part of what makes the simple track so popular in education my next slide talks a little bit about the technology behind the simple track 2. and there there's this is the software we're going to take a peek at this and ask answer questions for this but the software allows you to define a tracking zone and within that tracking zone set up blocking zones so this is a movable gif here so this will kind of give you an idea of how it works the inside of the tracking zone we're blocking the students heads and we're blocking the projector because any movement with in the students area or from the projector we don't want to you know set off any of the motion also inside this area we have the ability to have preset zones and when a teacher walks in front of these preset zones we can do a couple different really great things one is we could zoom directly into a known spot and stop there and that's really nice if a teacher likes to sit at a lecture there's no need to have the camera go back and forth and back and forth even a little bit when the teacher's standing at the lectern so these preset zones allow us to further optimize the tracking capabilities depending on where the teacher is in the space another thing that we can do with preset zones is we can actually automate control systems and third-party software so a preset zone can actually send a trigger to a crestron system to switch the video maybe uh you know switch to a presentation you can send maybe you're sending that video to an echo 360 or a media site or an epiphan perl so there's a lot we can do with these preset zones that really makes the simple track a special camera we'll also take a peek at the camera management software and this software allows you to manage all of the simple track twos on your network it allows you to configure all of the fine-tune adjustments for pan tilt and zoom speeds tracking sensitivity it also allows you to record directly to the computer connected to the camera or directly to an sd card although probably 90 percent of our customers are recording to a content management system or a learning management system like blackboard or moodle or echo 360. i talked a little bit about touchless control and automation using these preset zones but i want to stress that touchless is important and in in this modern world it's nice to be able to give a teacher a way to control a uh their audio visual system without having to touch a surface that might need to be cleaned later and that's where these preset zones come into play because we can tell the crestron system to do something specific when a teacher walks in front of a specific area using that 4k reference camera on the bottom of the camera so pretty cool stuff and this camera is able to live stream so you can live stream directly from this camera directly to blackboard to facebook to youtube panopto it is live streaming ready and it's got that audio input there if you'd like to include audio with the live stream so a customer of ours and we have a case study video on our website that we can share you can take a look at is the simple track 2 being used with echo 360. an echo 360 is a great lecture capture system it captures video via sdi and hdmi so that the teacher and the students can look and kind of choose whether they want to see the presentation or the notes captured from the whiteboard but what really is amazing about this lecture capture solution is that the camera's automatically tracking the echo 360 system is already automatically publishing and the canvas system is allowing everything to be scheduled in one single place and it really just makes the whole operation of lecture capture easier for everyone to use so i'm a big fan of that and honestly this is another scenario using epiphan which also has some great integrations with kaltura moodle and panopto again using an auto tracking camera to capture the video but then using a lecture capture system to do the integration directly into your learning management system and in this scenario we're showing a wireless lapel system this is the harmonic blink which we have here we can kind of show off but it's it's a great little system for automating lecture capture mike can we take a quick peek at the software so i wanted to show this to you guys just a quick peek at the software so you guys could see what how this is all set up with these tracking zones and these blocking zones and so here's the software and so this software here i'm going to walk over next to mike so we can go over it together is showing the live video from two different simple tracks that we just demonstrated mike is in the main view but mike if you click device management just so that they could see at the top tab there this is where all of your simple tracks would show up so you know if you've got we have customers have 30 40 50 of these simple tracks they can each have a unique name they report back their serial number the version that you have so you can keep them up to date and you know consistent with what you're doing it's just a nice management tool now if we go ahead and stop tracking on let's say this main one for a moment here and go into the settings i want to show uh a little there's a little uh settings button at the bottom there and what will happen here is it shows you our tracking area so this is the kind of tracking area that we have that way you know mike who is down here right any movement that he does is not even going to interfere because not even in the tracking area now mike let's just for an example show click click blocking zone one and just go ahead and click that and just it should be inside the tracking zone and just let's say those chairs over there there's people that's sitting there we don't want them to throw off the auto tracking we can go ahead and put a blocking zone there and now any movement in that area will be you know that's what a blocking zone does now let's turn that off because