Panning, Tilting And Zooming
There are two ways of panning and tilting the camera, the slow way is to click on the arrows in the TrackerCam panel. Each click only moves the camera a few degrees. A much faster way is to put your cursor in the video window, hold down the left mouse button and drag the camera. You can see in the video how much faster this works versus clicking on the arrows.
After twisting the camera around, you may want to bring the mount back into the default position. Simply click on the circle in the center of the arrows and this will reset the position of the TrackerPod.
You can also zoom in or out by clicking on the plus and minus signs in the panel. This is digital zoom and not optical zoom.
Optical zoom gives the best quality because the lens actually moves to zoom into the picture. With digital zoom, the lens stays in the same spot and the software tries to guess the picture. This produces a blurry and blocky picture after a few percent of zoom.
Tracking
TrackerPod can make the Webcam track either motion or color. Tracking puts the robotic base into autopilot and it will cause the Webcam to move towards movement or a specific color. Just like other Webcams, the tracking is not perfect. While tracking is on, a white tracking box illuminates over the subject. You can fix the tracking on the movement by clicking inside the bounding box. We found that the box won't appear if the movement is extremely fast or if the colors are too bright.
Surveillance Mode
What if you could have a security guard that didn't need to eat or to be paid? The TrackerCam software has an awesome surveillance mode where you can set "Viewpoints," points that Webcam will pan to and watch. You can set multiple viewpoints, so that the Webcam will automatically move between them. You can also set the time that the Webcam will stop at each point.
You set the number of seconds that the Webcam will take as it moves between each point. You can also set the Webcam to snap a picture when it stops at each viewpoint. This is a great feature that greatly helps in surveillance.
