Camera Position Advice

[Samtex]

I'm looking to ceiling or wall mount a PTZ Shotgun camera for recording church meetings. We want to keep it out of reach but not so high that the camera angle looks strange.

I've searched everywhere, there is plenty of information on CCTV camera height and angles but nothing for video production.  

Does anyone have any standard angles or know where I can find such a resource so I can work out the max possible height the camera can be mounted without having an unnatural looking shot?

Stage to the back of the room 45 foot

Stage height is 1.5 foot off the ground.

Ceiling height 11.5 feet.

 

Thank you in advance for any help 🙂

[timsabre]

The perfect height is to put it at the eye height of the person speaking. Anything else will look strange and the further off eye height you are, the stranger it will look. This is why at professionally recorded events you will often see cameras on a platform in the middle of the audience.

Obviously you will have a compromise with what is actually physically possible - if you already have the camera, get it into the proposed position and see if you can live with the picture you get. If you don't have the camera, use your phone to get some test shots. If you have an android phone you can use Droidcam-OBS app (free version) to livestream into OBS software (free) from your phone camera as a test.

 

Edited January 9, 2023 by timsabre

[Samtex]

It's a difficult one. Your are right the ideal height is eye level but that means we would have to keep taking it down and putting it away after each meeting to keep it safe but this would increase the risk of damage and mean I'd have to check / reset all the resets every time we shoot.

Umm it seems like trial and error it is unless anyone can come up with an alternative. I did think of an automated retractable ceilings mount but that's what out of our budget. 

I appreciate your reply. Thank you.  

 

[kgallen]

Can you put it to one side (on a wall?) at a suitable height rather than direct-on where it hangs directly in the aisle in the way? If the angle is not too severe then it's not too unnatural. If your camera has an optical zoom (and adequate light sensitivity) then the further back will reduce the side angle.

I know nothing about video cameras but at this point it seems like a maths/triangles problem for position, and then finding a camera with appropriate optics.

Edited January 10, 2023 by kgallen

[Dave m]

Define safe?

Years ago we had a computer tucked away as if on a high shelf  but it swung down for access.It was some kind of kitchen food mixer bracket intended to be fitted under a work surface and allowed the mixer to swing out and up to be at work surface height. We used it integers, so the PC was swung up out of reach and lowered for access.

Obviously a kitchen accessory device doesn't"t lock but it's simple to add a padlock.

 

Or a linear actuator that slides the camera down a rail? Into a box when not in use?

A cheap pantograph off amazon might work, you could have a box high up, pantograph pulls down and some kind of location plate mates with a fixed bracket on the wall with a quick release bracket as on Tripods. when finished, release the bracket and push up into the box.

[sunray]

Ive done this twice for video projectors. a swingin arm on a pivot which stops before it reaches vertical.

lifted up out of the way on a rope and pullies, once by hand and wrapped round cleat, t'other on a motorised drum.

angle shown exaggerated

[paulears]

How big is the camera? 11ft ceiling height means you simply use threaded rod from screw fix, maybe two lengths together and mount the camera to that - the power and video cable probably being the same thickness as the rod. A downward angle also means that you tend to get a more flattering angle on groups of people. I've never found video from a follow spot box that weird. Steep angles - say tilting down over 30 degrees from horizontal look a bit birds eye ish.

A bit og graph paper and protractor should work to check maximum distance/minimum distance too.

[Samtex]

Hi guys, 

Thank you for all your suggestions. 

It's a PoE powered camera so only one ethernet cable and maybe one audio cable. It's dimensions are roughly 14cm x 16cm x 25cm. 

I've found a solution which I've outlined below.

What I did was mount the camera on a tripod and stepped away until the viewing angle looked acceptable. I then did a little trigonometry so I could scale it up to full room dimensions. It works out that 10 degrees is acceptable up to 13 - 15 degrees at a push. This allows me to mount the camera at around 2.6m and still have a little room for height differentials amoung subjects.