i like to walk in that area we also have these preset zones down here now there's those four preset zones now those preset zones we'll come back to in a minute uh but those are those zones where if there's motion in that preset zone the camera can do a couple different things we want to call a preset and stay there so we can temporarily turn auto tracking off automatically if we'd like but we can also automate crestron extern control systems and other third-party systems as well so we'll take a peek at that in a moment but let's go to the next tab here basic two which is at the top kinda there you go this is some really nice information that you can tweak for your professor but the ability to turn auto zoom if you wanted to be able to zoom in on it in and out for you automatically the tracking sensitivity the pan and tilt speeds we've kind of gotten this where we like it so we'll leave it where we have it but every room is a little different every prison presenter is a little different and usually you don't need it to track too fast because the focus is on recording those white whiteboards and the blackboard notes let's go to the next tab over here um yep here we go these are the preset zones and again this is a little bit technical but for those of you who are interested in that we have some more information about it this is where you can say if presets if there's motion in preset one send a send our crestron system a command to you know to do x y z and so it's a really cool new feature that i just wanted to share now if we get out of main view and we exit let's exit this really quickly at the bottom and then we'll just turn tracking back on in case we feel like tracking again there let's go to remote playback really quickly at the top there's a tab there this is where we have the capability of recording directly to the camera and you can record to the camera you can view the recordings that are on the camera generally it's just a backup all right so i just wanted to show that we'll answer questions as we go forth but that is a good look at the huddlecamhd simpletrack 2 and the software that's available and we've got a great case study that you guys can check out with case western university now next i'd like to talk about the ptz optics cameras they're ideal for those medium to large size conference rooms where you want to put in maybe a 12x or a 20x or a 30x camera these are more used in higher education um and maybe high school level classrooms because we have the ability to run longer cables supports poe power over ethernet sdi which is a great solutions very reliable these cameras have a five year warranty and they include things like ndi and a lot of different integrations that really make using the cameras uh super popular there's three different models really there is an sdi model and of course these are available in gray and white there is an ndi model you can see the ndi logo there and then if i flip this one around i want to flip two at least two of these around to show the backs there's a usb model which has got the plug and play usb connectivity and then we have you can see this one over here i should flip this one around let me have it set up here um we have an sdi connectivity with hdmi and ndi and then and one with hdmi and usb and the usb works with with zoom and all the different pan tilt zoom remote camera control options as well so it's a it's really popular and it's very easily mountable on a wall on a ceiling we've got a lot of different scenarios mounted even right here in our studio that we can share off but people mounting these in all different types of locations a lot of schools are doing two ptz cameras as we'll show in a case study in fact mike let's show the video from that rosemont case study on mute and i just want to show a couple quick shots of a case study in a classroom where they're doing two different ptz cameras in a single room which is really popular the case study is available on our youtube channel and i just want i just thought it would be a good example so if we just scrub forward you can see behind me there's a ptz camera there in the front of the room that shows the remote students the either the teacher because remember these are ptz cameras so you can move it to show different angles so there's one scenario where this teacher is showing herself as she's presenting to the class and then there's another camera in the back of the room so whether the teacher is addressing a remote audience or the students in the actual classroom having two ptz cameras really helps and a quick note with with that uh setup i want to show here in my presentation is that for a lot of classes they're using a ptz optics usb camera that's the one on the left here there's a usb camera connected to the to the computer just plug and play and then there's an sdi camera that's maybe 50 feet away right and it if you include the wall and the and the ceiling and then that is converted to usb with an sdi to usb capture card so because usb extenders can be sometimes a little hassle um so sdi is really good for those long runs to the back of a classroom in some scenarios in education we have an auditorium we have a theater we have a broadcast club and that's where ptz optics cameras start to become more into the live streaming and video production space and it makes it very nice to have a power over ethernet switch to power all of the cameras sdi coming into a capture card maybe an ip joystick maybe all of that going out to a content delivery network of some sort so we mentioned the rosemont college hybrid model it's been very very popular in many many spaces so take a look inside of that installation there's a touch screen there that she uses two different ptz cameras and it's all running zoom on a small intel nook windows computer so it's a pretty popular scenario now i want to take a quick moment there's a great video of that there of of the remote classroom