Setting the camera at the right location, angle and perfectly focussed first time can save valuable time during an installation. We can help you try to achieve this with some tips and tricks – 

Before the camera gets installed at height, you can get it focussed in advance. If you know the throw distance will be 10m for example, simply focus the camera whilst at floor level to something 10m away. Lock the lens into this focussed position.

A recent Follow-Me software update (V.0.6.651 onwards) introduced a Lens Advice Tool that allows you to know in advance of an install which lens will be needed. 

Go the ‘Cameras’ tab and enter the required info to get a result. 

So in that example, the 15m wide stage and 10m throw distance gives a recommendation for the 2.8mm lens.

Now, you can use the chart below and see the Vertical Angle of View for that particular lens.

lens (mm)	H AOV (º)	V AOV (º) 16:9
2,3	126	96
2,8	100	68
3,6	72	45
4,0	85	55
6,0	48	29
8,0	40	24
12,0	33	19
16,0	25	15

With the Vertical AOV being 68 degrees for this install we can proceed to look at a camera study to give us an idea how the camera feed will look in reality.

We can do the camera study easily within the Follow-Me 3D window as shown below. But you could easily do it within common industry visualiser programs too.

Open the 3D window. And reshape the default 10m by 10m area to whatever your stage or tracking area dimensions will be for the 4 recommended calibration points. In this example it is 12m wide by 10m deep.

If you have a 3D model of your stage you can also import it for the camera study but this isn’t strictly needed.

In the top right hand corner of that 3D window click on ‘3D Tools’. Now this popup appears allowing you to input all the known information – 

Adding the Z position height of the camera above the stage too, in this example 10m.

This then gives us the final viewpoint of the camera relative to the stage –