In The Trenches Video Series

Patrol, Presets, Auto-Tracking, etc PTZ Functions

In this episode we'll take a deep dive into PTZ functions answering questions such as How do you control a PTZ? Can you control a PTZ from your iPhone? What is a preset? What is a patrol? What is auto tracking? And so much more.

Our speakers today are:

1. > Matthew Nederlanden
2. > Benjamin Larue
3. > Michael Bell
4. > James Campbell

Matthew Nederlanden:

Our Facebook status as a company with auto-tracking is, it's complicated.

Michael Bell:

Yes.

Matthew Nederlanden:

So it's a feature that can work really good, and it's a feature that can not really do what you wanted it to do.

Ben Larue:

What's up, everyone? Welcome to In the Trenches. Today we're going to be talking everything PTZ. And yes, we will be defining what that acronym stands for. So along with me today is our awesome panel of experts. Of course we have our support team manager, Michael Bell.

Michael Bell:

Hey, guys.

Ben Larue:

We also have our product expert, James Campbell, here with us.

James Campbell:

Hello.

Ben Larue:

Awesome. And last, but certainly not least, we've got Matthew Nederlanden, our CEO.

Matthew Nederlanden:

Hi, everybody.

Ben Larue:

Awesome. And he plays dual roles here. He's also the CEO, but he is our resident business owner expert. So that's why we've got some good input from him, on that side of house. So I think we should start off by tackling the elephant in the room here. What does PTZ even stand for?

James Campbell:

I guess I'll take that. PTZ stands for Pan, Tilt and Zoom. So they refer to a type of camera that can be moved around and controlled. So every, PTZs come in different forms. You see some that are more bell shaped, and kind of hang down. There are some that are kind of in dome form, as well. So a bunch of different kind of shapes and sizes. But the primary thing is that you can control them remotely, using your smartphone, your local interface on the recorder, your apps, your web interface. And you can move them around up, down. So panning, tilting, and zooming.

Ben Larue:

Awesome. And do all cameras have this capability? Or is this a capability of only certain, specific cameras?

Michael Bell:

Only specific cameras. So the other cameras that are not considered PTZs, and our instance could be considered fixed lens, to where you can't do anything with it. But we do have a few that do have a zoom function, so a zoom and a focus, you can't move them left-right, up and down, but they can zoom in on a particular area for that type.

Ben Larue:

Gotcha. But the cameras that can pan, tilt and zoom, that's a specific category of those.

Michael Bell:

Correct.

Ben Larue:

Gotcha. That makes sense. Awesome.

James Campbell:

It's a good question, because we have had customers purchase dome or fixed dome cameras and they think, "Hey, where's the PTZ controls? This says I can't control it, what's going on?"

Ben Larue:

Right.

James Campbell:

People really don't realize that that is actually a manual thing. So as you're shopping out there for security cameras, it is important to know that PTZs are specific. Don't assume, just because it's a dome camera, that it can be controlled. Most cameras out there are not PTZs. It's a very small percentage of the market, actually.

Michael Bell:

And on our website it does list PTZ as a particular section. So everything under that section, you are going to be able to move around and control.

Ben Larue:

Oh great. Good. And I think James, you had spoke to it earlier, but with PTZs you can control them locally, at the recording device itself. And do you do that via a mouse, or a joystick? How do you actually interact with the PTZ?

James Campbell:

You just basically control... You bring up the PTZ control option, and then you'll have a virtual joystick, and whatever direction you click in the camera goes in. And so that same virtual kind of controller shows up on your local interface with the mouse, your smartphone, with your finger. You move it in the same direction. And then of course, on the web interface and view station, it's kind of similar as well. You get the same little joystick that pops up to control it.

Ben Larue:

Awesome. So there's a couple different ways you can control it, and it sounds like you certainly can remotely, which is awesome. What are some reasons why you would even want a PTZ?