in action i want to take a quick moment to address esports we have a webinar next week on esports so i'm going to go over this quickly but esports is becoming so huge and it's providing students not just with gaming opportunities but non-gaming opportunities like video production camera operation editor shoutcaster and so i wanted to let you guys know that we've got some really great uh information about esports uh in fact you know a lot of students that we're working with are applying the video production equipment that we offer in esports environments i'm not going to go over this in too much detail because as i mentioned we do have a webinar april 29th i think that's next wednesday or thursday i can't remember but look at this giveaway we have we're giving away 14 webcams a ptz camera and eight i think it's are actually six esports chairs from spectrum in uh industries so uh that's streamgeeks.us i know this is a long uh a long title here building dash n dash esports dash lab dash webinar julia we have to ask our team to make those shorter because that is a very long url to remember but that is a that is a long one i just dropped in the chat an article um the commercial integrator just did on that rosemont college um case study so um feel free to check that out and you can see a little bit more there of course paul mentioned our youtube channel where we uh you know catalog all of our videos from our case studies as well cool well um yeah and maybe we can share that link julia with everybody in the chat if you're interested that's a pretty awesome giveaway uh next week for yes i will i will do that as well awesome and then another um important education scenario is uh is is broadcast clubs and these are becoming more and more popular i've worked with broadcast clubs for many many years i think it's amazing how we're giving students the abilities to learn these skills that can really be applied to almost any industry honestly broadcast clubs really prepare students for real-world scenarios in fact one of my friends avi blooms has joined and he has a broadcast club in the bronx and it's amazing what they're able to do they can help live stream sports for your school they live stream morning announcements they're giving students these great career opportunities here is a student from hubbard ohio using a ptz optics camera and setting up a tally light if many of you guys use tally lights but they're light indication lights that allow the on-screen on air talent to know which camera to look at also wanted to mention that all ptz optics cameras feature a five year warranty and we're giving away a free webcam with every single ptz optics camera today so here's just some examples of some of the learning opportunities that students have live streaming sports for their school this was this was pre-covet as you can tell here but still streaming is is more important than ever in fact live streaming graduations is another big topic here this was last spring which was obviously during the pandemic and you can see here that uh live streaming was the only way to really attend and so we've got some great information we're going to be doing our next live stream on live streaming graduations uh coming up soon so some of the things that are used there joystick controllers ptz cameras to have that professional live stream with just a single camera operator so we're hap we're here for you guys to help we're gonna we're gonna ask um we're gonna jump into a q a now and uh julia pop this in we did receive a stellar service award for our service department from any of you who have ever spoken with our service team they really are dedicated to helping you guys with your projects so we'd love for you guys to succeed and we're here now to ask questions and answer any questions that you guys might have okay we have a question how do i get a tally light to work with your cameras with a roland v1 hd switcher that is a good question now using roland um i have to think about that one um if you wouldn't mind dropping me a line at paul.richards ptzoptics.com i will ask my team about that because roland is one that is a hardware video switcher so as a hardware video switcher um it would have to have a tally light output so i will i will follow up with you on that one i'm not sure i also just dropped into the chat the um the link to the promo um select ptz optics cameras up until may 3rd you um are you know just fill out a form and you can get a free webcam so that tends to work really nicely for you know teachers who want to work from home and um you can give them a webcam to go along with your purchase um so we do have a question um paul can you address classroom audio what are the best solutions for getting solid audio from around the room into the zoom okay great question i'm happy to ask answer that one thank you avi um it's q a time so we're happy to answer that so we have i have a couple different solutions i'll show off here and um it really does depend on on what you're you're trying to pick up um right now i am using a wireless headset right but i'm doing a live stream doing a broadcast i'm the only person in this room that is talking right there's nobody else here that's part of this conversation so having a nice little wireless headset is the best option but it's a little pricey because you have to buy the wireless headset you have to have batteries you have to have a a usb capture system to capture the audio from the sure wireless system and it's a little expensive but for what we do it works for a lot of classrooms this this product here is called the huddlepod air and it's 299. so it's less than the cost of even just a headset and this is wireless so a lot of teachers actually keep it plugged in unless they feel the need to unplug it and move it closer to students and this was so popular so this is just a plug and play you plug it into the computer mac pc windows totally wireless from the