Outside Looking in with Crestron Automate VX
Sam Kennedy runs product marketing at Crestron, having spent 17 years at Polycom and Poly before joining. He explains how Crestron's Automate VX multi-camera system delivers an 'outside-in' room view, what it costs to deploy, how rooms are designed and troubleshot, and what its recent Microsoft Team
Prefer audio?
Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, AV designers and integrators evaluating multi-camera options for boardrooms, large rooms and auditoriums, and anyone weighing centre-of-table versus outside-in camera approaches for Teams Rooms.
Guest: Sam Kennedy — Product Marketing Lead, Crestron
Sam Kennedy runs product marketing at Crestron, having spent 17 years at Polycom and Poly before joining. He explains how Crestron's Automate VX multi-camera system delivers an 'outside-in' room view, what it costs to deploy, how rooms are designed and troubleshot, and what its recent Microsoft Teams certification unlocks for larger spaces.
Many thanks to Crestron, sponsor of this episode.
Key insights
- Automate VX is codec-independent software that runs in the room, drives up to 12 optical-zoom PTZ cameras placed anywhere (circular, square, rectangular or irregular rooms) and feeds a single intelligently switched output into a Microsoft Teams Room or Zoom Room — it does not have to be paired with Crestron Flex. ▶ 5:37
- Kennedy positions centre-of-table cameras as best suited to smaller spaces and outside-in multi-camera as better for medium, large and extra-large rooms, largely because optical zoom (10x to 20x) holds image quality at distance — some auditorium deployments frame subjects 30 metres away. ▶ 5:06
- A basic Automate VX configuration is around $15,000 MSRP, against a common perception that multi-camera boardroom systems cost tens or hundreds of thousands; most real deployments use a handful of cameras, not 12. ▶ 9:14
- The architecture pairs one AI 'auto tracker' camera for presenter zones, podiums or whiteboards with standard PTZ cameras driven to preset coordinates by microphone-derived speaker location — solving the 'butt cam' problem when a presenter stands in front of the front-of-room camera. ▶ 10:45
- Preset-based tracking is being augmented shortly with visual AI so the camera re-frames to rule-of-thirds when someone sits off-centre — important as soon as chairs are not fixed in place. ▶ 11:47
- Room design is done in a free web-based drag-and-drop tool on crestron.com: set room dimensions, place table, chairs, cameras and mics, then export a configuration file. No command line is involved, and the same tool shows real-time audio pick-up for post-sale troubleshooting. ▶ 12:47
- Many enterprises install Automate VX themselves; Kennedy says the only real skill prerequisite is being able to configure an audio DSP, with camera mounting and cable runs (typically one to two days) being the bulk of the work. ▶ 14:19
- Cameras connect over SDI, NDI or HDMI, with NDI over a single PoE cat cable back to a local PoE switch the usual choice — keeping the camera traffic off the corporate network. ▶ 16:22
- Microsoft had no certification category for multi-camera solutions until this; Crestron is currently the only certified multi-camera system, and Microsoft has publicly discussed deploying it internally, including in the Hive. Kennedy notes buyers only started listening seriously once the certification tick-box existed. ▶ 17:24
Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.
Listen: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Other platforms
Comments ()