Matthew Nederlanden:

So there's a bunch of different reasons, depending on which model you have. So you can have PTZs that are not designed to be long range, for example. And you're really just being able to move back and forth. And then you have models that have an extreme amount of zoom. PTZ is generally going to be your most long range camera, for the long range PTZs. And obviously, when you're talking about something that's very far away, it can be important to be able to move it left and right. So something like a varifocal camera, which also allows you to zoom in, that's great for a use case like a gate. The gate is not going to move, where it's going to be. A PTZ might be really good for an open field, for example. You don't really know where they're going to come through, and you do need to zoom in on them.

Ben Larue:

Got you. So, covering sweeping areas, larger areas, it seems.

Matthew Nederlanden:

Specifically for the longer range ones. The shorter range ones have some different use cases.

James Campbell:

PTZs come in different forms and sizes. You've got ones that can see a person a mile away, and more, and you've got ones that are for short distances. So PTZs, to me, act as an auxiliary to your main system. They're good at gathering details, especially from a distance. So anybody from very high security area, where you have potentially somebody manually controlling that PTZ at all times, or during business hours and looking around. To commercial systems where things are being a little bit more automated by presets, patrols, and stuff that we'll talk about I'm sure, later on in this video.

Of course the big downside to a PTZ that everyone should consider, is a PTZ can only see what it sees at the time. You can't go back on your playback, and then zoom out, if you've zoomed in a mile away and you're looking at something a mile away. So that's the one consideration. A PTZ is only as good as what it's looking at, at the time.

Ben Larue:

Gotcha.

Matthew Nederlanden:

And the same thing for left and right. If you point it to the left, it's obviously not seeing what's at the right of your screen.

Ben Larue:

Right. So I think it's important to notate there, that this is an auxiliary type camera, right? A PTZ is not going to replace what a fixed lens camera would give you, in terms of a constant view. So that's cool.

Matthew Nederlanden:

Yeah, I would always say that a PTZ is a good thing to add to the system. It's not replacing an entire system.

Ben Larue:

Right. Because it's common, people ask, "What's the field of view of a PTZ, then? If I can turn it all the way around, can I cover all that coverage?" And like James said, it's what you're looking at, is what's important. So that's awesome. James, you mentioned some words in there about patrols and presets, and things of that nature. So I'm guessing by the sounds of it, these cameras have some special capabilities.

James Campbell:

Yeah, they do. PTZs are more than just cameras that you can control yourself. There's also tools to aid in the operation and control of the PTZ. So the first one we can talk about is presets. Anybody want to take the preset thing? Or I'd be happy to take it.

Matthew Nederlanden:

Do you mind if I sort of frame a little bit, of a larger? I would say that in general these help automate the usability of the devices. So if you're using, let's say the joystick, and you wanted to go back and forth between two different areas very quickly. That can actually take a little bit of time. If you want to have precise movements, you have all these sort of functions. Presets, patrols, patterns, auto-tracking and Autoguard, are all these functions that help automate the usage of this device.

Michael Bell:

And they come with no presets already set up. So that is something that the user will need to set up, because every camera's going to look at something different, every camera's in a different position. So the user will then, after they get their camera mounted, they'll go through and they'll set up what presets that they're looking to get. It's very easy to set it up, it's a one button save, you can rename it at that same time. And it's easy to recall.

James Campbell:

So to even back out a little bit, a preset is essentially a safe position within the PTZ. So like Michael was saying, you move that camera to a spot. Let's just say you have the front entrance, and you zoom in on it, you get to the view you want to, and you hit save. And you can name it, you can put, "front entrance." And then you can go over to your shipping dock and zoom in, move it, save it exactly where you want, and then save that as your shipping dock location, for example. So you can think of these, preset, if you're not quite gathering what that is, almost like a bookmark location. It knows where to go when you click that, and you can call those at any time.

Ben Larue:

Gotcha. So we've got all these presets, these bookmarked locations where the camera looks. From there, are there... Matt mentioned a bunch of other features that are available with the cameras. Is there one that makes sense to talk about next?

Michael Bell:

Yeah, the preset patrol is really great. That one you can take a group of your presets that you've already set up, and have your camera automatically patrol through those presets throughout the day.

