Camera control systems / communications engineering question

[SVTV]

Hello everyone,

I'm not sure if I'm in the right place. I am TV and Film production teacher, and I recently took over my community's cable access channel. We have a great facility, enthusiastic kids, and lots of great post-production equipment; however, our cameras and equipment for live shoots is very old and outdated. We currently use old Telemetrics units on big, bulky 20 year old Panasonic cameras, patching into an existing infrastructure of coax cable that reaches out to athletic fields, gyms, auditoriums, and other schools on our campus to our studio for switching/graphics/sound, etc. We've had a hard time getting all of the units and old cameras to work correctly from shoot to shoot.

Several times we had to resort to shooting an event from 3 nice Canon prosumer cameras and editing later. The video quality was usually better, but of course the editing took much longer.

I'm looking into replacing the current cameras and system with smaller prosumer models with good lenses, but I do not want to abandon the camera control and communications ability (talking back and forth from studio to field cameras) that the Telemetrics units provide. Does anyone know of units that can provide similar benefits but are compatible with Prosumer miniDV / HD / or P2 type cameras? My research attempts have been unsuccessful.

Any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated! Thanks very much,
Dan

[TheSigma]

Can you give some more info about the telemetrics system, what is the model number, what type of cabling is running to the locations you want to use. Can you get new cabling to those locations if neccesary?
http://www.telemetricsinc.com/ If you go to the telemetrics site you can request the manuals for your system and that would probably contain more useful info. I have no experience with telemetrics, but I have used Panasonic and old analog PTZ/control systems. pictures don't hurt either if you don't know enough about the equipment to use words.

AS for new stuff, cannon makes this: http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/broadcast/products/ptz_cameras Is that what you are looking for? Doesn't look like they make the control system for it though they claim it to be a non-proprietary format so you can design your own, using an RS-422 link. not sure how much it cost's or what your budget is though. Panasonic also makes some nice systems http://www.panasonic.com/business/provideo/cat_cam_systems.asp.

I'll try to help you out if I can.

[eadler]

Probably beyond a sane budget, but they make triax to fibre converters... maybe a grant or two or twelve?