App: PTZ Director One
Developer: LiveSkills Menssen & Ebelt GbR
Genres: Photo & Video, Utilities

PTZ-Director One is the free variant of “PTZ-Director”. While “PTZ-Director” is able to handle 4 NDI cameras, “PTZ-Director One” only supports a single camera.

With PTZ-Director software the user can control position, exposure and white balance of the connected NDI® enabled camera (white balance control depends on the camera type).

Requires Mac with M1 or newer (works also with MacBook Pro Intel 2016 or newer, but stuttered signal is more likely)

A user can connect a joystick to his computer to control camera position with hardware.
He 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 One recognises NDI® enabled sources in an ethernet network and provides a list for selecting up one camera to control in a multi-view (in “PTZ-Director One” only 1 of the 4 slots is enabled) 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 websites 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 only with 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.

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

NDI® and NDI® I HX is a registered trademark of Vizrt group.

Release notes:
• Preselect the browser in which the camera website is opened (system default, In-App-Browser, Safari, Chrome)
• Fixed several bugs (Joystick handling, a seldom crash when quitting the app).
• Better NDI interfacing