Matthew Nederlanden:

So presets would be something that allow the operator to become more efficient in how they're using it. A preset patrol starts to automate that, so you don't necessarily have to use the operator.

Ben Larue:

Gotcha. And it just rolls through the preset that you choose it to go through?

James Campbell:

So when you're setting up a patrol, what you're setting is what preset it starts out with, what preset it goes to next. In the settings in between that are two things. You've got speed, which tells you how quick it goes from preset one to preset two. So the slower it is, the more it's going to go, slowly pan across there, which could be useful if you're trying to gauge what's going on in your facility. Or you can have it go very fast, and it might go boom, boom, across.

There's also the time that you stay at that individual location. Now there's a minimum one on each PTZ that's in the specs, that you guys can see, but you can set it to where one stays at 30 seconds, the next one stays two minutes if you want to. That way you can prioritize how long you want to be at a certain spot. And you can have, I think, what is it? Like 16 presets on each patrol, or something like that. So you can have quite a bit of individual stops on each one, so you can have small stops in between if you wanted to, or you can mess around with the timing and everything like that. So there's tons of customization with this to fit your kind of unique need.

Matthew Nederlanden:

At it's most basic setup, you could set a preset to be able to say, "Look to the left, pan over slowly, look over to the right. Get over there, rest for a few seconds, pan back over." And just kind of do this repeatedly. It can get a lot more complex than that, but at the most basic level, you've got a start point, an endpoint, and additional points you want to set up. And then, how quickly you want to move back and forth between them.

Ben Larue:

Gotcha. Makes sense. So starting to talk about some of the automation features that PTZs afford you, which is nice. Because if I'm an owner and I don't have somebody on staff watching the camera system all the time, I feel like these features would be nice.

James Campbell:

And just a quick thing about patrols too, you can turn them on manually if you want to, so you just hit the play button on them and they'll play that one. You can set it to where, if nothing's going on with the PTZ at the time, you can set them on an Autoguard, which I'm sure we're going to talk about here, in just a second. Or once the PTZ is not moving, it can automatically go into a patrol.

Ben Larue:

So let's actually talk about Autoguard, since you already mentioned it. I think that's a perfect segue.

James Campbell:

Yeah, so Autoguard, what it is. Imagine you're controlling the PTZ, you're looking at something and you go, "What's going on with my shipping dock?" And your normal location is looking at the exit, or the entrance of your facility. And you go look at the shipping dock, and then somebody asks you a question and you get distracted, and you forget what you're doing with the PTZ, and it's stuck on the shipping dock for the rest of the day. And you miss something going on at the entrance. So this is designed specifically to, after the PTZ is no longer being manually operated or under a patrol, that it can go back to a certain preset, it can do any kind of function, basically. It's basically a timeout, if that makes sense, for people.

But it can go back to an individual preset, so it's looking at the same location every time. It can jump into a patrol. So you have a lot of options for that, but most people will go back to a preset location. So really cool function, really useful.

Michael Bell:

Very useful. And that also happens whenever you move the camera manually, you don't necessarily have to use go to a preset. If somebody just comes up to the camera, and they just move it to look at a particular thing that may not be a preset, it'll then go back to its home position.

Ben Larue:

Awesome. Now a random question that I just thought of, that came up while you all were explaining that, does everybody have the ability to adjust or interact with the PTZ on the system?

James Campbell:

A good question.

Michael Bell:

That depends on what the admin has allowed for each user. There are multiple different permissions that are available for pretty much every camera on an NVR, and something like PTZ control can be granted or revoked. So it just depends on what the admin for that particular user sets up.

Matthew Nederlanden:

In other words, the admin could say, "This particular user over here can't see this camera at all. Certainly not even control it, they can't even see it." The next user could say, you could see it, but you can't control it. And then you could have a sort of more advanced user, that can see and control that camera.

Ben Larue:

Oh, perfect.

