Tips & Tricks for Staying Organized as your IP Production Grows

Описание: Welcome to another PTZOptics tutorial video. This video is a helpful addition to your PTZOptics camera setup videos for either SDI, USB, NDI or your ZCam. This video includes tips and tricks for staying organized as your IP production grows and it compliments our recently published IP networking implementation videos. Therefore you may find it helpful to review your specific camera, producer kit setup or networking setup videos for more detailed information before you watch this video.

If you are considering using multiple PTZOptics cameras for your video production, live streaming or communications system, it is important to understand the IP networking capabilities of your cameras. In this video, we will review the details you should consider regarding the management of PTZOptics IP addresses, multicasts addresses, and friendly names on your local area network.

As you may know, we always suggest setting up a static IP address for your PTZOptics cameras. This can be easily done using our Mac or PC IP Address Settings Tools available for download at PTZOptics.com/downloads. By default, PTZOptics have a static IP address of 192.168.100.88 or .99 depending on your camera model. This default IP address can be referenced on the bottom of your camera. You can access and update this default IP address using our Mac or PC IP Address Settings Tool. You can find a guide for this at help.ptzoptics.com or detailed inside your camera setup video.

You can also set up your PTZOptics camera with a DHCP IP address, this will automatically assign an IP address to your camera that is in the range of your unique local area network assuming your router is enabled with DHCP. You can quickly reveal your cameras IP address at any time using the IR remote control. Once you have set up an IP address for your camera go ahead and log into the camera using any web browser. When prompted enter the default login credentials which are admin/admin. You may want to consider updating these login credentials in the system tab of the IP interface. Recording your cameras IP address is important because you can also use this address to control the camera with third party software solutions such as OBS, Wirecast, vMix, Livestream Studio, TriCasters, and the new PTZOptics Mac and PC control apps. Try the new Camera Preset Map feature in the PTZOptics control app with a panoramic image of your production space.

Once you have set up your cameras IP address, you should consider setting up a multicast address for the camera as well. By default, PTZOptics cameras have multicast disabled. This is done because not all networking hardware can support multicast video traffic. The multicast feature is essentially the ability to send a single stream of multimedia (audio & video) to multiple destinations on your network without clogging up your network. That means that a single stream of bandwidth, let's say 12 Mbps, can be sent to a total of 100 devices with only 12 Mbps of bandwidth used on your switch. This is very different from Unicast which is how most networks are set up by default. Unicast video traffic will stack up bandwidth on your network for each user accessing a unique video stream. PTZOptics cameras are capable of delivering 2 Unicast video streams over your network simultaneously. With multicast enabled, you can deliver video to more users more efficiently.

Note: Make sure that your network is set up to handle multicast traffic before enabling this feature. To use multicast each PTZOptics camera should have a unique multicast address. You can assign a multicast address in the “network” area of your cameras IP interface. Once you have determined a unique multicast address for the camera you can turn multicast on. You can turn multicast on by clicking the on radios button and clicking the apply button. Finally, reboot your camera.


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