Control position, exposure and white balance of a connected NDI® and NDI®|HX enabled camera
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 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 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 the app with your production environment before buying)
Requires Mac with M1 or newer (works also with MacBook Pro Intel 2016 or newer, but stuttered signal is likelier).
We strongly recommend testing the app via Apple TestFlight code in the users production environment.
Test link for 30 days free testing is available here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/7vdMSs7V
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.
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.
- 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 previews 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 Newtek (PTZ1), Marshall (CV-series), Canon (CR-N 500/300) and Panasonic (AW-UE 100), Datavideo and Mevo. For some cameras it might be necessary to install a paid upgrade if NDI® isn’t already available.
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.
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.
MADE IN BERLIN
LiveSkills is dedicated to combine the power of broadcast equipment with the ease of use and the mobility of iOS devices. We have a long history in both, software development for iOS and macOS as well as broadcasting events to a worldwide audience. Our products have already proven their practicality in many live events and offer a low-cost, reliable and satisfying solution.
© 2017 LiveSkills Menssen & Ebelt GbR