Matthew Nederlanden:

Especially when you start getting into larger systems, you can bump into each other. Like let's say Michael, James, and I are all logged in, viewing a system. It's kind of pandemonium, if we're all trying to move the PTZ at the same time.

Ben Larue:

True.

Matthew Nederlanden:

So you can control who has access to be able to move the camera, if you want to.

Ben Larue:

Which I could see being extremely beneficial, in certain circumstances. That's awesome. Another feature that you guys mentioned earlier was something about auto-tracking?

James Campbell:

Yeah, auto-tracking is a capability on all of our PTZs right now except the mini PTZ. And there's basically, we have a really good article on auto-tracking, and we kind of bluntly say it here in this article, that auto-tracking is one of those features, and probably the lowest satisfaction rate. And the reason why is two things.

Number one, expectations just generally sort of have to be realigned with what's possible with the technology. And number two, a lot of the older PTZs out there, and still a lot of them on the market actually, only auto-track based on the motion detection. Motion detection is simply pixel based. So it doesn't know the difference between a person, a car, or a branch that's floating in the wind. So it would go and track the branch, and it would be stuck on that branch for literally hours on end. Because it's like, "Hey, motion, motion. Let me go check it out." And of course, it's missing the car is coming in and everything else that it needs, that you think it's going to do.

So yeah, definitely check it, take a look at that article if you're interested in auto-tracking, it goes into it in a lot of detail, but if you do have a camera that's set up with the person and vehicle detection, with some of the VCA options like intrusion detection or a line crossing. It definitely works a lot better than it has in the past. So you set up, for example, a line crossing in your entryway of your location, it can track when a vehicle itself kind of goes past it, and then it can track the vehicle as it's going through your parking lot. And that's kind of the idea behind it.

Matthew Nederlanden:

There's still some problems with that. If you have multiple people on campus at the same time, it may be following a person that doesn't matter to you, that's not a threat, and ignoring someone who is. So it's not always a perfect solution.

Our Facebook status, as a company with auto-tracking is, "It's complicated." So it's a feature that can work really good, and it's a feature that can not really do what you wanted it to do, and it's really hard to create a situation where... Especially in a busy environment, they might have a dozen people on campus at the same time, which one should it track? It doesn't have that sort of queuing system in the way that a human operator would have.

A remote location. Let's say you're an oil and gas rig, and nobody should be here. It can work really well.

James Campbell:

I think with auto-tracking, the important thing to consider with it is, it's never supposed to be a single camera, it-does-everything kind of job. And that's where a lot of the expectations are. They go, "Oh, auto-tracking, this is going to be having like a person in this, and it's going to control it and it's going to know exactly what I wanted to see." [inaudible 00:17:59].

Matthew Nederlanden:

"And now I don't need to buy a security guard. I get to not pay that person." And it's not...

James Campbell:

Or, "I don't need five other cameras to cover my parking lot, because I have one camera with this auto-tracking function." That's just not the case. Your auto-tracking, I always explain this to customers, is it should be considered a great tool to get details. It's very rarely, even when it tracks the right thing, and maybe it tracks a guy coming in that's going to break a window or something like that, in that scenario. And it tracks his car perfectly, but then it's looking at his car, and nobody's coming out of the car for a couple seconds, and it goes, "Okay, I'm done tracking it, let me go away."

Ben Larue:

I'm going back to the home position.

James Campbell:

And misses... It doesn't know a human being is in that car. It doesn't know to wait for somebody to come out of it. So it doesn't have the logic that a human operator is going to have. It may not ever get to that level, honestly. But what it can do is that it may see that car very well enough to potentially get details on the car, potentially even see the person inside the car. And then you hope, you need to have a camera that are covering your general area, so that even if that camera doesn't quite get a good image.... Maybe it's hard, it's far away from when he is breaking this window, but it's still getting the incident.

So you have two pieces of evidence. You have the closeup camera when, even if it's not there from the entire time, you maybe get a face detail, maybe a plate if it's set up correctly. And then you have the further away camera that's getting the full incident. So it's a detail gatherer, is the best... If you have that expectation, you're going to be a lot happier with it. And if you have the expectation it's going to be a one camera, silver bullet solution, you're going to be a lot more upset with it. So that's kind of where I [inaudible 00:19:46] say.