 I know each situation is unique but I hope it gives someone else a place to start in the future. 🙂 

 

Many thanks 

 

 

[timsabre]

Thanks for coming back with the results.

What is your camera just out of interest and what delay do you get on the picture? What are you recording onto?

I am also recording and livestreaming our church services but I'm using surplus Android phones with Droidcam into OBS.

[Samtex]

5 hours ago, timsabre said:

Thanks for coming back with the results.

What is your camera just out of interest and what delay do you get on the picture? What are you recording onto?

I am also recording and livestreaming our church services but I'm using surplus Android phones with Droidcam into OBS.

Hi Tim,

I'm using a Rocware RC840S 4K, which has a 1.8 Sony CMOS sensor, 20x optical Zoom, PTZ, PoE Camera with NDI. 

The main attractions to the camera were 1st 20x Zoom, 2nd NDI (game changer), 3rd PTZ and 4th larger cmos sensor than other 1080ps.

Internally via NDI and viewed via NDI Tools the lag is minimal. It increases a little once it passes through OBS encoding but I'm pulling the audio from a analogue system via a secondary source so I can't really comment on any audio delay that comes directly from the camera itself.

I mostly output directly to YouTube Live and Zoom via OBS using the YouTube API within OBS or the NDI output to NDI Webcam and then into Zoom. 

Having the camera wired via ethernet cable is great as we can use our existing network infrastructure and hide most of the cabling as not to distract from the meeting.

Our main bottleneck is CPU processing power as we are using a somewhat older PC without a dedicated graphics card. If you have any half decent nvidia card it takes a massive load off your system especially with the NVEC H264 encoding option in OBS.

A quick tip... if your looking for a way to get secure sound over NDI via ethernet rather than WiFi. Pick up a second hand MEVO start as they are half the price of an NDI encoder and with a PoE ethernet adapter you can keep them plugged into the network without having to disconnect them to charge.

 

Maybe a little more than you asked for but I hope this helps 🙂

 

[timsabre]

Thanks Samtex that is really interesting to know how others do it. That looks like a nice camera, what is the PTZ movement like - e.g. can you make slow moves with it when you realise that the person speaking is a bit taller than you expected? Where did you buy it from?

As you say it is definitely worth having a PC with nvidia card to use the NVENC option in OBS. We added a suitable graphics card into our streaming PC which dropped the CPU load from 65% (dropping frames sometimes) down to 10%.

[johnb]

Our church went through this back at the start of the pandemic when we realised we'd were going to be streaming for a while and invested in PTZ cameras feeding an Atem vision mixer and then the screens in the church and the stream.  We were lucky enough to put 3 PTZ cameras in - one at the back, one on the side and one near the front.

The one at the rear is mounted above the main doors at a height of about 3m and probably about 20m from the main place that people stand to speak.  Usually the preacher/service leader stands on a single step at the front which helps raise them a little.  At that angle the speaker is generally looking slightly down from the camera, but not actually too bad.  What does make a difference is for the services which are streamed we usually have the chairs arranged with a centre isle.  However our evening service which is not streamed has a different arrangement of chairs with a central block.  On one occasion we were asked to stream an evening and this change became very obvious on camera where the view was nothing like as good. 

The advice of trying a phone camera or similar in the position is a very good one - one of our other camera positions at the front replaced an existing composite PTZ.  The old camera produced a very downward looking shot which was not very pleasant to look at.   By testing positions with a phone I was able to demonstrate than moving it down about a meter produced much more pleasant shots to watch and is where it is now.  So tested and getting people to sit and stand in key locations to check sightlines is worth spending the time on.

The other thing we've found invaluable is that we have a forth camera which is a fixed wide angle right next to the rear PTZ.  This shows a view of the whole church and provides both a really good context shot for the viewer, but also a handy fall back for when something unexpected happens and the operator needs to reposition the PTZ's in some way.  Everyone involved in the setup agrees that it was actually the best investment in the system.  So if you can stretch to an additional camera, not necessarily anything fancy or expensive, then you'll probably fine it really useful.

