NotoriousBRK

Our SD cameras will. I'm not aware of any megapixel sensors that are very sensitive much beyond 900nm.

Digital zoom on a PTZ is worthless. All you're going to get is massive pixelization of whatever you're zooming in on. I have contacts directly at some of the factories in China that make this stuff. I can tell you that even ordered direct, in lots of 25+, you can't get a useful PTZ for $263. You *can* get something that has a 10x zoom, and then a bunch of "digital" zoom garbage beyond that, but it's not going to do much beyond about 40 or 50 feet from the camera, and it's also going to be about $400 street price. There is also no $366 DVR that is going to have any kind of a usable motion detection function in it. It's just a glorified scene change alarm, and if you use it on outdoor cameras it's going to trigger ALL THE TIME. In all honesty, you're most likely just throwing money away on that system.

You can save yourself some trouble and just get a siren and hook it to a small circuit that activates the siren at random times for no reason The result will be about the same as the motion detection function of a common DVR. It is possible to do something along the lines of what you are looking for, but you're probably going to have to step up to higher end equipment.

www.obzerv.com makes a product that will do what you want. Depending on configuration, the price will be around $200-$300K USD. I can put you in touch with the right people there if you like. Pentax's PAIR lens may also be an option. I believe those are much cheaper, around $25K USD, IIRC.

What program or method are you using to connect to it? The pictures you post look like the results you get when you use a screen sharing/desktop sharing protocol (RDP, VNC, etc.) and either have a very low connection speed and/or have the settings configured to overly compress the image stream.

There is nothing you're likely to be able to done on your own with just simple enhancement tools. The best service I can recommend is this guy (Doug Carner): http://www.forensicprotection.com/ I forget the exact rates, but expect to pay a couple of hundred dollars for the service. From the still you posted, I'm guessing you might have a 50% chance of getting at least a couple of the key digits off the plate. That along with the vehicle description *might* be enough to get the interest of the local PD. Lesst's post was a bit "direct" but also accurate and something you might want to think about in your camera system. From the aspect of people who deal with CCTV systems on a day to day basis, you get a lot of people with a blurry, low-res image in hand, hoping there is some "magic" process to run to reveal details that were never captured in the first place. In some rare cases you get lucky and a higher-end service can stitch together several key frames where part of an object (like a license plate) appear in detail and reveal what you're looking for. But, as a rule of thumb, if you can't read a license plate (or see some other distinguishing detail) in a video clip, there is no reliable way to create those details post-facto from the video clip. Hopefully you get lucky on this one and it doesn't turn out to be just an expensive lesson to you.

No, it's the inverse. All (most?) sensors can see the IR light. The filter is there during the day to REMOVE the IR light spectrum, otherwise you get a funny tinge to the image. At night, in B/W mode, there is no color, so the IR cut filter is removed from the image path. That lets the IR light hit the sensor and give you a brighter image in B/W mode.

I've been getting all my mini-itx gear from these guys for years: http://www.logicsupply.com/

This feature is generically referred to as "POS Integration". There are a handful of companies that specialize in this, usually at the NVR by taking a stream from an IP camera, and correlating it with a serial data stream from the register or POS controller PC. Envysion is one company that comes to mind with a potential solution: http://www.envysion.com/integratedsolutions

When did you send this email? I'll look into it. Usually we get responses to any website inquiries within a couple of hours, but maybe yours was missed. You can email me directly if you like: bkaras@videoiq.com. I run the Field Engineering group, and will either answer your questions, or get you to the proper person.

Looks like an M5 or M2. Not sure what's up with that huge kludge though, hopefully they didn't pay a lot for that setup.

Why not get an IP camera that fits your requirements, and couple it to a wireless bridge, like a Ubiquiti Nanostation? You can get the wireless part for around $50-$80USD, and that would allow you to make any IP camera wireless, or even have multiple IP cameras/devices at the gate.

There are some factories affected that make sensors, DSP's, etc. It's not 100% clear how real the shortages are, some factories already had decent inventories, etc. Most manufacturers buy in pretty large lots, so I wouldn't expect to see this hit most aspects of the marketplace for another 2 months or so, unless you just happened to have a vendor that was waiting on a new order of chips that hadn't been manufactured yet.

Check out: Avigilon Exacq Mirasys Nuuo They all have pros and cons, but if you've been using one system for a while you should hopefully know what features you really use and need, and maybe also what you'd like it to do extra.

This is a screencast I did a while back of OmniGrafflePro, which is a $200 OS X app that is a kind of Visio for Mac. http://stream.myicvr.net/CameraLayout/ It doesn't do as much as for calculations as the VideoCAD app, but it's pretty powerful and easy to use. You can also get the iPad version and edit layouts on your iPad as you're walking around a site with a customer. Nothing fancy, but figured I'd mention it for anyone interested.

