NAB 2024: PTZOptics Talks 蜂巢 Studio and Remote Camera Control

肖恩林: I'm here with Matthew Davis, he's the director of technology for PTZOptics, and today you've got a big announcement. It's coming in June and it's the 蜂巢,对吧? Tell us a little bit about that.

马修·戴维斯: We are super excited about the launch of this brand new product. We've been thinking about this for countless years at this point, and finally have something we think you are all going to absolutely love. What we've created is basically a remote control solution for  相机. 现在, this isn't just focused on our own 相机; we focus on as many 相机 as possible, currently supporting over 400 unique models. So what we've got here is a nice solution for a variety of producers out in the wild.

The 蜂巢 Studio is going to be launching very soon, 当它发生时, it's going to have three different tiers available to the end users. These tiers start with a free basic model. They'll have one camera that they can control and experience the platform a little bit. You can jump up to a three-camera solution or an unlimited camera solution depending on your needs.

肖恩林: And so these tiers are available on a subscription model?

马修·戴维斯: They're subscription, they'll come in a monthly or yearly flavor depending on people's needs, 预算, all sorts of things like that.

肖恩林: So you're controlling remote 相机 with software. Give us a bit of an overview.

马修·戴维斯: So you will have a couple of ways to approach the system. There'll be a nice little agent you can run on your PCs; it'll connect everything on your 网work and make everything really easy. The same agent will allow you to operate the system even without the cloud. So you get the same interface to control everything regardless of whether you're cloud-based or not at the moment. 现在, 最妙的是, once you go cloud-based, is that those 相机, if they're PTZOptics, don't even need an agent. They don't need a PC in the middle. You can literally send one of our 相机 to the other side of the world, they plug it into the inter网, and it will show up 正确的 in your studio, in the web interface.

肖恩林: And if they're one of the other 400 相机 that you have already programmed in there. It's just a bit of simple programming,对吧?

马修·戴维斯: 是的. It's as simple as if you have a Windows or Mac PC, you run a little agent on there, and it will accomplish the identical thing for you.

So beyond just that, there's some nice low level of switching that people will get in here. I mean, you've got a bunch of 相机, you kind of need some way to do something with those. And why we might have switching? The software allows you to have an 抗利尿 output so you can bring that into your existing vMix systems, your 奥林匹克广播服务公司, your TriCasters, and leverage your existing equipment already. The platform will also handle recording auto tracking, so if your 相机 don't actually already have auto tracking, the platform will add that for you.

肖恩林: And that's kind one of 最妙的是s I saw when I was watching the demo was that it's supporting 相机 that don't natively have auto tracking built in, and it's not only just really quick movements,对吧? I mean, you guys call it "cinema movement."

马修·戴维斯: We've done this before. I appreciate you identifying that because, we could deploy a nice auto tracking that does all these robotic movements and all the movements that we do. We're trying to bring to the table something that makes it very easy for each end user to produce something of a high quality. We all know what TV production and movie production look like, and while we all want to attain that, it can be a little bit unrealistic sometimes either with experience or the equipment that you have on hand. But with something like the 蜂巢 Studio in the middle, you're allowing people to bridge that gap very easily.

肖恩林: When you're looking at auto tracking, what are some of the human elements that you've incorporated into this technology to make it feel like there is a human operator on it and we're able to control it a little bit better or make decisions to say I want left or 正确的 or center bias?

马修·戴维斯: So I was very fortunate actually, 感谢NAB, I got introduced to a producer near the very beginning of us launching all of this. He imparted to me what they would use in their television studios and the styles of production that when they had a hand operator, 他说, "No, no, no, I see the movement you've got going on. It works, but here's how you ease it. Here's how you smooth it. Here's what I would expect my camera operator to do."

And literally as soon as I had somebody kind enough to share how they did it, 好吧 guess what? There's no reason we can't bake it into a platform for end users where they don't even need to be aware that they're doing these cinematic movements. It's really making it happen for them.

肖恩林: 这是优秀的. So let's talk a little bit about the recording capabilities. Once we get this footage up into the cloud, now we have the ability to stream it, but can we ISO record each individual input?

马修·戴维斯: 完全. And then the beauty with the system is, if you have existing on-premise equipment, you can be doing it in the cloud, you can be doing it with your existing equipment. You can even be doing it on the remote production end of it--not true ISO recording per channel--but at least a single recording coming out at that point.

肖恩林: Al正确的, let's go have a look.

马修·戴维斯: So what we're looking at here is actually the 蜂巢 Studio operating in a local mode. So what's going on here? We have 相机 that are local to this 网work. In theory, we're not using any cloud resources. Nobody'd have to pay for anything in this type of mode. One of 最妙的是s I was talking about before, the ability to support multiple studios. So from this one interface I can actually jump around to. We're going to have some fun here. 我们来看看 保罗's home office is actually live. Some of the neat features we've got here, we've got a click to center, so you can make it different sizes, you can zoom in on different areas. If we come back out, you'll see that we also have things like a nice cineframe or the C center. So we saw what that movement did

肖恩林: And that was the really fast one. Whereas the cine movement is the smooth one--the human operator imitation.