computer running zoom or any other solution and this chat pod totally wireless put it anywhere you want on here you can mute the yourself you can turn the speaker off so you don't hear the far enough so you can turn it up and down and it has an eight-hour battery life what happened was that that was so popular yet there's some bigger classrooms this has a 12 foot radius this speaker phone here is a dual chat pod so this is the huddle pod air duo and this adds two speaker phones and again a lot of teachers leave these charged up leave it up leave one right on their desk and then a second one to go kind of in the middle of the room so this one especially is a great product i think it's 599 for two wireless speakerphones and these can be just plugged in all the time so they're always charged and then unplugged for eight hours and then just plug it back in so that is what we have from huddlecam hd the other camera that has the built-in microphones this is the hubblecam 3xa and 10xa this is a ptz camera with built-in microphones again just a single usb connection on the back so very easy for a teacher plug it into their macbook their laptop single usb connection you know they're using another usb connection for a document camera or you know another thing so this is pretty popular in fact we had a school district standardize on these and it's just because it's so easy it's just one single usb connection right to the computer comes with a remote control so you can pan tilt and zoom it to what you need to and capture the entire room with audio here that's how beamforming microphones really work well for that and we have another question paul um carlos would like to know if uh you know the cameras come with uh streaming software or is that another expense so you can talk to that a little bit about how you can stream direct sure so um basically a couple things here one is my favorite free live streaming software is called obs it's totally free and i actually wrote a book that is also free called the unofficial guide to open broadcaster software there's so much you can do with uh literally free tools out there in fact another one more designed for teachers is called technology tools for education which builds up to using obs totally free to live stream to record in hd in fact we had a video on our youtube channel about the quality of zoom recordings yes zoom is super easy but the recording quality is really not even acceptable in like standard youtube scenarios the bit rate of a zoom recording is is between one and 2 megabits per second that is super super low that's because everything's going up to the cloud and bandwidth is a big issue but if you would like to 10x your quality 20x your quality you could just record everything locally with something like obs which is free and your videos will look literally 10 to 20 times better than the zoom recordings so learning how to use obs for both for live streaming and recording again is totally free for mac pc or linux it's totally free and i i believe at this point at version 27 it's very intuitive um i think that it's something to totally look into so yes that is true another thing is that you can live stream directly from ptz optics cameras and the simple track 2. so all of our ethernet connected cameras you can log into the web browser interface enter the streaming credentials for your live stream and stream directly from the camera which is also pretty popular i do think that you have more flexibility with the software bring the camera into your computer run obs then you can have a lower third then you can have graphics and you can have overlays using something like obs but from a simplicity standpoint it is nice to have the capability of live streaming directly from the camera and i put in the chat the the link to where you can find those free books that paul's written so you can just download them um darian would like to know if the 20x and 30x cameras do auto tracking or is there any plans to introduce this in the future so as of right now um the simple track 2 is our only auto tracking camera and let's just show that off again mike with the auto tracking capabilities um you'll see here that i have you it really is designed with a dual camera scenario so there's one reference camera that allows it to see everything and then there is an optical zoom camera on top now with a regular ptz camera there's no reference camera built in so it's difficult for the cameras to do auto tracking but we are working with a company called martin roberts robotics control and they have a solution that uses unfortunately it's kind of an expensive solution that uses a server and it uses the image coming from the camera to direct the camera that solution is called poly motion chat and it's still not totally ready for action so uh the simple track two is really our best bet for education right now francis would like to know if the cameras can be used in church for live streaming integrated with worshiping softwares and we know the answer to that yes that is a uh great question yes you can use these cameras for streaming in churches uh that's very very popular and um you can stream directly from the camera you can put together a system that supports multiple cameras and our team will be happy to help you put together a system so just reach out to partners at ptzoptics.com and they'll walk you through kind of some of the things you should be thinking about all right i'm dropping that email address into the chat as well so you guys have that and so so far no other questions in our chat um oh how about streaming jimmy would like to know how about streaming a sporting event in a gym great question we've talked about this before yeah that's a great question let me give you some tips about streaming from a gym a when you're in a gym and there's balls flying uh you know a ptz camera can get knocked by a ball and it might be a rare scenario but you may want to