How to setup Tally Lights w/ PTZOptics Cameras
In this video, we setup Tally-Lights for each one of our live streaming cameras. Tally lights are a great way to notify your on-screen talent which camera you is live (via a Red LED light) and which camera is in preview (via a Green LED light). These lights are an essential non-verbal form of communication between the video producers and the on-screen talent increasing what you can do with your live streams.
new Tally Light
Setting up Tally Lights
At first, I did not fully understand the full value of tally lights in a video production studio. It’s one of those things that you have to see to believe. The Tally Lights we used here are from Tally Lights LLC and they are very easy to setup. You can see in our video that many of the Tally Lights we setup are using simple Velcro tape to place the lights near our cameras. We also installed a Tally Light in the drop ceiling next to one of our ceiling mounted PTZ cameras as you can see in the video. This is an easy process where you can use a screw to place through the drop ceiling and secure to the Tally Light.
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- PTZOptics Tally Light ZCam
The tally light system is powered by a central Hub which connects to our computer with USB. This is where vMix comes in. vMix has support for multiple Tally-Light systems and Tally Light LLC seems to be the easiest system to set up. The instructions in the Settings page for vMix says “there is nothing to setup. This will automatically work.”. We found this to be true, although I did not mention in the video that you do need to install a Windows Driver for the tally lights. Once the Windows Driver is installed, re-open vMix and add your camera inputs. Each camera input has the ability be assigned a Tally Light output. This is the easiest way to have the right Tally Lights assigned to the right camera inputs. Once this is done, vMix does the magic of lighting up the Tally Lights (Red or Green_ depending on where your camera input is inside your video production.
tally lights box
Finally, in lieu of a wiring diagram I have the above picture which shows off the USB 2.0 connection from the Tally Light controller box and the 3.5 mm audio cable connection to each Tally Light. We already had audio cabling connected to our PTZOptics cameras and were able to use that cabling to power and send signal to the Tally Lights. So this was an incredibly easy installation for use this time 🙂
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