Save up to 100 positions with preview, connect an USB joystick and Stream Deck. Control 4 NDI® and NDI®|HX enabled cameras with your Mac Silicon.
PTZ-Director for macOS
LiveSkills, announcing its support for software-driven IP workflows using NDI®.
Joining the industry’s largest IP ecosystem of products and the rapidly expanding number of companies enabling IP-based customer workflows, LiveSkills integrates NDI® and NDI®|HX into its software for monitoring and control NDI® sources in a standard Ethernet local area network.
NDI is a brand of the Vizrt Group and a royalty-free technology that allows video and audio sources to be shared bi-directionally across a network, eliminating the need for costly direct connections, expensive cable runs, and infrastructure upgrades while turning every source into a destination instantly available anywhere on the network.
With PTZ-Director software the user is able to control position, exposure and white balance of the connected NDI® and NDI®|HX enabled camera (white balance control depends on the camera type)
A user can connect a joystick and Stream Deck to his computer to control camera position with hardware.
Features
- Control and monitor up to 4 NDI® or NDI®|HX enabled PTZ cameras from different vendors at the same time
- Connect joystick to position your PTZ camera like a pro
- Connect Stream Deck to work in your familiar production environment
- Connect external monitor and watch multiview or main view in HDMI resolution
- Save and recall up to 100 positions for each camera with assigned preview pictures
- Control iris, gain, shutter as well white balance for your NDI® enabled PTZ cameras (test your production environment with „PTZ-Director One” for free)
Requires Mac with M1/2/3 or newer (works also with MacBook Pro Intel 2016 or newer, but stuttered signal is more likely).
We strongly recommend testing the app with free “PTZ-Director One” in the users production environment. „PTZ-Director One“ for one camera is available for free in the Mac App Store:
Download PTZ Director One for free here
Guides, Overview and Connection Diagram
PTZ-Director is compatible with NDI® and NDI®|HX. NDI® and NDI®|HX is a registered trademark of Vizrt group. Stream Deck is a brand of Elgato Corsair GmbH.
But wait, there is more
- Using a joystick, the user can set axis and button assignment in the app’s joystick settings. There is also a fine positioning mode available.
- To work with PTZ-Director in a familiar AV production environment the user can connect a Stream Deck. After installing the PTZ-Director Stream Deck plugin directly from the app, it’s possible to control nearly all functions over the Stream Deck buttons. Also the preview thumbnails will be showed in the Stream Deck buttons and synchronized with the app! Please uninstall old Stream Deck plugin and install it new to be able to use all new features as described in the Stream Deck plugin manual.
- A user can position connected NDI® enabled cameras in pan, tilt, zoom and other optical parameters and can save up to 100 position presets for each camera.
- PTZ-Director stores small preview thumbnails associated to preset position. Each preset slot can be deleted and saved again.
- A special feature allows to recreate the previews of a range of positions or all previews fully automated without changing presets. This can be necessary after new lighting in the same production environment or after installing a new studio setup in the same place.
- In “Picture controls” (depending on camera type) the user can modify the values for iris, gain, shutter, color.
- The app provides 5 user setups for each camera to save manual white balance settings. Camera vendors support different functionalities, so not all features are working with every camera model.
- PTZ-Director recognizes NDI® enabled sources in an ethernet network and provides a list for selecting up to 4 cameras to control in a multi-view and main monitor window.
- The app offers a matching camera profile after identifying the camera model. The user is free to work with these profiles or select a default camera profile.
- The user can connect external monitors to display the app’s multi-view and/or main view full screen. The app offers menus to switch between internal monitoring and external monitor.
- To deal with network conditions the user can switch between receiving high- or low-bandwidth NDI® video.
The app was tested with PTZ cameras from different vendors, such Newtek, Marshall, Canon, Panasonic, Datavideo and Mevo. For some cameras it might be necessary to install a paid upgrade if NDI® isn’t already available. We recommend to test the workflow between your camera and the app with the “PTZ-Director One”, free from the Mac App Store. “PTZ-Director One” includes all functionality of PTZ-Director full version exclude the Stream Deck functionality.
All USB-HID joysticks are working, from high quality „APEM RS desktop” models to inexpensive gaming joysticks.
Hikvision security joystick DS-1005K profile is installed in the app, and although the joystick has only 7 steps resolution, you can use it to work very precisely.
We provide feedback channel to send us reports for not yet supported camera models, which we will then integrate into PTZ-Director.
Not every camera provides control of all values via NDI® interface, this is due to the different levels of NDI® integration by the vendors. Some color, HDR, LUT and gamma settings are often only available on the camera’s local website. The user can open it directly in the app after selecting the desired browser one times in the app settings. Some camera website can’t be displayed on Safari or internal web browsers, due to their optimization for other browsers like Chrome. We recommend selecting a browser in the app settings like Google Chrome or Firefox to open the camera website.
Some camera website can’t be displayed on Safari or internal web browsers, due to their optimization for other browsers like Chrome. In this case you can open the website with a single click in other browsers.
Working with NDI® enabled network can be challenging due to different setups with unmanaged / managed switches, Unicast / Multicast NDI®. We recommend to start testing with only cameras, router, unmanaged switch, Laptop running PTZ-Director and NDI® Unicast settings in the cameras. When your setup is working fine, you can add managed switches like Netgear AV 4250 series or other managed switches, if this is standard in your production environment. We tested with simple Gigabit switches from Netgear, TP-Link as well as High End switches from Netgear (AV 4250 and 4350).
PTZ-Director is compatible with NDI® and NDI®|HX. NDI® and NDI®|HX is a registered trademark of Vizrt group. Stream Deck is a brand of Elgato Corsair GmbH.
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