You drive one camera.
The others follow.
A little production magic
A familiar is the creature bound to the witch: it follows her, repeats her will, and stays hers. BW Familiar does that with a PTZ kit. One operator drives the tight camera at the panel, exactly as before, and the other heads hold the same subject on their own. Take one back by hand and it is yours again.
- VISCA over IP: Marshall, PTZOptics, OBSBOT, Panasonic
- Zoom is never replicated
- Everything runs on your Mac, nothing leaves it
Why
The play is fast,
and you have one pair of hands.
An ordinary PTZ kit
- One operator per camera, or one camera driven and the rest left on a fixed wide.
- Presets assume the action comes back to the same place. In sport it never does.
- Image based auto-tracking follows a silhouette, and drops it the moment two of them cross.
- A camera at the side and a camera facing cannot copy the same angles: parallax sends them somewhere else.
- Taking a head back from an automation means switching the automation off first.
BW Familiar
- You drive the tight camera at the panel, as usual. Your eye decides, not a detector.
- The other heads hold the same subject, each from where it stands, with no presets and no image training.
- Parallax is settled by going through a point of the field rather than by copying angles.
- Zoom stays yours on every camera: a wide has to stay wide.
- Take any follower at the panel and it releases itself, with nothing to switch off.
Both modes
Two cameras side by side,
or a whole kit around the field.
-
1
Envelope, for two cameras side by side
You drive each camera into its four corners, once. The wide then replicates the pan and tilt of the tight camera, proportionally between the two taught envelopes. It is the simplest mode, and it is enough when both heads sit next to each other.
-
2
Field, for three cameras and more
The aim of the tight camera gives a line. Its intersection with the plane of the subject gives a point of the field, in metres. Every other camera then aims at that point from where it stands, which settles the parallax of side and facing cameras that plain angle copying sends astray.
-
3
Zoom is never touched
A follower receives pan and tilt, never zoom. A wide that copied the tight camera's zoom would stop being a wide, and you would lose the shot that saves the edit.
-
4
Taking a camera back is a gesture, not a button
Take a follower at the panel and the application sees it, releases it, and says so on screen. Nothing to switch off first, nothing to switch back on after. It is the rule that outranks the others: the operator's hand always wins.
What it drives
- VISCA over IP: Marshall, PTZOptics, OBSBOT, Panasonic
- Your panel stays your panel; the application listens to the same camera it drives
- Everything runs on the operator's Mac, and no data leaves it
No head to hand? The bench opens virtual VISCA cameras on real sockets, so the adapter you try is the one that will meet a camera.
One camera is driven. The other works out where to look.
The envelope mode, reconstructed: two cameras standing side by side, both views drawn. The operator touches the tight camera only, and the wide replicates its pan. The subject stays centre frame in both, and it is the background that travels, faster in the tight one because it is narrower. In field mode the cameras can stand anywhere around the play: on the bench, against simulated heads, the point is then recovered to 0.42 m median and 0.91 m at the 95th percentile on a running subject. The campaign against real hardware starts in early September 2026.
Cockpit
One window that says what it is doing.
Where the play is, which camera is following, which one is being read at the panel, and the error budget in metres per degree at that distance. Nothing hidden behind a setting.
The panel
A PS5 controller makes a PTZ panel.
A decent PTZ panel costs as much as a camera. A DualSense plugs in over USB or Bluetooth and the panel tab reads it directly: the tab is the bridge, and there is nothing else to install. The mapping is the standard one, so an Xbox controller works too.
One stick and presets
- Left stick for pan and tilt, L1 widens, L2 tightens.
- The eight buttons, the four arrows then triangle, circle, cross and square, change camera in a single press. No menu.
- R1 held plus a button recalls that button's preset. R2 held plus a button stores it.
- Presets live in the head itself, in native VISCA memory. No file, and they survive anything, including us.
Two hands, two cameras
- The left stick drives the camera picked with the arrows, the right one the camera picked with the symbols. Both at once.
- One head, one hand: if the other hand was holding that camera, it lets go with its stop.
- Driving a following camera with the controller releases it, exactly as at the panel. It is the same gesture, and there is no special case for it.
- A 350 ms watchdog: a controller that goes quiet during a move is a stop.
Why a controller drives well. Deflection is a speed, not a button. A 12 % dead zone, because a resting thumb is never quite centred and a camera that creeps is precisely what the stop rule forbids. A squared curve, because precision lives near the centre: half the stick gives a quarter of the speed. And deflection is brought back to the circle, or a diagonal would leave 1.41 times faster than a pan.
What is not proven yet. No real DualSense has touched this code: the path goes through the Gamepad API, which is standard, but the physical controller arrives with the cameras. The eight slots are reassigned in the window and do not survive closing it. And L1 and R1 are on or off where L2 and R2 are analogue, so widening drives less finely than tightening.
Availability
In field trials. Access on request.
BW Familiar is not on sale and has no price. Both modes work and are measured on the bench, and none of it has yet met a real head at a real match. The hardware campaign starts in early September 2026, with OBSBOT Tail 2 heads, a Marshall CV630 kit and a real panel.
Tell us which cameras you have, how they are placed and what you film. If your setup looks like what the trials cover, we send you a build and we listen to what breaks.
Apple Silicon Mac. The application talks to the cameras on the venue network, and to nothing else.
FAQ
What people ask
Does it recognise the players?
No, deliberately. The application looks at no video at all: it reads the position of the camera you are driving and works out a point of the field from it. Your eye picks the subject, so two players crossing changes nothing, and there is no model to train and no image leaving the machine.
What does 0.42 m mean?
It is the median gap between where the subject was and the point the followers aimed at, on a running subject, on the bench. Half the moments do better, and at the 95th percentile the gap grows to 0.89 m. On a wide, half a metre does not show. On a close-up at thirty metres it would, which is why the field mode serves wides rather than tight shots.
What if I grab a camera while it is following?
It is yours. The application detects the handover between 99 and 153 milliseconds on the bench, stops sending that head any orders, and shows it. There is nothing to switch off first and nothing to re-arm after: let go, and it follows again when you say so.
Does the field have to be measured?
For the field mode, yes: camera positions and pitch dimensions, with a tape measure, once. Learning then happens on five marks, the four corners and the centre. The envelope mode needs no measurement at all: you drive each camera into its four corners and that is it.
Can I buy it?
Not yet. It is in trials and has no price, because none of these numbers has met a real head at a real match. Ask for access: if your setup looks like what the trials cover, you get a build, and what you report decides what happens next.
A little production magic
Drive one. Keep them all.
Ask for accessIn field trials. No price, no buy button.