fa chris

lots of people in that thread are questioning why the security industry is so far behind with outdated crappy analog cameras. hrm...

substation should lock down strikes before sending underground to other homes. multiple homes on the same circuit from the sub station are all are subject to surges from a strike somewhere along the line. There's plenty of new overhead wire hung in the US every year, air is the best insulator for transmission, buried cables lose power over long distances. Rural areas will always have overhead wiring because of this. Anyways, no equipment survives a direct lightening strike. Surge protectors do exactly as their name says, protect against surges, they aren't strike protectors. Surges are going to come from close proximity lightening strikes, where the energy goes to ground through various paths which may include a steel building your equipment is attached too, or a circuit your equipment is directly connected to, the plumbing, etc. which can cause voltage fluctuations at your equipment. For those reasons I always put surge suppressors on our 120vac lines going to our panels and any equipment leaving a building. We lost a lot of equipment to lightening, and surge suppressors are cheap.

Have had good luck with Arecont cameras on HP Procurve switches. HP ProCurve Switch 2610-24-PWR with a Gigabit port. Has 24 PoE 10/100 ports and a gigabit uplink for your server. Can take mini-gbics if you want to run fiber between multiple switches. Has 77watts of power for the devices.

ZoneMinder is open source, I'm sure it has what you need in it. http://www.zoneminder.com

Genetec provides the software, you can put them on whatever server you want. We've used Dell, HP, and custom built servers as our NVR's. For video and access, you need Genetec Security Center, which combines omnicast (the video portion) and Synergis (the access portion). Email sales@genetec.com with a list of equipment you need licenses and everything for.

For more generic courses you can look into CompTIA Network+ or CISCO icnd1. Both cover essentially the same things, TCP/IP, OSI model, NAT, DHCP, IP addressing, routing and switching, subnetting, etc... basically everything Soundy recommended. Very good groundwork courses aimed at networking in general (zero focus on CCTV specifically), you should walk away from them with almost everything you need to know. What they don't teach you, we should be able to explain.

And storage is rated in Mega Bytes, which is often all you ever get from camera manufactures to figure out your bandwidth.

Part of the breaking system involves pitch controls to help slow it down, but it's not always fast enough. Mechanical brakes kick in when pitch controls don't slow it down enough. There's some type of electrical braking too I think. Electrical braking is probably what causes the explosions.

Yup.

Vivotek claims to have a calculator for such things, but apparently they've recently revamped their website and in the process managed to break all their links... so I have no clue where to find it. What's more disturbing is their cut sheets don't list bandwidth requirements. At max quality the IP8332's use less than a MB/Sec as long as you're using MPEG4 or H.264. With motion jpeg at max quality it's almost 4 MB/s... The other camera uses less bandwidth at max quality, by only recording at 10fps (compared to 30fps for the IP8332).

They work very well too. You can use a bunch of Axis 241Q blades to migrate analog to IP cheaply and effectively.

Wind Turbines have brake systems to prevent them from going to fast. Here's what happened to one when the brakes failed:

The main thing is video playback / searching for video during an incident, and exporting the video. Seems very basic, but a lot of VMS's fail at it horribly and the end result is you spend 3 hours looking at 24 hours of video to find the 5 seconds you actually need. For viewing, some software lets you stitch images from multiple cameras together to display one single image. Other features are how it stores data, using data aging (ie: new video might be 10fps, as it ages it gets recorded over to 9fps... 5fps... then eventually completely overwritten), how it manages multiple archivers, how it does backups, redundancy, failover, etc. Basically the server management portion. You'll also find a lot of NVR's offer different kinds of integration to other systems like access control, alarm monitoring, mapping software, basic analytics, POS Transaction functions, different levels of scalability, bunch of little specific features you may or may not need like ability to view on an android/iphone/ipad. Avigilon isn't the end all be all, but it's some pretty awesome stuff. Genetec and DvTel can compete with it, as I'm sure others can as well. Avigilon has an added bonus of offering their own line of high end IP cameras though.

I'm a big fan of the Genetic stuff. Great product and support. They've demo'd the VertX and E400's for us with their system and they appear to all work flawlessly, but I've had a lot of headaches with VertX and E400s on other systems... with nothing to go on but a demo, I'm still a little nervous about trying it out on a large scale project. So much so instead of replacing another system's head end with Genetec, we ripped it out entirely and slapped in all new hardware from another access control system.

I don't disagree. I used to be a fan, it used to be good stuff. The Casi stuff is still solid, but it's never been updated and everything has surpassed it. Very limited applications now where a micro/5 is equal or better than something else, and with fcwnx it never is. Their reps always touted their first NVR's as "ooh, look at our linux stuff". There was a time when it was top notch, 5-6 years ago it was still competitive, its now pretty far down there in my opinion. I've done around 5 major casi systems over the past 5 years and the decline in quality and support has been massive. Doubt I'll ever do another GE CCTV System, but UTC might bring them back around.

GE has put almost zero R&D into their security side since the 90s. Casi went to waste and hasn't been touched forever, allowing everything else to surpass it and then some (not to mention they had like 12 access control lines which only confused people). When they bought IFS they all but stopped development on it (the guys from IFS actually started their own company now - forgot the name). Their CCTV line... disaster. They changed software and OS's multiple times - first preaching linux, which was fine but something no end user wanted to mess with, then switching to windows with various versions of buggy software. Facility Commander being the worst. The camera line has gone through multiple revisions, each time requiring different mounts, part #s, etc... their legend PTZ domes STILL don't work (anyone else have these randomly freeze and reboot?). They blame the network for all of their IP issues, but every time we've hung a different camera out on the network it's worked flawlessly. Talk about a mess of a company... They really let their security fall to old buggy dilapidated crap before selling it all off to UTC. In otherwords... it's not really fair to use them as a comparison.

I don't think a lower problem camera will help you out here, you're better off switching to 24vac for longer voltage runs.

If you think its dirty power you can clean it up by putting your equipment on a UPS with with automatic voltage regulation (most APC's and Tripplites have it, I'm sure most others do too). Could possibly be cheap/defective baluns too? Does cycling the power to the cameras make them come back up?

You could use a 24vac power supply and put a 24vac to 12vdc converter at the camera. Something along the lines of one of these: http://www.altronix.com/index.php?pid=2&model_num=VR1

Cisco & HP make PoE routers. Lots of manufactures make PoE switches, why do you need a router?

In the US, typically there are no laws or codes regulating it, it's purely what the customer specifies. 30 days seems to be pretty standard. Customer also specifies the quality, frame rate, etc of the recordings.

http://www.aliendvr.com/docs/support/alien_dvr_networking.html You need two ports open.

From a business standpoint we have zero desire to use Bosch. Why sell software only your company has an agreement with the manufacturer to sell and then put a camera readily available to anyone on the system? I'd say it's a strategic move for them to NOT support Bosch.

avigilion or genetec would be my top choices. To take over existing analog cameras you just need an IP encoder compatible with the NVR software. Something along the lines of: http://www.axis.com/products/cam_240q/index.htm

Oh wow, that's an awesome concept. And a new place to park my domains.