Matthew Nederlanden:

I would also put the caveat that it's somewhat industry or location based. So again, I'll go back to a remote operator, oil rig in the middle of nowhere, probably a good application. A mall parking lot, it's probably going to be really, really difficult to get the results that you want because there's so many people coming in and out, so many vehicles moving. Which one should it track? Even for gathering details, in that sort of environment, you're probably a lot better off having a significantly increased number of regular cameras. Because there's just so much activity that if you're focusing on this activity and zooming in it, you're probably missing that activity.

Ben Larue:

And that kind of goes back to what James said earlier, that PTZs are good at looking at what they're looking at, right?

James Campbell:

Yep. Yeah.

Matthew Nederlanden:

I got brought onto a project a couple of weeks ago to try and help troubleshoot a location that was experiencing a lot of vehicle vandalism. So people were coming into this location, and this location at five different entrances that were really, really far apart. And that sort of thing is really difficult to have one PTZ solve it, that you had five different locations that someone could drive in. Let alone the fact that it wasn't even fenced. So that's just your vehicles, would come in from these roads, you also had the ability that people could walk in from anywhere. That sort of solution, you need a lot of PTZs to be able to have that function. And some people come with this expectation that a single PTZ will be able to move all around, and see everything. That's actually a lot harder when you think about it in the real world of, I might have two people at the same time from very different locations.

Ben Larue:

Does auto-tracking interrupt patrols?

James Campbell:

That's a very good question. And the answer is no. So once the PTZ is actually in a patrol and it's moving, it's not going to be able to then initiate auto-tracking, because the camera itself is moving. So it doesn't necessarily know when motion is anymore. It doesn't know if that car is moving, even if it has the advanced features, it doesn't know if that tree is moving that it really wants to see. So once the patrol is activated, you can't have auto-tracking enabled, and then once it's at a preset, go ahead and auto track somebody else. A lot of people do you want to do something like that, but unfortunately currently that's not currently how any PTZ works, that I'm aware of.

Matthew Nederlanden:

If you think about it from a perspective of, if the camera itself is moving, you end up getting really bad analytic data on, is the object moving? Because it appears to be moving the entire time. So what it does inside the UI, in general, is when you're moving the camera it's not recording it as a motion event. It's not perceiving the motion, it's like turning that off completely, because it sees motion everywhere.

James Campbell:

I think that brings up an even better option for a lot of people, than auto-tracking, which is... We don't really have a cool word for it unfortunately, but it's basically the ability to set a fixed lens camera, and set that on a VCA. And trigger the PTZ to go and go to that location, based on it. Michael, you want to jump into that? You seem pretty [inaudible 00:23:01].

Michael Bell:

It's my favorite thing about a PTZ.

Ben Larue:

Sounds pretty cool.

Michael Bell:

Sorry. So, okay. Just, thank you guys for talking so much about the auto-tracking, support really appreciates that because we do get a lot of calls expecting something more than what it's actually capable of doing. So thank you for that. But the fixed lens camera trigger, that one is our bread and butter.

My favorite thing is setting an intrusion area or a cross line detection for a particular fixed lens camera that is always looking at a particular view, and setting up a line and saying, "If something crosses this line, I want my PTZ to focus in on that line." And that is my favorite thing. It's so nice.

Matthew Nederlanden:

So let me unpack real quick, why that's so great. So let's say you've got the home position for your PTZ looking over here, and it's not looking over there. So it's not recording that. So you have any sort of auto-tracking enabled, it's not seeing the person that's over here. And if you've got another fixed line camera that's able to look at that location, it doesn't matter where you're PTZ, you're not relying on... The PTZ is moving based upon what another camera sees.

And this is so much more reliable and more effective than something like auto-tracking, where you're limited to, "What is the camera viewing now?" But the problem is, what if the person is behind the camera? What if the person is to the left with the camera? The camera's looking to the right. So these fixed lens triggers are definitely the way that we recommend setting all of this up.

