DVRs (or digital video recorders for those just out of a 10-year nap) are one of the most misunderstood and highly publicized elements of the modern CCTV surveillance system. Sure, cameras are important, but the DVR is the ‘heart and soul’ of your system and has the potential to make everything else meaningless.
It wasn’t many years ago that the surveillance industry used time-lapse VCRs as a recording medium, and these were the pinnacle of recording technology. Now, it’s hard to find a new one to buy and don’t even think about trying to fix one if it breaks. The ‘latest’ time-lapse VCR could record up to 960 hours on a VHS tape, but was usually set to record only 168 hours (a week). If you had 16 cameras feeding into a time-lapse camcorder for 168 hours, you were faced with a situation where you were actually recording one frame every 1.8 seconds, which represented 16 cameras, which meant almost 29 seconds elapsed before for each camera to repeat a shot. And that was the ‘ultimate’ thing, and only about 10 years ago. (A little known but extremely important fact for those of you readers still using one of these devices: – By the very nature of the design, the tape ‘advances’ very slowly while the recording heads spin very fast. This friction erodes the emulsion on VHS tape fairly quickly, even on “Professional Grade” tapes made for time-lapse recording.The result is that the images being recorded degrade VERY quickly if the tape is reused more than twice max What you see on the monitor IS NOT what is being recorded PLEASE replace your tapes every two weeks, and preferably don’t reuse them at all, after all they are only about $3 each and catch the thief or the thief is surely worth $3, isn’t it?)
Modern DVRs often advertise recording at 30 frames per second for any and all supported cameras, which means some commercially available 16-camera DVRs can record at 480 frames per second (fps). Although the human eye does not see in terms of frames, but rather works with a continuous flow of light/information, experiments have shown that a moving image appears to flicker when the pattern is displayed at speeds less than 30 frames per second. For broadcast TV and typical portable home video cameras, 30 fps (actually 29.97) is “live video”, so it’s a natural assumption that a DVR providing this from each camera is like having a “live movie” recorded from each camera. all the time. Like I said, that’s the natural assumption, but sorry folks, in the real world, “it’s not necessarily so.”
What it really comes down to is storage. Sure, you can record 30fps from all your cameras all the time, but soon you’ll be eating up even the largest hard drive’s capacity and storing recorded video for a reasonable amount of time (set by your type of business and what you’re recording, and why). ) is the main reason you have a DVR in the first place, isn’t it? As an example, if you’re recording H.264 1080 (“latest best”) at 30 fps at 1920×1080 resolution for only 24 hours from a single camera, you’ll need 1.02 terabytes of disk space. That’s a camera, for just one day. Multiply that by 16 cameras and the fact that you really need to store video for at least a week, and you’ll need about 115 terabytes. Can? – Sure, but practical? – hardly.
Now be honest. How many of you rolled your eyes before you got to the end of the last paragraph? How many ended up saying my father-in-law’s favorite expression: “Whatever”? The point I’m just trying to get across here is basically that it sounds easy to say “Let’s buy one of those packages from one of those companies that advertise in the space around this article, and do it ourselves”, and yes. you can do that, but do you really know what you are buying and why? That pizza-faced kid on the corner who’s “good with computers and stuff” and whose mom is a good customer of yours doesn’t know that either. Neither is your nephew. What’s the point of installing a DIY system like the one I saw at a convenience store I called last week, where there are 16 bullet outdoor rated infrared day/night cameras absolutely all over the place inside the store, set up to record continuously, compatible with a DVR with a 500 Gb hard drive? Heck, the storage capacity is probably so small that by the time the clerk got up from hiding behind the counter and cleaning his underwear, the footage of the thief who took all the cash 10 minutes ago had already been recorded.
My main and very basic point with this entire article is that this is a complex business, made especially by the extremely sophisticated technology available to anyone who can click a mouse and has a credit card today. Does doing it yourself work? For sure yes. But as the owner/manager of a specialty retail store, daycare owner, or pharmacist at a small-town independent drugstore, you don’t have the time, knowledge, or patience to figure it all out. go out and buy/order the right things for the right reasons. It’s like the (very wise) pharmacist/owner of the village pharmacy in a nearby small town told me last week: “I know I need a camera system. My accountant, my insurance agent, and my wife have been telling me.” for months.” I know about drugs, I’ve been selling them for 30 years, and before that I helped my father when he owned the store, and that’s my specialty. I don’t know about cameras and I don’t care, that’s your area. of experience just like drugs are mine. Just look around, ask any questions you need, and get me a proposal for an installed system. Be fair, don’t try to make your retirement mine, and we’ll do business. ” Shepherd’s Eyes will be installing their new system in a couple of weeks.
I can’t stress it enough: the devil is in the details of this business. Here’s another real life example to think about. A local dealer I’ve known and patronized for years purchased a special “8-Camera Bundle System” advertised from ***.com online, which claimed to have everything needed for a simple setup from cameras to DVR, power supply and even wire. It sounded good (a little less than half of what I had quoted him) and on paper to him it looked very close to what I had proposed (number of cameras, etc.) except for the setup. So he bought it without telling me or consulting anyone else—he and his stepson were going to install it on a Sunday when the store was closed. It went in pretty easily (although the wiring was strung like Christmas lights on a cheap tree) and it turned on fine. They managed to follow the instruction manual (although it was a challenge to understand the ‘English-as-translated-from-Chinese-by-a-computer-program’ in the booklet), and there were decent color pictures in the monitor. He called me a few days later and asked if I could come by and help him with some issues and he said “I’ll pay you for your time of course” because he was having trouble showing a video of what he thought he had been stealing the day before. In just a few minutes I found out that the reason he was having difficulty retrieving the video was that there was no hard drive in the DVR.
In fairness to ***.com, it was clearly stated (although it’s small and not fully explained) that “HDD not included” and it was extra. He didn’t know what that meant, he thought he was talking about “high definition”, or if he wanted it anyway. The DVR simply collected images from the cameras, multiplexed them on the monitor, and displayed them. He wasn’t recording anything because there was nothing to record. Fixing it was simple, I got him a compatible hard drive (for much less than the vendor originally wanted) and installed it, scheduled motion and recording times, and all was great. BUT… I had told him that opening the box to install the hard drive would void the DVR’s warranty (it made it clear on the label that it would have to be ripped open), but to return the DVR to the vendor to have a hard drive installed after the fact it was not an option. A month later, the DVR’s motherboard shorted (and no, I didn’t make that happen!) and because the warranty had been voided, the unit was rendered useless. I sold him a new DVR at my expense, properly equipped, and it is now one of The Shepherd’s Eyes best references.
Bottom line, guys (and gals), if you’re planning anything more than a basic home security system that isn’t critical to your business, PLEASE leave video surveillance to the professionals. After all, we don’t try to dispense our own medicines, run our own convenience store, run a daycare center, or operate a funeral home: each and every entrepreneur is an expert in their own field, usually for good reason.
With your best interests in mind, always,
Howard A. Barraclough
