PTZ-Director

PTZ-Director software allows control of position, exposure and white balance for up to nine connected NDI® enabled cameras. The number of displayed NDI® sources is dependent on the Mac’s CPU/GPU performance and Ethernet conditions.

A joystick or game controller can be connected to the computer to control camera position with hardware. Axis and button assignments can be set in the app’s joystick settings. A fine positioning mode is also available.

The improved Stream Deck plugin supports functions for buttons and rotary dials, reflecting states in the app such as selected multi-view and joystick speed. Buttons can be assigned ‚Recall Preset‘ and ‚Set Preset‘ to display a preview thumbnail of the preset, which updates automatically.

The plugin can be installed easily from the support page of our website (find the link in the Settings > General) or used with the new module for Companion v. 3.0 and higher.

Connected NDI® enabled cameras can be positioned in pan, tilt, zoom and other optical parameters and up to 100 position presets can be saved for each camera. PTZ-Director stores preview thumbnails associated with preset positions. Each preset slot can be deleted and saved again.

A special feature allows the recreation of previews of a range of positions or all previews fully automated without changing presets. This is necessary after new lighting in the same production environment or after installing a new studio setup in the same location.

In the ‚Picture controls‘ section (depending on camera type), the user can modify iris, gain, shutter and colour settings. The app provides five user setups for each camera to save manual white balance settings. This feature is not supported by the NDI® protocol but is available in PTZ-Director. Camera vendors support different functionalities, so not all features are compatible with every camera model.

PTZ-Director recognises NDI® enabled sources on an Ethernet network and provides a list for selecting up to nine cameras (or other NDI sources) to control in a multi-view and main monitor window.

The user can connect external monitors to display the app’s multi-view and/or main view full screen.

To accommodate network conditions, the user can switch between receiving high- or low-bandwidth NDI® video.

The app has been tested with PTZ cameras from Newtek, Marshall, Canon, Panasonic, BirdDog, Datavideo, Tenveo, Obsbot and Mevo.
All USB-HID joysticks are supported, from high-quality APEM RS desktop and Hikvision models to inexpensive gaming joysticks.
PTZ-Director also supports game controllers.

A free app with reduced functionality called „PTZ-Director Connect“ is available on our website (https://liveskills.net/ptz-director). This app operates for 15 minutes. It can be used to test compatibility with your camera, input devices or Stream Deck.

Not all cameras provide control of all values via the NDI® interface due to varying levels of NDI® integration by vendors. Some colour, HDR, LUT and gamma settings are often only available on the camera’s local website, which can be accessed directly from the app.

The app allows the user to specify the browser used to open the camera’s website.

Working with an NDI® enabled network can be challenging due to different setups with unmanaged and managed switches, as well as Unicast and Multicast NDI®. We recommend testing only with cameras, a router, an unmanaged switch, a laptop running PTZ-Director and NDI® Unicast settings in the cameras. Once the setup is working correctly, managed switches such as Netgear AV 4250/4350 series or other managed switches can be added if this is standard in your production environment.

PTZ-Director is compatible with NDI® and NDI® | HX.

NDI® and NDI® | HX are registered trademarks of Vizrt Group.

Stream Deck is a brand of Elgato Corsair GmbH.