threed

Rory, i hope you didnt loose much sleep over me posting in the wrong section of the website. Its my first time here so the general forum looked appropriate, next time it will be in the other section. Its funny, your the only user i recognized after reading through other posts, but ive only seen comments chastising people, none giving advice. What about reliability of the servers, is 100% uptime obtainable or do all vms systems go down occasionally, partially because of the amount of video they process constantly? We have been on 24x7 recording because we havent been able to tweak the motion sensitivity to a level that gives us good results on recording, is this normal or do other cameras have better motion activation?

The ongoing costs are important for us, thats what eliminates a lot of other vms's. Pelco does not have a annual fee and include free upgrades. I doubt we would go with any vms that did charge a annual fee. What type of server does avigilon recommend? Or do they have their own hardware?

It seems that Pelco has taken a old vms system and changed it to work with ip cameras. It doesnt seem as clean and user friendly as avigilon. Ive also noticed that pelcos software uses a lot more resources to run on client machines. I will look into Exacq and see how their stuff compares. \ As far as functionality, avigilon and pelco cover all the same basic needs in searching and recording. Avigilon is better having a ipad app but that is more of a toy than a essential piece of the system. It does make me lean towards avigilon though because they are developing stuff like the ipad app ( rather have a android app but thats a personal preference) and the fact that it looks like they created it for ip, not just adapted a old tech. I haven't done side by side testing but the searching etc seems to be similar on both systems, but avigilon is faster if i had to guess. What about cameras? Any preference on price/performance ?

Thats partially why im on this board and looking online, if we have the Avigilon group do the plans we will be paying for that as a seperate item and then we would get bids depending on their recommendations. I agree that its wrong to have a sales group do the heavy lifting and then go low bid at the end, thats why we are up front with them and have already gotten a quote from them to create a plan. My worry is about getting cameras/vms that is going to have problems like our current pelco setup, so im trying to get recommendations on manufactures before we have a plan created with a company that people say to stay away from.

Around 100-130, we have talked to a dealer from utah but because i dont have a lot of experience in this area im trying to explore the options. We will most likely install them ourselves, but administration is leaning towards having someone draw up a plan of how many cameras to install and what types, in what location etc. The area that our last install lacks in is the outdoor cams. We are thinking about getting a higher Mp camera for those areas. Right now we are using pelco 1.3 mp 8 ips cameras, how does avigilon compare price wise to pelco?

Idaho. I see your an Avigilon guy, we are thinking of going with them after seeing their high mp camera and software. How long has the company been going? Are they a big company and is their software reliable? The pelco software we are running with the other schools keeps crashing, i havent been involved in any big installations of cameras until now so im not familiar with what companies are popular.

We are going to be ordering a large number of cameras for a school setting. We currently have pelco but have had problems with the server stopping recording. I want some advice on camera brands that are good quality that i should look at. I have seen avigilon software that i like but havent heard of the company until now, any advice?