• Broadcasting

  Panasonic AW-HE50 PTZ HD cameras – experiences?

  Posted by Joe Piazzo on March 22, 2012 at 1:35 pm

  Anyone have experience with these cameras in production environment.
  I am thinking of pairing 4 up with a Black Magic ATEM. I have used similar units by Sony, but I like the Panasonic’s Ethernet control option.

  I am particularly interested in experiences with power / control options. Anyone ever try to power these units through POE over the Cat5. How about this new Net over HDMI spec? Anybody try to send control and video over the HDMI cables? The HDMI models are cheaper than than SDI (offset a bit by cable costs) – but the ATEM only has 4 HDMI inputs (one needed for PC graphics. Still, seems cheaper to convert hdmi – sdi.

  Any advise welcome, thanks

  https://www.panasonic.com/business/provideo/AW-HE50H.asp

  Tim Halle replied 14 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Tim Halle

  March 31, 2012 at 3:02 pm

  Hi Joe:
  Im using HE50’s in a mobile enviornment where I need everything on a single snake, so I broke out power to a standard 4 pin XLR and transmit data down two mic lines in the snake to a 5 pin XLR. Last thing I wanted on a show was plastic cat 5 connectors ! Also I couldnt find cable that had power, ethernet and video in the bundle I needed.

  The data transmission was a little klugey at first, wouldn’t work with some router/switches. This was fixed by setting the cameras connection setting from “auto” to “10 base t multiplex”. As you’re just sending control info this has no effect on the remote response and everything is talking happily on a cisco 8 port desktop switch.

  You might be able to get away with POE as these things dont seem to draw too much power, but you’d obviously need a breakout box to get into the cameras and this also depends on how long a cable you’re running. You probably know the math so I dont need to get into that aspect, but ethernet cable’s pretty small, so you might get into a line loss situation where in order to get enough power you need to run your supply hard enough to melt the wires.

  Lastly these things get upset and shut when you hit them with anything more than 13V. Good luck and will be interested to hear about your experiences with these cameras.

  Best Regards
  Tim Halle
• 

  Tim Halle

  April 5, 2012 at 10:39 pm

  One more thing, if you’re using this in a broadcast enviornment, you need the $200/camera software upgrade ( AW-HEF5SG ) to enable black and white balance beyond “AWB”. This upgrade also gives you 1080p.

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