Smoothness and Deadband

Q-SYS VisionSuite Seervision Commissioning Level 1 : Tracking Tips and Tricks

2 ) Hardware and Software Overview

2m 44s

3 ) Set up Seervision in Q-SYS Designer

4m 51s

4 ) Setting Up Basic Tracking

5m 20s

5 ) Tracking Tips and Tricks

14m 16s

6 ) Adding a Static-View Camera

7m 49s

7 ) Multiple Presenters

5m 1s

Video Transcript

Smoothness and Deadband 12m 20s
00:06
You, everyone, and welcome to the next part of the training.
00:09
Well, we're going to be covering tracking smoothness,
00:12
of course,
00:12
Seervision tracking is very smooth and works really well  
00:16
without needing to make too many adjustments.
00:19
But if you do need to make some adjustments,
00:20
you can adjust the smoothness of the tracking and also the deadband.
00:25
So let's learn about what all of that means.
00:27
I'm going to walk up to this trigger zone at the podium here.
00:30
We'll start tracking and then we'll see how it's working and maybe make a few adjustments.
00:36
So right away we can see here in the Seervision user interface,
00:39
the smoothness is set to around half. What does that look like?
00:44
Well, you can see that this lets me move around  
00:46
at a speed which is pretty appropriate for a presenter
00:49
so I can move here from left to right and nothing too dramatic is happening.
00:53
The camera's not whipping around and equally I can move fairly slowly
00:58
and the camera's going to move quite nicely just to keep me in frame correctly.
01:02
But of course if I really wanted to, I could run away.
01:06
I've really moved too fast there for the camera to actually keep track of me.
01:11
Okay, so this is where we can adjust smoothness.
01:14
Of course, typically you're not likely to be running away in the middle of a presentation
01:18
unless the audience is being really mean to you.
01:21
But it's good to have these kind of controls.
01:24
So firstly, let's have a look at this section.
01:26
We've got pan smoothness and tilt smoothness,
01:30
and normally when we're doing presenter tracking, we're most concerned with pan.
01:35
So let's just let's just turn that all the way down and see what the result is.
01:41
Now, with this testing turned all the way down to zero,
01:43
we can see that even very small movements of  
01:45
the presenter result in a fairly significant move from the camera.
01:50
It's really just trying to keep us perfectly centered in  
01:53
the frame as described by the tracking container.
01:56
And this is not a particularly pleasant experience for the far end viewer.
02:00
It's really quite jerky and if the presenter is the kind of person who might say,
02:04
Hey, let's talk to these people over here and now,
02:06
you know, I'm going to come over here and talk to you guys
02:08
and maybe I'm just going to move from left to right like this.
02:11
The camera's moving all over the place.
02:13
On the other extreme, we can turn it all the way up to one.
02:17
Okay? And now we can see that if I move,
02:19
the camera is going to very slowly and gradually bring me back into the center.
02:24
So it's still moving whenever I move, but it's going to do it in a much slower way.
02:29
Okay, So those are two extremes,
02:31
you know, a very low tracking smoothness setting is going to mean the camera's very jerky
02:36
and here with the camera set to the maximum smoothness,
02:39
even just walking at a normal speed,
02:41
I'm almost able to move out of the frame.
02:43
So let's just set this back to the middle,
02:45
which, to be honest,
02:46
is a really good place to have.
02:47
Tracking smoothness means you can move at the fastest speed you're likely to walk at
02:51
when giving a presentation often,
02:53
but it also means that it's quite slow and graceful.
02:57
However, we've still got a small issue,
02:59
which is that any little movement,
03:01
even me just leaning from side to side,
03:04
is causing a camera movement.
03:06
The smoothness is controlling, whether it's fast or slow.
03:09
But what if we don't want any movement until we start to walk in a significant way?
03:15
This is where the deadband comes in,
03:17
and the Deadband is a feature of Seervision,
03:20
which essentially means that the presenter can move within a certain range
03:23
and not trigger any movement of the camera at all.
03:27
Let's go ahead and turn on the deadband overlay with this person in the Seervision User interface.
03:33
We're going to turn that on and we can see I've got a green box around my head.
03:37
Now. The deadband's off right now,
03:39
which means that as I move,
03:41
we're going to see that camera move straight away.
03:43
Let's turn on the deadband.
03:45
We can see the box now goes into a filled in green.
03:49
And now the presenter can move from side to side in this case,
03:53
taking a step to talk to the audience over here, maybe over here.
03:57
And it's only as they start to move out of that deadband.
04:00
You see the little green dot representing my head on the Edge of the Deadband
04:05
that it brings us back into frame.
04:07
The speed at which it does that is based on the tracking smoothness.
04:11
But the deadband means that it doesn't do it
04:13
until the presenter moves significantly away from wherever you set up the deadband.
04:19
Now the properties of the Deadband are fully adjustable.
04:23
We can increase its width and its height
04:26
and we can also move it around the screen so we can move it from left to right here
04:30
if we don't want to keep it in the center.
04:32
Now you can see if we set it up like this where it's fairly small,
04:36
the present can still make small movements.
04:38
It's when they make a medium sized movement like this
04:41
that we get a response from the camera on the opposite side of the scale.
04:45
We could set this width to be really quite large
04:48
so that it's almost covering the whole width of the frame.
04:51
Now this might be something you want
04:52
if you don't want to really point out that we're tracking the presenter too much,
04:56
you want to allow them to move around quite a long way.
05:00
And in fact I might bump that up even a little bit more.
05:02
Okay.
05:03
And no tracking really happens until they essentially start to leave the frame,
05:07
at which point it brings them back in.
05:10
Now, of course, the risk here is that they move too quickly
05:13
and they can step out of the frame before the camera has time to react.
05:17
But you could combine a large deadband with a very low pan smoothness.
05:23
So if you turn pan smoothness all the way down,
05:25
we're going to see the camera responds really quickly,
05:28
but it will only respond when I start to leave the deadband.
05:31
So now we can see that no tracking is really happening until I start to walk away
05:36
and it's going to respond quite quickly to bring me back into frame.
05:40
Of course, the best settings are usually those in the middle,
05:43
and I find that what works really well is a pan smoothness around here
05:48
and maybe a deadband that covers this sort of range here.
05:52
Let's see present to move around.
05:53
They can fidget a little bit and the camera's not going to move,
05:56
but when they actually start to walk, that's when we have an adjustment to the camera.
06:01
Now, before we move on,
06:02
let's point out the dead pan settings,
06:04
along with lots of other tracking properties,
06:07
like tracking smoothness can be saved as part of a container
06:11
if you want to change them when different containers are recalled.
06:14
Let's have a look at how that works.
06:16
When it is seeing any container,
06:18
you can see all of the Sea Vision components contained within.
06:22
Now by default.
06:23
This includes the transition speed shot properties like the framing and the relative size
06:28
and whether tracking is engaged or not.
06:31
But if we press the add component button,
06:33
we get a complete list of every Seervision attribute that can be added to this container,
06:39
including the deadband.
06:42
We could also add tracking smoothness as a component inside of this container.
06:48
Now,
06:49
this means that the deadband and the tracking smoothness properties
06:52
will get recalled when the container is recalled,
06:55
overriding whatever's been set in the Tracking Settings panel.
06:59
This means you can have different deadband and  
07:02
different smoothness settings for different containers,
07:04
maybe to be used with different trigger zones.
07:07
If you'd rather these settings be set globally,
07:10
don’t add them to the container and Seervision  
07:12
will use whatever is set in the Tracking Settings panel.