My head is going to explode if someone doesn't have a better way to do this.
We've been using almost entirely Axis for a restaurant customer's front-of-house cameras for several years now, as the P3384s were the best we'd found (at the time) for low light, and more recently the P3225 for low light and WDR. Axis Camera Management has been a godsend for pushing time sync, DNS, and nearly all available video settings, to make for easy and consistent setup across 40 stores in four provinces. Suffice to say, I'm a fan of ACM.
Recently we've found the HIK 5146 model has substantially better low light and WDR performance, and at a good 2/3 the price, the customer has gone whole-hog spec'ing them for FOH on new builds and upgrades. Which is fine, they're a great camera and all... but HIK has nothing even close to ACM.
Batch Configtool works... mostly. It's clunky as hell, needing to select cameras and then copy blocks of settings from one of them to the others. I always worry that selecting the "Video and Audio" block to clone frame and bit rates will also try to copy resolution or other settings I don't want it to... and it doesn't seem to touch some settings I DO want it to. And of course, it doesn't support templates like I use for Axis.
Worst of all, trying to centrally manage cameras across the entire WAN is completely useless, because it adds (or tries to add) EVERYTHING it finds in an IP range scan: HIK cameras, Dahua cameras, the odd Samsung, Axis cameras, Axis decoders... I think it even tried to add a few TP-Link managed switches.
iVMS is no better, and it's extreme overkill for just wanting to edit or bulk-edit cameras.
Tell me there's another option... or that Axis has a new model that will blow the 5146 away on both performance and cost. Please.