From Skeptic to Advocate: Thom McGuire's Revelation with BZBGear's Commander Junior PTZ Controller
"It's super volunteer-friendly...but it still allows them to be creative if they want to..." - Thom McGuire, Production Manager, River of Life Christian Center
When it comes to PTZ cameras, movement is a huge factor because ideally, you would love for your PTZ rig to look like you have manned cameras even though you don't. Whether you can pull that off depends on the build quality and attention to detail in the controller you’re using. Does your controller’s rocker and joystick actually allow you to get that smooth motion?
“Yeah, the movement was very smooth and the ability to change the speed of the movement was great because I tend to go faster than probably people should,” says Thom McGuire. He’s the production manager at River of Life Christian Center in Orlando, Florida and he’s trying out BZBGear’s new Commander Junior PTZ Controller. “It allowed me to actually slow myself down some to make sure that I was making smoother transitions and smoother moves.”
As part of the Church Production Road Test User Experience, BZBGear sent the Commander Junior and several of their PTZ cameras to McGuire to test drive. The church averages about 1600 in attendance on Sunday, and is currently going through a very large upgrade of all of the AV systems and they’ve added a podcast studio. Ironically, McGuire says he didn’t like the idea of PTZ cameras until now. “The quality of the picture was amazing,” he says. “And we're going to end up buying some for this room because the one-man show is hard to do without having presets and stuff like that on cameras.”
The Commander Junior is small enough to fit inside a backpack, features a two-access joystick, a zoom rocker, a focus knob, and an easily accessed PTZ speed knob. “Everything was right in the controller. It's super volunteer-friendly, and the reason why is because it's so easy to set up ahead of time and then put a volunteer in front of it and just let them run it because you've done all of your presets. It still allows them to be creative if they want to because they can move the camera on their own, but it's very, very volunteer friendly,” McGuire enthuses.
To see the Commander Junior in action at River of Life and hear how they’re using it in the new podcast studio, watch this video.
Original article written by Deidra Blackmore for Church Production.
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