I have been lurking for a few weeks now and finally got the guts to post. As much as I have researched, we are still at a loss as to the best solution for a project we are going to be working on. For some background, we are a small software developer in the healthcare field and we were working on a one off product that required video. While the solution we created about a year ago worked out, we are looking to now improve upon it.
Use: This system is used to record is a medium sized (normally around 20 X 20 room)...recording both the bed and clinical staff moving and working around the bed. Sound capture is important as is full view of the room and recording smooth movement. The primary use is to review after recordings are complete, with a live video feed being less important.
Basically our needs are:
- High resolution...but most importantly no hiccups with smooth movement
- This will be indoors and lighting will ALWAYS be very strong and bright...there would never be a circumstance when we need to record in the dark.
- Ceiling or wall mount...we need to get a bed and all the area around it to monitor the movement of clinical staff around the patient. So something that can record a wider view would be good.
- Good sound input...the rooms are (on average) about 20' X 20'. The sound that needs to be recorded is of spoken words within that room. We don't care about background noise and, in fact, the more ability to filter out background noise the better. If a good microphone isn't built in, the ability to easily add something is important.
- Active Pan/Tilt/Zoom is not at all important. There won't be anyone who can control the movement anyways. However, I did notice some of the hemispheric cameras have the ability to do that after the fact (though digitally - not physically I believe) and that could possibly be appealing.
- A Good SDK - We are a software developer and would need to integrate this into the rest of our system (which does much more than video - this is just one piece).
- Networking or bandwidth isn't too big of a concern as we are making a dedicated connection directly to the PC that will be running the software to save the videos.
- The main reason for creating the recordings is to view them after the fact. While a live feed is somewhat desirable, it is not the main purpose. The main purpose is to use it and review it post-recording.
What we used in the past:
- When we went live our first test set-up we used an AXIS p1346 set at H.264 with the 2MP and 30fps setting. While we liked the POE option, we found it stutter somewhat (even though it was on a dedicated Cat 5 line to our PC), the sound is less than ideal and...most of all...the viewing area was not wide enough, even thought we mounted it as high as possible on a wall. Also, getting a lower cost from the $1,450 we paid for the Axis P1346 models would be good. Another very big problem with the Axis cameras was, since these videos will be reviewed later and are ported (via USB drives from the video recording PC) to various computers, we had no easy way to get the Axis Codec onto different computers...as they wouldn't have access to the direct camera feed since we put it on an independant network for just the cam and PC. If there are other solutions that can get around this (for instance, not having to use a proprietary codec) that would be highly desireable.
I have been researching on the forums and am intrigued by the Mobotix Q24. The idea that we could mount it above a bed (or on the wall) and record different views (such as different points in the room where important events may happen) and that could be panned around after the recording is completed is highly desirable. However, I am concerned about the low FPS and the smoothness of the video.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. We are a "think out of the box" kind of group, and are not stuck on any one manufacturer or even that it has to be an IP camera, so any ideas are helpful. Please keep in mind that we are very new to the A/V realm (as we are mainly programmers).
Thanks!
