App: PTZ-Director
Developer: LiveSkills Menssen & Ebelt GbR
Genres: Photo & Video

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

You can connect a joystick to his computer to control camera position with hardware, set axis and button assignment in the app’s joystick settings. There is also a fine positioning mode available.

It has an improved Stream Deck plugin, with great new features, supporting 20 functions. Buttons are reflecting states in the app selected multiview, joystick speed).
You can assign “Recall Preset” and “Set Preset” to buttons, where the buttons can show a preview of the preset, updating automatically.
Install the plugin directly from PTZ-Director.

You 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 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. This feature isn't suppose by the NDI® protocol, but available in PTZ-Director! Camera vendors support different functionalities, so not all features are working with every camera model.

PTZ-Director recognises 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 user can connect external monitors to display the app’s multiview 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), BirdDog, 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 a simplified, free app called “PTZ-Director One” here in App Store, which has a limited functionality. If you are unsure whether PTZ-Director app works with your camera, use this app first to test it.

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.
In the app you can specify which browser is used to open the cameras web page.

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 / 4350 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 are registered trademarks of Vizrt group.

Stream Deck is a brand of Elgato Corsair GmbH.

Release notes:
• NDI 5.6 integrated
• Improved Stream Deck plugin, with great new features, supporting 20 functions, buttons are reflecting states in the app (selected multiview, selected joystick speed) and you can put "Recall Preset" and "Set preset" onto buttons, where the buttons optionally show a preview thumbnail of the preset, updating automatically. You can install the plugin directly from PTZ-Director.
• Full-window video playback view
• Long-press of joystick buttons can be used for more triggering functions. E.g. you can use normal button press to recall a preset and long-press for setting a preset, this doubles the number of possible functions controlled by joystick buttons.
• Setup how to open camera web page (Safari, Google Chrome, In-App browser, default web browser).