look at getting an enclosure there are enclosures basically security camera enclosures we recommend the dot works d2 enclosures not only does it make the entire camera vandal-proof which is which is an awesome opportunity to keep your investments safe because these cameras do have a five-year warranty so you're going to have them for a while you might as well protect them but uh also they uh that that's just a good good reason in a gymnasium scenario to get like an enclosure of some sort and i've even seen people get cages but i i prefer the security camera set up because it has the clear domes you have still great view of everything the second thing to think about when you're live streaming sports is to use 60 frames per second if possible uh the reason why maybe in a in a classroom you would use 30 frames per second is because there's not a lot of motion going on you know you don't need to go crazy with the frame rate because it does double the processing speed but in live sports you know we're used to seeing 60 frames a second because the fast-moving balls and things of that nature look crisper and smoother and more realistic when you use 60 frames a second so to do that you just enable the ptz optics cameras to be 1080p at 60 frames a second you can do that over ndi you can do that over sdi and then bring all that back into your production switcher and that's ideal for live sports the anderson would like to know if the sdi to usb converter introduces any delay it may introduce a very small amount of delay types of sdi converters we generally will recommend it looks like that i'm frozen there i don't know why see that are you there julia i am okay we do have some wind here so it could be it looks like we got a little little jitter there um and i seen more questions on youtube we'll definitely get to um the question was about sdi to usb capture converters um it's it's if you get a good one and we recommend magewell um magewell is some of the best out there there should be no noticeable latency okay um we have another question if you bring line audio into a usb ptz optics camera will the camera embed the audio to the hdmi output yes it can you can embed the audio into usb and hdmi the only video output that does not include audio is sdi currently and let's see we have uh somebody who asked about um mr del toro said uh he recently had to send in his ptz optics sti gen 2 is there an internal clock battery um not that i know of no uh that sounds like a support question it's more of a support question uh we did release some more advanced information regarding time syncing the cameras using an ntp server and so check out that video on there if you really want to frame sync all of your cameras to a time-syncable server that is now available on the latest ptz optics firmware so speaking of clocks you can basically have your ptz optics camera all of your ptz optics cameras in fact um set up to basically um use an ntp server to record directly to a frame syncable uh camera so it's really good for ip video as well mr del toro also mentioned something that we really didn't talk too much about today but the joysticks and he said he's done live live sports with the pete uh with ptz and the huddlecam joystick so we've got you know both of our companies offer joysticks yeah we didn't talk too much about the joysticks uh the newest joystick is the super joy which i have over here and when we're talking about sports yes and if this was a sports webinar i probably would have spent a lot more time on the joysticks the latest joystick is the super joy this cam this joystick uh is really really popular right now it has the ability to not only control multiple cameras the cool thing about this joystick is it also can do multiple groups very easily so you may use this at your broadcast club at your school and have a whole group of maybe four cameras in the broadcast club but you may have different cameras in the football field or the auditorium and you can quickly and easily move this joystick around and have different use cases different groups for this joystick it also has these custom buttons that everyone really likes these custom buttons again can do almost anything http or tcp command wise meaning you can control vmix you can control wirecast you can control a tricaster you can control we haven't controlled zoom with it yet but you can control a lot of things including an epiphan uh pearl uh for lecture capture so really cool opportunities for controlling cameras uh with these joysticks yes we are still getting questions in the zoom chat darien would like to know if we have any tutorials on correctly doing color correction and white balancing with the cameras yes we do we have a video tutorial and we do have a so we have a video tutorial and we have a guide so in our downloads um area of our website there is a color matching guide and there's a video that goes with it so i know it is a struggle for a lot of people the the biggest best place to start is to make sure if you're in a controlled area use manual exposure okay make sure all the cameras are set to the same exposure so in a classroom that would probably make sense unless there's a lot of light pouring in that changes throughout the day if you're in an environment where everything changes a lot then you should be using auto exposure that's the exposure side of things and then is the color matching itself and the color matching is done in the color settings of the camera so when you're doing color settings it has to do with white balance and we have a whole guide on how to choose the right white balance based on the different application that you have shelby has a good general question she says you know there are many placements for cameras in a classroom what do you feel is the best to catch all aspects of the room that's a great question do you have some ideas on that julia or do you want me to take that one well i mean first for