TheCaretaker

I work at a small school and recently we have had problems with intruders on site. I have been tasked with finding out more about CCTV systems suitable for use on the grounds. The trouble spots are likely to move during the school year, for example at the moment with the summer people are breaking in to use the school swimming pool. So the suggestion is to have a system with one camera which can be moved to cover the vulnerable areas. My questions are, is this a good idea? Since the school is networks for computers is an IP system better that analogue? Would a DVR be a good idea or a more basic set up with a camera feeding back to video recorder. Any suggestions, advice, etc would be very welcome. Cheers Ed

This is the front of the swimming pool changing rooms, the lightened area is where I would imagine mounting the cameras. The building behind is fully networked so extending power and cabling to here is not a problem. This is the extent of the area that would need to be covered. At the moment this is the other proposed area of coverage, it only needs coverage for the lightened areas. p.s. sorry for the last picture, I thought I had resized them all

Thanks for the advice so far. I'm guessing storage will not be a major problem, if the system can be set to record only between certain hours, footage will not need to be stored for longer than a couple of days if there is no problems. I will post some pctures of the site here tomorrow to give some idea of the areas we are trying to cover. More questions: Are wireless camera's worth going for, are they reliable? I use wireless network at home, but I often run into problems if the neighbours routers are picked up which interfers, we have a large residential estate surrounding the school and I wonder if wireless cameras suffer from the same problems. If not what is the best connection between camera and DVR? When a DVR is described as 4 channel at 25fps, are the fps divided per channel? I seem to remember at the last school if one camera was set to max frame rate the others suffered. Are there any 4 channel systems that you have used that you would recommend?

Thanks for that reply, 4 channels should as you say be more than enough, I understand FPS, but what is D1 resolution?

To start with my questions will be quite vague, as this is an area outside my field. However I have been tasked with finding out more information. The school I am at is a private school that covers several acres, the majority of the buildings are clustered together and networked. The pupils are extremely well behaved so there is no need to monitor corridors, etc. Any trouble on site comes from outside. There is a heated outdoor swimming pool with two changing rooms that is a target for local youths to try to use during long hot weekends. The problem being that while there they cause a mess and vandalise the facilities. The changing rooms face the pool and are close enough to the main building to run cabling across. Since the cameras are not needed during the week and for parental concerns wouldn't be used while the children are on site. The school Bursar would like a system that can be quickly and easily set up to monitor the pool compound certainly during the school holiday periods and over occasional weekends. Equally there are school events which require equipment being hired and left onsite for a few days. Again this is going to be close to school buildings, 10 - 15 meters max. The idea is that if we have one camera this could be moved to cover the required area. My concern is that once we have purchased a system if it proves useful then they may wish to expand it, so I don't want to end up with a system that is going to be useless in the future. At my last school they had an analogue camera that fed directly to a video recorder. The images captured were rubbish, unless you knew who the culprits were it was impossible to identify them, unless you zoomed into an area, but then you missed huge areas of the school grounds and it was all pretty hit and miss. Just before I left they purchased a couple of DVR's and ran a seperate network for cameras across the school. It then became possible to view the results on computers linked to the school network. But that system was far in excess of the requirements here. The footage we capture would need to be of a quality that would assist the police to identify any intruders and be able to be used in prosecution. Thanks for your replies so far, and please bear with me as I try to get up to speed. Are there any good websites where I can go to learn more. Cheers.

Hello All I'm a caretaker for a school in the UK. Due to a few recent problem the school wishes to install CCTV, since this is not an area I am very familiar with I'll be seeking some advice from those who know. Many Thanks Ed

I have posted a message in the General discussion, so I won't double post to two different threads. My main thread is here.