马修·戴维斯: 是的. One of the things that we have heard from clients--as much as I strove to get all these cinematic movements, whether it's in the 相机 or this platform, ultimately we had a lot of clients that were like, "No, no, no, no. I do a lot more scene switching. I just want it to move quickly to where it needs to go."

肖恩林: Are there timing controls or is it a preset duration of that movement?

马修·戴维斯: It is a preset duration, but you can alter the time spans on it by adjusting the movement speeds. You also have more basic control capabilities. So here we get a nice little arrow. The further out you go in theory, maximum velocities that'll be reached. This has a pretty slow speed set for it, it looks like. 还有什么?? So if we come over here to our controls section, this in theory would be everything that you would natively find in the onscreen display. 每一个调整, 无论是图像, 运动控制, you get it all exposed through this web interface. You do not need to go messing with jumping between a camera's web interface or control platforms or management platforms. Just one spot to do everything from. One of the other nice aspects you've got here is the ability to easily color balance between multiple 相机 using one interface to be able to compare between multiple ones.

We can quickly set these into the available modes that are available and then go into nice manual. I'm going to make this look real funky, 但是你可以看到, you're able to make these live adjustments on the fly. You get some random light that comes into your scene, you can actually adjust for that without a problem. As we know, it's not always predictable when you go into live production. 不幸的是, one of the other nice aspects of the system is this ability to not just compare between two PTZOptics 相机, 两台索尼相机, but one of the larger things that we hear is, balancing between 他们现有的 Sony, 他们现有的 松下, and our PTZOptics can get to be a very difficult thing. Once you've got this unified interface with all the same controls, actually getting them in line becomes an easy feat for almost any beginner even.

肖恩林: And that's big because so many camera manufacturers have very poor camera color controls. They just don't play 好吧 with others.

马修·戴维斯: 是的, and one of the nice things that we've found is that as we gain control over these 相机, we found ways where we could implement better control over their color aspects than they were offering to their own end users.

肖恩林: Let's go through an end-to-end workflow. So you start off with your PTZ camera, you connect with your 蜂巢 Cloud, and then what?

马修·戴维斯: That's where the magic really happens. You've got all this stuff floating around in the cloud, but where do you get it? How do you direct it? What do you do with it? So within the 蜂巢 platform itself, you've got a couple of options. The high platform itself will have an 抗利尿 output, so you can bring it into existing workflows with TriCasters, 奥林匹克广播服务公司, vMix, 没有问题, or the large amount of 抗利尿 supporting products out there. 现在 you also have the option, if you wanted it do to have on-premise equipment for mixing. So just because your camera may be remote and your producer may be remote, 好吧, there's no reason that the local equipment that somebody's already invested in can't be used for all the recording everything. 一直都是. You're just handling control. Then at that point through 蜂巢. 更进一步, if you start getting into the recording capabilities, you're starting to look a little bit more at the post-production end of this.

肖恩林: And then the streaming. Is that done locally or is that done in the cloud, from the cloud?

马修·戴维斯: That can actually be done either way. It has a cloud mode and a local mode. So you don't need to eat up your cloud resources, so to speak, if you don't need them. And you can pump 正确的 out from the agent that will work live on your PC, regardless of having a cloud connection or not. 但是,嘿, if you've got the cloud connection, you can do all these extra bells and whistles is the nice thing.

肖恩林: What's a typical use case for the 蜂巢 Cloud?

马修·戴维斯: We envisioned a handful it seems like, between education, the church markets. I actually haven't heard anyone yet that hasn't said, "Oh wait, I have a place for that." From a very large-scale, end-user sales type of scenario where they saw amazing benefits to allowing producers to make their talent look very good as they were presenting different products. But we're finding a lot of interest, 奇怪的是, in the educational market, way more than I originally thought. Beyond that, we've always had remote producers. People that are generating the studio in boxes have also been very intrigued by this, with the idea that they can have one of our 相机, they can have a box ship it off, and there's nothing else for them to do.

肖恩林: Let's talk a little bit about latency. So how much time does it take to get up into the 蜂巢 Cloud and then back down?

马修·戴维斯: So, I like to do this as an example for most people. I can get into the numbers, but it has allowed me traveling over 3,000 miles to actually properly track an individual by hand. There were no missteps, 没有问题s. It was a very natural feel to it. As far as latency goes, depending on the scenarios, like 正确的 now what we're seeing is probably less than 300 milliseconds, and that's for that 3,000 mile journey to occur.

肖恩林: 这是快的.

马修·戴维斯: Yeah, it's really fast. And we've seen lower, but I'm not going to go claiming any numbers there for anyone yet.

肖恩林: Thank you very much, Matt.