fa chris

If it's a lighted indoor area, I would put occupancy sensors on the lights so they turn on when someone enters the area. This alone is a deterrence to anyone breaking in. Added bonus is they turn off when no motion is detected for a preset time so they're awesome for daily use as energy savers.

The camera doesn't need any motion activated sensors, the software should handle it all. I'm not sure about lepta, but in the software I've dealt with you set up the recording for the camera for motion activated, and you select the specific area of the camera view you want it to record when motion happens in that area. For example, if you have a camera in an office pointing down a cubicle hallway, you'd set the area for motion recording to be anything in that hallway. You don't want it to record whenever people move around inside their own cube so the software ignores movement in those areas. It sounds like your software may have something similar, and the area selected for recording motion is a small part of what the entire camera is seeing, hence recording only odd bits and pieces for no rhyme or reason.

Most DVR software packages record in somewhat proprietary formats so they can't be tampered with. Makes them more legitimate to use in court. Your options are to use the software package to export an incident and it should give the option to include a player, or to convert it to a different format using a converter included with the software package or directly from the manufacturer.

To get an idea of your competition, we've used this IEE people counter with success: http://www.iee.lu/products:public:people-counter It's basically an aluminum housing with a few cameras, a fan, and a controller. Malls, public buildings, stadiums, etc. always like to have an idea of how many people are coming and going. Anywhere you see a turnstile is an opportunity to sell a people counter. It's been my experience the accuracy of people counters isn't the greatest. The selling points are convenience (you're not clogging up foot traffic with turn styles, even if they are optical turnstiles), and installation costs to retrofit. It's a camera in a ceiling tile as opposed to ripping out the floor and installing turnstiles. It may be a niche market, but the customers are there if you find them...

Sounds like the issue is the company made promises of security it failed to deliver on. It they never had fences, guards, access control, or never agreed to provide any of it, then there wouldn't be a case. And a CCTV system with a guard monitoring still probably wouldn't have stopped this. Common sense for own personal well being (ie: don't open doors to strangers) has to come into play at some point to truly be secure.

The manufacturers website usually has tools for calculating this information too. Sometimes it takes a little bit of searching and sometimes you're required to register, but it's always there.

Pelco sells black housings, should be available through a number of suppliers / internet sites.

Have any pictures or a sketch of the layout of your site? There might be some other possibilities. Sounds like you need a vehicle counter at each bay more than anything else.

I see a few of these import autocad files, do any of them export to autocad?

If it's happening to all the cameras, hook up a camera you know that works on one end of the cable and a monitor at the other end BEFORE it goes into any head end equipment (dvr, splitter, encoder, matrix, etc.). Ruling out the cable installation should be easy.

I use 650 feet to play it safe but the Pelco says 750 feet for RG59. Took the info from the data sheet for the Pelco MPT9000: http://www.pelco.com/sites/global/en/products/analog-systems-controls/range-presentation.page?c_filepath=/templatedata/Offer_Presentation/3_Range_Datasheet/data/en/shared/analog_systems_and_controls/mpt9000_series_control.xml

are there lightpoles or anything you can mount the cameras on that can also provide a 24/7 power source?

Rough price range 1.5k-3k ea.? For a dome with heater, roughly 1-1.5k. Heater doesn't add much to price of the equipment, but adds to the installation cost from pulling an extra cable and adding a power supply. This assumes you're using the PoE options to power the actual camera.

We have a bunch of outdoor Avigilion IP cameras at a site in Minneapolis with no heaters and no issues. Also have used IP Arecont MP cameras with heaters hooked up and have had very little issues with them quite a bit farther north than MN. I doubt either of these are a cheap(ish) solution though.

99% of the time we get them direct from the manufacturer. Depending on your volume you may want to pick a line and try to become a rep. The other 1% we go through vendors like ADI or other similiar local distributors who cator to low voltage systems.

The little standalone installer works okay (not great, but okay)... it's just too bad they don't actually make it readily available. Unless things have changed recently, they only thing they provide on the bundled CD and on their website is their full setup/NVR package... and the installation for that doesn't give you the option to NOT install the NVR, or to set it to NOT start automatically with windows. Two weeks ago I programmed ~80 arecont cameras (from the from the small av2155's all the way up to the 360 view av8365's) and every camera came with a disc with the AV100 software. It installs the AV100 software along with a viewer and something else, small quick install, easily removed when done. It was a little finicky when I plugged in a bunch of cameras at once, but overall had very little issues. I also found on areconts if you don't set the "lock IP" option when programming they sometimes forget their assigned IP.