Bricor, As I stated earlier, their are no entry/exit points of the parking lot. I still don't have any other definition of "IP" camera, or why an IP camera is different/better. If I have to readjust my budget, I will. Money is fluid. I said $300 was my preference, not requirement. The important thing is finding the right product and getting value for my money. The building roof is only about 15 feet high. D. Analog cameras (what you're probably used to), are limited to a basic resolution (D1, 4CIF, VGA, Standard TV resolution). These all vary by a couple of pixels per row/column, but are all effectively the same thing. They equate to ~330,000 pixels. Analog cameras use a coax cable to communicate back to a DVR or viewing station. IP cameras have an Ethernet port. They communicate on a network, and can support higher resolutions. Some go up to 16 Mega-pixel (16,000,000 pixels), but most of what you'd be looking at is in the 2-3 mega-pixel range. If you want to make out facial or license plate details it is basic "camera math". You're going to want at least 50 pixels-per-fot (meaning that every 1 linear foot has at least 50 pixels of the image sensor covering it). This is *normally* just factored across the horizontal to make it easy. So, let's say you have an area that is 150 feet wide. 150x50 = 7500. You'd need 7500 pixels across this area to get adequate resolution. You also don't want to cover too wide of an area with any one camera, even if it was 7500 pixels wide (to get best detail you'd like the shots to be as straight-on as possible). So, a common format would be a 16:9 aspect ratio 1080p (2.1 megapixel) camera. This would be a camera with 1080 lines by 1920 pixels wide. 1920 pixels / 50 pixels per foot = 38.4 (call it 38 even). A single 2.1 MP camera could cover 38 linear feet of parking lot to give you the *minimum* requirement to start to get good detail. Cameras are nothing more than light receptors. As lighting drops, so does the detail gathered. Less light generally means you need tighter shots (more pixels per foot). For your parking lot, you'd probably want at least 200 lux at the target in order for the camera to get enough light to give you a crisp image. As lighting drops, camera count goes up. You have to do the math to determine what is important or most cost effective: 1) More lights, less cameras 2) More cameras, less lights 3) Come to think of it, I really don't *need* all that resolution after all. For what you want to do, you're probably looking at somewhere around 9-10 2.1MP IP cameras, with some powerful IR illuminators (you're NOT going to solve this problem with junk cameras that have some IR LED's sprinkled around the lens). A cheap 2.1 MP IP camera is around $300-$500 street price. A good IR illuminator is around $500. Then you need an NVR and some other odds and ends. This is a $5K job minimum, maybe a little less if you skimp a bit here and there and scrounge for some good 2nd hand deals. Cheaper cameras will have sub-par low-light performance, so you might end up spending closer to $750 for a camera that's not going to be crap and fail in 4 months.

Yo uare right about the PoE switch, it communicates with device, but some PoE injectors are passive and, they just inject power to the cable so it is possible to fry camera. Yes, but almost any device with an Ethernet port is also designed to handle some basic voltage spikes, well within the range of what you're going to get out of a quasi POE-Injector. The Ethernet spec used specific pairs of the cable so that it would not interfere with telephone wiring, which is -48VDC, and ~90-96VAC for the ringer signal. Generally speaking, any device with an Ethernet port should be able to handle at LEAST 100VAC on any set of pins, just as a simple protection against wiring errors. The magnetics should block any DC voltage from getting past the port. You'd have to couple a REALLY oddball injector with a REALLY poorly engineered device to damage it.

No, it's not bad. The PoE switch/injector communicates with the device to determine if it is PoE compatible before putting full power on the line. If you have everything cabled correctly, you won't damage a non-PoE device by plugging it into a PoE supply.

That is our (VideoIQ) 1080p camera with storage and analytics. I'll do a sample video tonight with/without IR and a solid lux reading from the floodlights.

I'll have to try to get some tonight. Not a lot happens after dark, I also have a RayTec IR Illuminator on by default, so any of the currently recorded video I have wouldn't be a representative test.

They don't really exist yet for board-mount versions, though several key glass grinders are currently working on various iterations. There are a couple of options in the C/CS mount form-factors, but I'm not sure if they're only available OEM, or if you can buy them on the standard distribution market.

