Why would a church with high-end film cameras incorporate PTZ cameras into the mix? The tech team at Turning Point Church in McDonough Georgia wondered just that when they were asked to Road Test Vaddio PrimeShot 10 PTZ cameras as part of the Church Production User Experience.
"Having a 10x focal zoom, it gives you the ability to really put the camera pretty much anywhere in your room.” - Nathaniel Smith, Turning Point Church
The Vaddio PrimeShot 10 PTZ Camera has received the Church Production Road Test Certification.
“When we first unboxed the PrimeShot 10, we were trying to figure out how are we going to set this up, where are we going to put it, all these different things,” says Turning Points Live Production Coordinator Nathaniel Smith. “We ended up realizing that because it has a quarter 20 thread on the bottom of it, we were actually able to mount it to a portable lighting stand, which really just gave us the ability to put it wherever we wanted to and to be able to utilize it however we wanted to.”
The PrimeShot 10 operates in a 1080P resolution. It has great low-light performance and Smith says the 10x focal zoom gave them a ton of flexibility for placement.
"We also found ourselves using and running camera for things that normally we wouldn't run camera for..." - Nathaniel Smith, Turning Point Church
“Having that 10x focal zoom, it gives you the ability to really put the camera pretty much anywhere in your room,” Smith explains. “Our auditorium is a thousand-seat auditorium and it gave us plenty of range to be able to zoom into the different things and to use the different shots that we were wanting to utilize. We also found ourselves using and running camera for things that normally we wouldn't run camera for --- events where normally we wouldn't have camera volunteers present and so we wouldn't run cameras. We found ourselves utilizing the camera a ton in that aspect of things because I didn't have to have a volunteer to run the camera here.”
While the PrimeShot 10 can be operated over an IR remote or the IP connection, it also has a web interface that adds some extreme controls, as well as some tools to help a small team get big results. With only an IP and HDMI out - that makes it even smaller than some of the other PTZ’s out there. And once Smith and his tech team discovered the Vaddio Device Controller --- tablet that became their preferred way to operate the camera.
“One of the things that Vaddio sent over with the PrimeShot 10 was actually their control tablet and our original plan when Vaddio reached out wanting us to take a look at the product, was to integrate it into our switcher and to be able to control it. But once we got it here, they kind of walked us through how we could use the tablet - the different things that it was capable of - and so we originally set up the camera with the tablet. The user interface was so nice and the abilities of things you could do from the tablet was so well that we actually didn't really want to integrate it into our switcher because we had more control. We had better options through using the tablet.”
Having the ability to set presets was a stand-out feature for them as well, especially when they came up short on volunteers during the weekend or for events where volunteers aren’t scheduled.
“It was super easy to go in, set the position of a camera, store it as a preset in the admin window, and then when I'm in service and I need to go back to that position all I have to do is recall the preset and now all of a sudden, I'm back to where I wanted to be. I didn't have to zoom, I didn't have to pan, I didn't have to tilt, I didn't have to mess with the controller. All I had to do was simply recall that preset,” Smith enthuses. “I think the controller was probably a game changer for the PTZ because if I just had the PTZ camera, I might not have been able to kind of dial in the colors and stuff the way that I wanted to easily, but the controller gave me direct access to it and I was able to do it very easily.”
To see more about Turning Point's experience with the Vaddio PrimeShot 10 PTZ Camera and the Vaddio Device Contoller, watch this video.
