Sup3rFly

I have 10 Arecont AV3100 cameras (3MP) in a casino environment and they are awesome! We are recording them at 10FPS and use much more CPU than 550tvl analog cameras at 22fps and 3x the disk space. But the end result is well worth it. One of these camers is enough to cover a 12' craps table and be able to read the dice anywhere on the table! We are going to buy more of these now that they have been working flawlessly 24/7 for 2 months now. I can only imagine the 5MP would be almost 2x better

I see. I guess I never thought of that since we always buy the cards from Cammac. The OP could download and try Vigil, since they have a 30 day trial. When you install Vigil, you have the choice of these capture cards: XECAP200 XECAP100 XECAP50 XED120 XED240 XED480 HICAP200 HICAP100 HICAP50 HICAP25 MIS16 MIS8 MID16 MID8 ZEUS16 ACTi HIKVision NVR (No Capture Card)

You can buy Vigil server licenses with no hardware. We are buying them for around $300 a server. We have over 50 Dell PowerEdge 2950's running Windows XP Pro with Vigil 5.0 on them, with a mix of analog and IP cameras. We have 16 analog cameras per a server running at 5fps and 8 analogs per a server running at 22fps. This is a limitation of the PCI capture cards we use (we buy these for $700 from Camac). No limitation on IP cameras other than hard disk and CPU, which sucks if you have high fps!

Howdy, I want to share what we are doing at work (casino) to hopefully help others and get some feedback from you on how to make things work better for us. We have about 600 analog cameras being recorded by Vigil 5.0. Vigil is running on Dell PowerEdge 2950s, with 8 cameras on each server for critical (22fps for each camera - limited to 8 by the card we use), and 16 cameras a server for non critical (5fps). Everything works great and we are very happy with it. Storage is contained locally on the server (4x500GB drives in two sets of RAID1). We are able to save about 20 days of footage on each server. Now on to the IP cameras. We demo'd some megapixel cameras and were amazed at the difference compared to our 550tvl analog cameras. We could actually read cards on tables without focusing just on a 1'x1' area! We ended up buying 15 Arecont AV3100 cameras with Stardot MP 4-10MM lenses. This decision was based on that it could do 22FPS at 2MP and the price was one of the cheapest ($500 a camera, $130 lense). Oh, made in USA is kinda cool too With Vigil, we can easilly have a hybrid system with both analog and IP. We have 8 cameras going into a Netgear FS726TP switch (24 100mbps PoE switch, 4 1gbps ports). We are putting 4 IP cameas on a server with 8 analog cameras. The 2950's have two 1gbps NICs, one goes to a network that our surveillance clients use to view footage, and the other NIC goes to a seperate network that the IP cameras are on. We are only doing 4 a server due to the very intensive CPU usage these cameras cause at 22FPS. With just two 22ffps Arecont cameras capturing at 1.6MP and 8 analog cameras recording 22fps, a dual core 3GHz is at 70%. If we reduce the two IP cameras to 11fps, it goes down to 45-50%. We are going to add another dual core 3Ghz procecssor, which should allow to add another camera or two. Might even go with two quad cores. Right now at 1.6MP 22fps, these cameras are eating up 1GB a hour each. Not too bad for the quality you get, IMO. Here is paintshop drawing of our network to give you a visual: -edit can't do it yet So any thoughts on our setup to make it better? Thanks

Oh, we do have the IP servers setup in RAID 5. The reason the CPU utilization is so high is because we are recompressing the video stream with Vigil's codec to save disk space. Looks like we are burning through 160GB a day with the 8 22fps analog and 4 22fps 1.6MP cameras. Using 4 Seagate 7200 1.5TB drives.

Memory isn't a problem, the Dell's have 2GB and aren't even using 1GB. We have 8 analog cameras doing 22fps and 4 IP cameras set at 1.6MP doing 22fps, with a server with two dual core Xeon 3GHz (12Ghz total) at 85% utilization right now. But of course that means there is still 2GHz free The IP ethernet port is utilizing 120Mbps, so each IP camera is using 30Mbps of bandwidth. We aren't putting more than 12 cameras on these Netgear switches, but so far these guys for $350 seem to be holding up great. Vigil only works with Windows 2000 and XP. It took a bit of tweaking, but we have XP working great on the Dell 2950's, even have Server Administrator working for monitoring. Plus, Server License is way more expensive than a Windows XP Pro Disk space is killing us right now, so we are working on getting the rules changed for us to reduce the fps to 10 instead of 22. But the difference between a 550tvl and 1.6MP camera on a Blackjack table is night and day difference! You can read the cards/suites and see the entire table with all of the players and dealer in the shot. Gaming doesn't allow wireless devices on our casino/surveillance networks, so we are now just using a long network cable that is attached to our surveillance network to adjust them. I suppose this works for now, and of course can use radios. Would be nice if there was a test LCD monitor that had an ethernet port w/ PoE. I did test out one of the IQEye 1.3Mp camera and did see it had a video output. But unforuntelly it didn't do 22fps.

A question... Does anyone know of a portable LCD test monitor that works with PoE IP cameras? We have one for our analog cameras but need a solution for these new IP cameras. Right now we hookup a laptop to our surveillance network and adjust through the Vigil software, which can be a pain.