sure you want to get a view of of the instructor and any kind of you know technologies behind them like a white board or a blackboard and then you know like we showed in the rosemont case you know if you can also have a camera to to be in the back of the room to show the students for those hybrid learners who want to see you know that's part of the whole engagement piece i think is is the fact that you know students want to see their fellow students when they can't even be in the classroom so yeah mike i don't know if we could show that b-roll maybe one more time but i did get the opportunity to sit in on a live class and see what it's like to have a presenter uh have a lecture actually present to an audience this is similar to what we're doing now right uh sometimes i can't remember from the auto tracker or not but it you know you're now presenting to a virtual audience on a tv and then also trying to accommodate the students who are actually physically in the classroom and this is going to be the near foreseeable future so the camera in the front of the room right i mean by that i mean the camera that's above the tv or next to the tv that allows the students who are joining remotely to see their teacher when the teacher is looking at the television which is happening right now on screen as you guys can see here so so as she's presenting to her screen uh where the where the students are you know she needs it makes sense to have a camera looking at her but as soon as she turns around and she needs to address a teach a student in the room now she's got her back to that camera and that's where the other camera comes in and first for teachers who are using there's there's teachers who are using zoom and there's teachers who are using other solutions um i will say that it's very easy to switch between two cameras using zoom it's a a lot of teachers know as control n to cycle through the cameras that are available inside of zoom so that's a great opportunity to at least have those two cameras a third a lot of times is a document camera or something that can show close-up materials a ceiling camera shooting down um and that would be like a third option but definitely front and back of the classroom is my recommendation yeah that's what i would say too so um back to sporting uh jimmy has another question how well does the auto tracking camera work in a sporting situation ah that's a great question it really doesn't work very well in sports so that this is a lecture capture scenario as you maybe saw in the presentation if you if you were here earlier it's really set up to track a a single presenter at the front of a room so we've got a lot of tools in there to have blocking areas to block where maybe the students are to block maybe where a television is i have a tv over here you'll see this tv is certainly not um you know screwing anything up when i walk over here you know the tv has some movement on the background that's not going to screw up the auto tracking capabilities but in a sports environment there's just too many different people moving too much movement for reliable tracking of a single person because this camera uses facial and motion tracking so it's looking for that one main presenter mike would like to know if the tracking camera if you can use it with an rs232 and if so is it possible to switch tracking on and off um can you use it with rs-232 is it possible to turn tracking on and off yes the camera includes rs-232 and rs-485 so that is the standard you know serial control communication capabilities and that can be integrated into a crestron or an extern control system for example or a serial joystick controller using the protocols available on our website including visca now regarding the preset zones that does give you the ability to also use the camera to control control systems in a more automatic way a more touchless way right by somebody walks into the preset zone you can trigger an http or a tcp command to then have a crestron or control system do something so that is something that you probably won't find in any other auto tracking cameras currently that i know of so it's kind of got both input and output capabilities for control capabilities mike showed earlier how to manually turn tracking on and off that's not there's no automated way of doing that but there is a way to do it with the control protocols and obviously the software that's included i am just looking for uh we just redid our website the ptz optics website so um corey is interested in uh getting the link to where the guides for white balancing are there is a brand new website so i apologize um for that the brand new website um has a download oh wait there's a camera settings guide yes the camera settings guide that is it that's it okay i will just drop that link into the chat here and then you can access that it's a pdf um i think we do have another question [Music] this is from mtarpy i'm just finishing up an install at an education system in an art museum with three cameras per classroom there's a ptz and overhead and a tripod on a dolly cam using obs and a stream deck using ndi virtual cam and zoom and controlling audio in the classroom so that students in class can see and communicate with people at home it's been a bit tricky any suggestions on how to wrangle that effectively so it sounds like the audio piece is is what's um presenting the most difficulty from from the gist of this question if i'm reading that correctly yeah and from that amount of information it's hard to provide guidance audio is generally a tricky scenario and you know we showed some basic audio you know usb connected solutions which are the the huddlepod errors for example but audio can get tricky in larger spaces when you're using ip video with all with you know different types of technologies so i i would say send me an email at paul.richards at ptzoptics.com and i'd have to take a closer look at how you have