The car stopping and then jumping is an artifact of the screen capture program I used and the YouTube uploader. That video was a link I shared with a friend of my new "snowplow", it wasn't meant to be a VideoIQ sample video Our D1 cameras record at D1 continuously, and scale the frame rate and compression based on whether or not their is alarm activity (eg: some kind of person or vehicle event). So, non-alarm video is D1/5fps at a 100Kbps bitrate (h.264). Alarm clips are generally D1/15fps at a 750Kbps bitrate. Our HD cameras typically record continuous at 960x540/5fps resolution and do 1080p/15 for alarm events. This is just to manage the drive space more efficiently. You can record 1080p/30 24/7 in the cameras regardless of activity if you want, but that will use about 45GB/day. All of the VideoIQ cameras and encoders can do full-res, 30fps continuous recording if you like. The alarm event clips (so, most of what you see in demos and on YouTube) are of what we call the LowQ (lower quality) image stream. This is to preserve bandwidth and get the events out quicker. Using my driveway as an example, I don't need 1080p/30 in event clips because I can tell even from a lower-res clip if a vehicle in the driveway appears out of place or not. If/when I want to get the full-res clip there is a 1-button export function in the software that let's me get the full-res clip (which also has a configurable pre-alarm buffer as well). Our HD camera will also maintain 1080p resolution at night down to about .7-1.5 Lux on target (depending on target distance and reflectivity. Here's a sample of a 1080p/15 export from my home camera this morning: http://support.videoiq.com/docs/001f92000076_2011_03_14-11_32_21_726__12000.mp4

It's going to be impossible to get repeatable results that you can use as a reference with this method. When you take a reading with a light meter in low light, you'll notice that even tilting the sensor a little bit will change the reading, which makes it hard to get a perfect reading. The more typical way to test cameras is to use a 2000lux light source with a test pattern, and then introduce neutral density filters in front of the lens to cut the light reaching the sensor down. This is a good writeup on what a typical camera test setup looks like: http://www.tek.com/Measurement/App_Notes/NTSC_Video_Msmt/videotesting.html If you want to build your own reference database, I'd suggest that everyone wanting to participate build their own replicable test harness. It doesn't have to be super high-end, just consistent. To take it a step further, for cameras with analog outputs you can get a good handheld waveform test monitor. I use the TEK WFM 90: http://www.testequipmentdepot.com/tektronix/video/waveformmonitors/digital/wfm90d91d.htm It's been discontinued for a while, but you can find them on ebay from time to time around $200. What you're really looking for, IMO, is how cameras perform relative to each other vs. finding absolute specs. That way, if you have say an ABC 12000, and the low-light is not delivering what you need you could reference cameras that others have tested and find that the XYZ 1850-G camera had low light performance that extended beyond the ABC 12000. It's $100 more street price, so you have to make the call is the extra low-light sensitivity worth the $100. It would also make sense to build an IR light source test harness, which would be a little different than visible light test source. For IR, you'll probably have to setup a basic illuminator pointed at some test targets at a short distance (5 meters) in a darkened room and check the cameras performance. Sensors respond a little differently to visible and IR light, it's mostly a factor of where their sensitivity to higher wavelengths starts to roll off. Real-world tests *can* be extremely helpful, but don't use them as your test reference or you'll probably find it hard to get accurate readings. If you're going to get a new LUX meter, get one with a USB port (this is the one I use: http://www.metershack.com/metershack-professional-digital-40k-fc-foot-candle-meter-400k-lux-light-luxmeter-with-usb-interface.html) You can set these up to either store/log internally, or to a connected PC. Set your PC and camera/NVR to sync to an NTP time source. Set the camera and meter up outside a little before dusk and let 'em run while you do other things. Then you can go back to the recorded video and watch it, and get LUX readings for a given time point from the meter software.

Our cameras incorporate storage (up to 500GB) in the camera, along with self-calibrating video analytics adapted to detecting people and vehicles (and ignoring pretty much all other motion). For your scenario, you can mount one of our 1080p HD cameras, get continuous recording at 1080p 24/7 if you like, and get real-time notifications of certain activities (like a person coming into a specific area of your property at night). All of this is managed within the camera itself, so there is no requirement to have a back-end PC running any software to make it all work. An example of a camera mounted on my house, tracks me, ignores the dog:

A) Because some board cameras have more than one board The number of boards in the design means very little. In the camera industry there are companies that make practically every component in the camera, some that OEM key components and then add their own "flavor", and some that just whitelabel and resell the components of a larger manufacturer/OEM provider. Also, as technology evolves, you can fit more components in less space, and integrate more things together. So, you could have a manufacturer like Sony (who makes their own imagers and ISPs, plus has general electronics manufacturing experience) produce a board camera that is one board with a minimal number of visible components. It would be the sensor, ISP, power circuitry, etc. all on a 2" square (or smaller) PCB. Another company might OEM a sensor/ISP module (board) from Sony, and then build their own daughter board assembly to manage power and maybe provide some additional features and functions (motion detection or image "enhancement" functions), a balanced output to be used on a twisted-pair cable and so forth. Electronic circuits don't work that way. The circuit draws as much current (amperage) as it needs, and no more. You could hook a 5000ma (5A) power supply to it and it would still draw just whatever it needed, leaving reserve capacity in the supply (to power many cameras from a single source, for instance). A bigger problem would be using a supply that had more voltage than the circuit was rated or designed for. A cheap way to do voltage regulation is to throw off the excess voltage as heat. So, even when you have a camera than can run on say 6-24VDC, it's often best to supply a voltage closer to the lower end than the higher end of the scale (I'm simplifying a lot of things here).