The PTZ on the side wall was an interesting one.  Personally of all the cameras I like the angle and the shots it gets least of all, and I've wondered a few times whether we'd do better off mounting it at the back alongside the other cameras.  However there are enough times when it's able to get a shot which the others can't which means we've left it where it is.  Dropping it down would also probably help the angle but not really possible in the space.  We manage as this is not really our main camera - the PTZ at the back is used for the majority of the close ups as it's head on where the side often does the context or alternative view.

An example of how we use the system and the types of shots we achieve can be seen in the following video.  You can also see the wide view and how it's a useful alternative to save having to move the PTZ's too much when on air which never looks nice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mamo_iQ_nqA

Happy to answer other questions about our setup if it's useful

John

[timsabre]

John, your setup looks really good and gets some nice shots. I would really recommend adding a stereo pair of ambience mics into your audio mix for the songs which lets people at home hear the congregation singing and helps them feel more part of the service, it's surprising the difference this makes to the "feel" of the livestream.

We meet in a school hall and have to set up and derig each week. All equipment and cabling has to be put in and removed so this limits what is feasible to do - I have 3 android phones running Droidcam on cheap PTZ mounts from Amazon. The phones run off USB power banks and connect to OBS over wifi (we have to bring our own 4G wifi router as well as the school will not allow us to connect to their network). This allows all 3 cameras to be wireless which really reduces the setup and derig time. The wifi links sometimes drop a few frames but the intention is just to allow church members who are at home due to illness etc to join in, so I consider the balance of effort/quality is acceptable. Sound is fed from our XR16 with a couple of old Tandy PZM mics for room ambience, the ambience feed is gated on the XR16 using a control signal from the piano so that when someone plays the piano for a song, the ambience mics automatically turn up, then reduce again at the end of the song to make the talky bits less echoey.

[sunray]

17 hours ago, timsabre said:

John, your setup looks really good and gets some nice shots. I would really recommend adding a stereo pair of ambience mics into your audio mix for the songs which lets people at home hear the congregation singing and helps them feel more part of the service, it's surprising the difference this makes to the "feel" of the livestream.

We meet in a school hall and have to set up and derig each week. All equipment and cabling has to be put in and removed so this limits what is feasible to do - I have 3 android phones running Droidcam on cheap PTZ mounts from Amazon. The phones run off USB power banks and connect to OBS over wifi (we have to bring our own 4G wifi router as well as the school will not allow us to connect to their network). This allows all 3 cameras to be wireless which really reduces the setup and derig time. The wifi links sometimes drop a few frames but the intention is just to allow church members who are at home due to illness etc to join in, so I consider the balance of effort/quality is acceptable. Sound is fed from our XR16 with a couple of old Tandy PZM mics for room ambience, the ambience feed is gated on the XR16 using a control signal from the piano so that when someone plays the piano for a song, the ambience mics automatically turn up, then reduce again at the end of the song to make the talky bits less echoey.

I have to agree, ambient audio of the congregation is missing and makes the viewing experience during the singing sound flat/clinical.

We used to do an OB from a local festival back to Hospital Radio, it took several years before a recording was made at the studio and it was realised that was missing.

 

 

Edited January 14, 2023 by sunray

[sunray]

On 1/12/2023 at 9:23 PM, johnb said:

The PTZ on the side wall was an interesting one.  Personally of all the cameras I like the angle and the shots it gets least of all, and I've wondered a few times whether we'd do better off mounting it at the back alongside the other cameras.  However there are enough times when it's able to get a shot which the others can't which means we've left it where it is.  Dropping it down would also probably help the angle but not really possible in the space.  We manage as this is not really our main camera - the PTZ at the back is used for the majority of the close ups as it's head on where the side often does the context or alternative view.

 

John

I think you're being a bit harsh on the side camera, the only angle I can think to criticise is the reading at 29 minutes against the door in the background, even then it's really only the fire extinguisher and fire signage that spoils it.

The whole presentation is way better than most church streams I've seen.