Customizing TPZ Control Settings for Surveillance Cameras

A Pan-Tilt-Zoom or a PTZ camera is a special surveillance camera that can move horizontally, diagonally and vertically to keep the target centered in the field of view. It can also zoom in on the target to get a better view. This is especially useful in case of detection of faces or licence plates, etc. in large areas. Once the target moves out of the range of the camera, the camera zooms out and goes back to its previous setting.

The Smartlens software helps you in configuring a PTZ camera. It also helps in recording the captured video on a personal computer, a disk drive, USB drive, a memory card or other forms of mass storage.

A few things that you should keep in mind while setting up a PTZ camera are:

• Turn off motion detection for the PTZ cameras to avoid the DVR from detecting the pan and zoom function as motion and triggering an alarm.
• Make sure that the PTZ camera is connected properly to the DVR.

Some important things about the PTZ camera settings on the Smartlens software are that:

• It displays the blue arrows on the border of the surveillance area in case a camera has all or even some of the pan tilt or zoom features. 
• In case of a few cameras, the actual movement of the camera can be in the exact opposite direction of the arrow that is pressed.

To control the PTZ camera with the Smartlens software you need to first open the SmartLens camera software. This will open the main application window.

On the main application window, on the Control Panel, select the Manage tab. This takes you to the ManageCamera window.

The ManageCamera window shows you the cameras that have been added for monitoring. Here, we have added the Microseven and the NETCAM cameras. To control the TPZ features of the camera, select the desired camera from here. Here, we have selected the Microseven camera.

Once you select a camera, the window displayed below opens. Here, there are 2 tabs. The Options tab and the Motion Detect tab. The Options tab is displayed by default.

You can use the blue arrow buttons displayed over the surveillance area window to move the camera horizontally, diagonally or vertically to adjust the view.

You can use the buttons with the plus (+) sign or minus (-) sign to zoom the camera in or out, respectively. Originally the camera is centred and zooms in or out at a speed depending on the time for which you press the sign buttons. The zoom slider displays the length for which the camera has been zoomed in or out.