Automate PTZ Camera Movements with vMix for the Pre-Show
In this video we show you how to set up cameras to actually move independently without having to worry about doing it yourself great for pre-shows, all these and more, coming up next.
So this is something I’m really excited about. A lot of people when they’re on live stream start to pre-show a good hour maybe half hour before the real live event. That can be a time where you can be good at the message out that your live stream is going to happen on YouTube, on Facebook, all of the automated messages happen. Give people time to get to that live stream and see that it’s live before the live show. A lot of people show a countdown timer.
PTZ Cameras Automated Control
But what’s really great that you can do today with just a couple of pent out zoom cameras is you can automate the Pent out zoom operations to be going every five or 10 seconds to different areas in your venue and you can actually automate that whole process.
So first of all we have to set up the IP control of each camera. So each camera needs to be on your network with an IP address. What we do is we just put that IP address into vMix and connect to the cameras so that vMix can control the cameras.
What I’m going to do is create a couple of different presets. You can see it has a create input at this position. So when you do that you’re creating a completely new input and we’re going to use those inputs to create a playlist of inputs which will cycle through various different positions that we want to automate.
vMix PTZ Control Menu
So this is position two, and we have three positions per camera. What we’ll do is when we turn on the playlist setting in vMix it will rotate automatically through each one of these positions at a time and transition that we’ve select. So I’m just going to select one more position for this camera and then I’ve got a module three position for the next camera.
So once we have all of our position set up, you can see we create one more, these are actually creating inputs inside the vMix so I just created three inputs there and let’s just go ahead and connect to the IP address of the camera which I have written down here to the second camera and you see that that would be done on the PTZ tab. You just select the PTZ optics VISCA UDP dropdown. Again, we have full control of the cameras directly in vMix. I’m just going to create two or three different pre-sets here.
Create PTZ Position in vMIx
If we can try to scroll to what’s basically end up happening you can actually see it happening right in front of me is that once all of these pre-sets have been created we can use the playlist tool which is right here at the bottom of vMix. You hit the cog tool.
So that’s something I’ll show in the moment here is that the cog tool at the bottom of vMix allows you to, this is vMix running in there, the playlist open here, and I’ll show that full screen in just a moment, that once that playlist has been set up that’s where we can go in and that all of these inputs and all of these inputs have pre-set positions, PTZ positions stored in them.
So you’re seeing here, it’s actually working live there and you see I have it set every five seconds. The cameras are going to move to a different location. But let’s just go back to our video here and the vMix set up. There it is. That’s my third position.
vMix Playlist with PTZ Inputs
Now, this is the playlist tool. On the playlist tool what I’m going to do is I’m going to do is I’m going to select each of the pre-set positions that I’ve created. You can see it has PTZ at the beginning there and I’m going to choose. Since I have two cameras, I’m going to choose one from each camera and so I’ve got all of my six positions. Then, when I double click them, I can—you can go ahead and select the duration you want to stay on that pre-set position, and the transitions; so whether you want it to fade, or zoom, or wipe, to the next pre-set position.
So, I’m going to set each one of these for roughly two seconds. We’ll do a fade and you can choose how long you want that fade to take. That’s a little trick where you can actually have it be a long fade and that will actually make it so that the transition will not actually show the panning and tilting and zooming.
So it’s a powerful tool. We have a lot of control. But just for ease of use we’ll do a quick fade and a two second pan and all we have to do is set that on a loop and press start.
So as soon as I press start there and close this you will see that the cameras are automatically basically cycling through those presets. You know, I could have set this up a little better but that’s how it works. So it’s a great opportunity to kind of automate camera controls on a pre-show level so that if you’re streaming an hour early you have some kind of exciting movement and information that’s live camera video for your audience in the pre-show.
Thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video. We have a blog post below that will kind of walk you through all these stuff but I think we have a good job of explaining it. Don’t forget to like and subscribe if you haven’t already. Thank you so much for watching.
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