things wired and take a peek at the wiring diagram and then also think about what's easiest for the teacher to manage in a realistic setting the other thing that we recommend you know we work with an e-commerce division but nareva makes great sound solutions so you know that might really be an option too for you yeah they have great audio bars [Music] okay um aaron wants to know can older rg fix coax cable with bnc connectors be used to pass sdi from ptz optics cameras around with a 150 feet of distance it's definitely possible um you know i'm not exactly sure the exact coax cable that you have but yes it is possible essentially you need to look up the bandwidth capabilities of that cable and remember that you know you're sending uncompressed video off of these cameras so it probably won't handle 1080p at 60 frames a second which requires 3g sdi cabling which is fairly new but it may be able to handle 720p video at 30 frames a second so you just need to look up the you know the quality of the cable and the bandwidth is usually what you're looking at there that it can handle and then set the resolution and frame rate of the ptz optics camera accordingly so what do you think are we ready to do that giveaway we should and i just wanted to answer one more question i saw from from dan he's asking using a ptz camera as an encoder meaning streaming directly off the camera do you need to log into the camera to start the broadcast or just power up the camera the great news is you can just power up the camera so if you're using facebook or youtube they do offer the option to have a persistent url so a persistent stream key that never changes you pop that into the camera save it reboot it and it starts streaming turn the camera off obviously the stream stops the next turn you time you turn the camera on it just starts again so it looks like we have time for just one more question maybe we're it's 156 so we just want to try to wrap up the two um graham would like to know if there's any way to get the microphones from the huddle cam to work with hdmi rather than just usb well those are really wireless usb speaker phones and that's what they're designed for um if you were to possibly run the audio out of one of these into a ptz optics camera it's possible to embed that audio into an hdmi output but really that would not be common um common practice most customers are using these plug it into your computer connect it to zoom it's your microphone at your speaker and that is kind of the tried and true kind of trouble-free way of using these now i'm gonna pull a winner for someone is going to win a huddlecam hd pro so these are in stock uh they've been really really popular as you can imagine and we have had some issues keeping them in stock in the past but we've got lots of them now and we're excited to send one to one of you today it is going to be awesome and we have here i'm gonna pick the winner and then i'm just going to pop it into the chat um julia so we can we can share it with everyone because they have to be here alison barkley and so i'll just pop it in the chat if she's not here i think i see someone named allison in the chat i see an allison who's in our our meeting um are you here allison it looks like she's here oh you know what she might not even be able to unmute herself i'm gonna go ahead and let everybody unmute themselves if they have any final questions i'll let allison on mute hi can you hear me yeah hi yes yeah i i've been here watching awesome congratulations allison uh i'll send you a quick email and then you can just send us your address and we'll send we'll send out the huddlecamhd pro to you awesome thank you so much no problem now i just allowed everyone to unmute themselves if there's somebody who is still waiting and didn't get guests to ask a question please feel free to ask a question while we're here is that all right mike can we go over a little bit if there's a question um i have a question oh sure go ahead um i would like to find out because i'm looking at the the ptz um camera that does the the tracking that i want to find out if i want to use that tracking because i have a pasta that's really more moves a lot when he when he preaches so i just want to make sure i wanted the final one how much is the price and could i use the track tracking camera to ndi that is a good question so first of all uh the price is 299 and i will say that we're really getting close to uh a lot of people have been asking for ndi and i think that if you if you stay tuned ndi will will very likely be something coming out soon i know we've been asked about it our engineers are working on it it doesn't ship with ndi but you do have the capability of connecting via usb to your computer sdi to a capture card which you could connect to it that way and then ndi is something we are very close and we're working on um to hopefully have have available okay okay thank you no problem all right um raymond is asking what is the range of the tracking camera it can go up to 50 feet away so 50 feet away to capture a head and shoulder shot so it's quite a range ideal for those medium but it can also be closer as well yep all right well great job and i i think um you know we're pretty much done um awesome feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions um follow up if you'd like a copy of the presentation um we are more than happy to share that with you and um as paul mentioned you know we won the systems contractor news we won an award for our stellar service so our support team is is really there um to help support you throughout your project and along the way if you get stuck at all so thanks for joining us today thanks guys take care bye bye you

Channel: PTZOptics

Views: 1,153

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Live Streaming Camera, PTZOptics, Broadcast Camera

Id: mAgcqSyu178

Length: 70min 45sec (4245 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021