James Campbell:

To even give a real world example where you've used this, let me go back, we mentioned that PTZs are only seeing what they're seeing. You can't go back, on playback.

So we have a front entrance, pretty narrow front entrance, and in this case the PTZ was looking towards the right, and we had a camera that's looking at the front entrance with a line crossing set up. Once that vehicle crosses that line, the PTZ knows, we set up a preset on that PTZ. The PTZ knows, once that line's crossed, to go to that preset. And it's able to zoom in and get a better look at the vehicle coming out or going in.

So it definitely, it's an easy thing to set up, but it's definitely something that you want to require... You definitely want to consider planning, on that. Like, how many times is somebody going to go over there, if you're controlling that? Make sure that you're not going to have the PTZ pin balling all around at all times, too. So you don't want to put it necessarily on every camera, but you want to make sure it's strategically placed and planned out.

Ben Larue:

Do these triggers from fixed lens cameras, do they interrupt or disrupt patrol?

James Campbell:

I think they will.

Michael Bell:

I believe so, yes. And then the home position would take over at that, or I'm sorry, the Autoguard would take over at that point after so long of it just sitting there. Then the Autoguard would start that patrol that's already set up.

Ben Larue:

Patrol again, gotcha.

Matthew Nederlanden:

The presets, or the triggers from the other cameras, are a higher priority to the camera than whatever you're saying for Autoguard.

Ben Larue:

All right. Some housekeeping items. Got some questions here. Motors, in these things. There's got to be motors that spin these cameras back and forth, and make these maneuvers. What about the lifespan of these cameras? Are they shorter or longer than normal cameras?

James Campbell:

I can tell you that our warranty is the same on them as a fixed lens camera. Now as far as longevity of a motor, of course anything with moving parts is probably going to have, at some point, they're going to potentially fail. Now, we don't have a higher failure rate on our PTZs, or anything like that. We still offer the five-year warranty option on the PTZs, if you're interested too. That would still cover that motor. But there's things with, the motors are built to last. They're built to be there and make sure that they're lasting for years and years. They're not something that's going to die in a year, and you have to replace them. Especially, on ours. On lower end PTZs, that definitely happens. You've got very cheap motors in there, and-

Matthew Nederlanden:

Those are pretty easy to identify. If the PTZ is made out of plastic, that motor is going to die, because that means that the motor's usually met out of plastic.

The other thing that I would mention as a big caveat here is that if you install a PTZ the way that it's meant to be installed, so it comes off the wall usually, and then it hangs down. If you put that upside down, it's going to be, well outside of warranty, it's not going to work right. It's not designed to do that. So, same thing, you install it not like this, but like that? That's going to burn the motor out. It's not designed to operate that way.

Michael Bell:

One thing I'll also add onto that, some of our smaller PTZs don't have as powerful as motors as the larger PTZs, and those kind of protect themselves, like we were talking about. The precept patrols on those, those limit you to two minutes before the camera's going to be able to move again. So if it moves to one position, it's going to be there for two minutes before it moves to another position, because they know that that motor is not as powerful as the larger cameras. And they do that for the longevity.

James Campbell:

And actually, on the topic of motors, not all PTZs move as fast as... They're not all equal, when it comes to motors. Move in speed, too, which is a very important thing. So our smaller PTZ, the Lookout Mini, that's a pretty slow PTZ because it's covering a smaller area. So we're just panning left and right, the maximum speed's fairly low. Whereas I think our fastest PTZ is actually the Lookout 2.0 v2. It's in the specs, you see how many degrees it can move a second, but that one can move very quickly left and right, because it's more considered with somebody potentially operating it. The presets need to be very fast.

So that's another thing to look out for, when you are shopping for a PTZ, is don't assume that every PTZ is going to move as quickly or as even as much. Our Lookout Mini actually only goes 345 degrees. So once it gets to the way back over here, it actually has to do like that, and go all the... It can't do 360s. So every motor is not the same. I mentioned those dome PTZs that are out there, too. Those are generally very slow. They don't have the space to put a higher end motor, a faster motor in there. So again, just don't assume that every PTZ moves the same. Look at those specs, or get demos if you see video demos, and everything like that.

Ben Larue:

You said something that was important that I want to cover. I'll come back to it. But another housekeeping question, real quick. How does weather affect these things?

James Campbell:

So any of our PTZs are going to have different weather tolerances, and everything like that. Our highest end PTZs are all IP66 or IP67 weatherproof, which means they can basically handle any weather outside. Their temperature ranges, of course matter with PTZs, as well. The highest N1s can go to negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit. But then we have other PTZs, like the Lookout Mini, that have a temperature range that's more for... Not quite as high as the higher end ones. And then we even have PTZs that are indoor only, like the Garrison.

And that's going to be true again, if you're shopping outside of SCW'S ecosystem, there're going to be other PTZs that are not weatherproof, that only can be operated in above freezing temperatures, and everything like that. So that's another important consideration, and a really good question because that's why some of the more expensive PTZs are more expensive.

Ben Larue:

And final pin here, on some of the housekeeping items, and we've been mentioning it a lot here, but I don't think we covered it in depth. We've mentioned the words like "mini," and, "some of our larger PTZs." What are the size of these things? Are these normal-sized cameras?

Matthew Nederlanden:

Not so much.

Ben Larue:

Gotcha. Okay, so it's something to consider.

Michael Bell:

They go from about this to this.

Matthew Nederlanden:

On the biggest end of the spectrum, the Beacon, it's almost as big as the size of your body, minus your limbs. It's a giant camera, really big camera, but it's seeing two miles away. It needs to be able to have the ability to create that focal length between the image sensor and the lens, so it needs to be bigger, so that it could zoom out to that degree. On the flip side, you've got more reasonably sized, like the Mini models, like this. So they're not mammoth, but the mini is 10.6 inches, in height.

James Campbell:

Yeah, we have a good picture here to show you kind of the difference between-

Ben Larue:

Thanks, James.

James Campbell:

... the bigger PTZs, and the smaller PTZs. And then our newest PTZ, which is the Garrison 5.0, is an indoor only mini PTZ. And that's the smallest that we have, it's basically like this big. So it's meant to hang off a ceiling, and is our smaller of the group.

Ben Larue:

Okay, I was just teasing you. I have one more question for you, in regards to housekeeping stuff. And then we'll be done. I promise.

Matthew Nederlanden:

This place is getting real clean, in here. Real clean.

Ben Larue:

Yeah. I am curious about now, the talk of motors and extreme varifocal lens style, image sensors and such. Do these cameras power directly from the recording device, like a normal camera would? Or is that something that we should consider?

Michael Bell:

That's a very good question. So luckily, the Lookout Mini, will. It is still power hungry though, so we might need to take into account what your NVR is able to output, as far as power per port, and then also what other cameras are connected to that. So we can definitely do that calculation. That's not a problem, I don't have all the numbers in front of me.

But as far as the full size and larger PTZs, those do come with an additional power source called a Poe injector, that you need to put in line from your NVR to the camera. And normally, it's usually three or six feet away from the NVR side, and then it can run up to 300 feet on the 5e, CAT6 cable to the camera, to provide the data stream and the power for that particular device.

Ben Larue:

Yeah, I think that does it, I think that covers everything. That's PTZs. Awesome. Super excited about it. All the resources that we have mentioned, any of the documents like the auto-tracking guide, some general PTZ guides, those will be in the description below.

Of course, all of our contact information will be, as well. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our team, Michael's team, anyone here at SCW would be more than happy to answer any questions you have. And we're very excited to have discussions regarding PTZs with you.

Matthew Nederlanden:

Thanks for coming.

Ben Larue:

Thanks so much for joining us today.

Michael Bell:

[inaudible 00:34:10].

Ben Larue:

We'll see you.

James Campbell:

See you.