mgb

Hello and welcome

If you go to a home depot and go to the aisle where outdoor outlet boxes are. heres a link to one http://www.homedepot.com/p/Bell-1-Gang-Five-1-2-in-Hole-Round-Electrical-Box-White-RB550WH/202284526

You can go a couple of different ways. First off, it has a mounting flange. And the connection cable should come through that flange. You can drill through the brick and bring the connection cable right into the building if accessible. Then you can screw the mounting flange to the building right on top of that hole using Tapcon screws or screws with lead lag shields or plastic bushings (Rawls). Then caulk the flange mounting. Or it may even be best to mount and exterior electrical box and mount the cameras flange to a blank cover. Again you can drill into the budding behind the box or pipe from the box to a place to enter the building using and LB. again, caulk the box. When caulking, be sure to just caulk the top and sides but leave the bottom uncaulked so if water does get in, it can drain out. If using tapcons, use their drill bits for the pilot holes.

Usually sync play is just one particular feature that allows you to view across multiple cameras to see an event play out amongst those cameras. Sorry if my explanation is a bit confusing but it would be like, lets say someone got into a hallway and did some damage and then on to other halls and rooms, you have a camera in each of the areas. You can select up to 8 cameras in sync play for a particular time frame and watch the whole event as it played out across those cameras.

I'm not sure pinhole cameras would be your best bet for seeing them in the dark. You'd probably want more of a standard day night camera with ir. but if your plan is to setup the cameras to be looking through windows, you will get reflection problems from the ir. With the budget you have, you'd be best off looking at one of the package deals from Lorex, Swann or Qsee. Or you can look into Dahua or hikvision. You should be fine with a 4 channel dvr with a 500G hard drive. Maybe even smaller if possible. Keep in mind that there are some DVRs that come without a hard drive so make sure it's included. Good luck

As long as its for video which it sounds like it is. If you question a particular model just post it here.

Most of the cmercial nvrs I do are Raid. How important is your recorded data to you. You don't have to have raid though

You're joking right? He means from his local network he can see them

Some of them have other inputs and outputs such as audio in and alarm output. Maybe that's what you're seeing.

If you do go wireless, I would think wifi may not work well in an elevator shaft. just a thought. what about a wireless option like this http://www.eyespyli.com/svex_yt2.htm if that's the route you're looking.

This place has a few options. They have single camera transmitter / receivers (5.8GHz) starting at $86. http://www.eyespyli.com/wireless_receiving_systems.htm There are a lot of high power weather proof units from other places but they are far from cheap. I'm going to assume, based on the fact that your boss purchased Lorex equipment, that he doesn't want to spend a whole bunch on these wireless units.

Not a whole lot of details there. Because you mention no wifi, I'm assuming you are looking for ip cameras and nvr as opposed to analog cameras and dvr. Hikvision seems to be the special around here due to its cost vs reliability. They have plenty of ip cameras to choose from and they accept Poe so you can run a single cat 5e or 6 to each. They have 16 channel NVRs and I believe with built in Poe switch or you can supply a separate Poe switch if desired

If I had to guess on which wires went where, I'd say you're probably right on guessing the blacks and black/whites are negative power and the reds and red/whites are positive power. Which leaves the yellow and white for video. Probably your only choice now is to experiment. If you're right on the power, the video is easy to just try each polarity. If you have nothing to loose, you can try opening up one of the cameras and tracing the wires.

Kind of hard to tell what steps you have taken so far here but first off you need to enable and enroll your ddns service in your nvr. I'm not familiar with that particular nvr but typically it's something like selecting the service ( in this case hikvisions ddns) and then typing in what you want to name it. After applying that, it should register with the ddns service and tell you if it succeeded. Then whatever ports are being used by the nvr have to be forwarded within your router. If you are unsure of how to do it in your particular router, you can go to portforward.com. There you can find instructions or I believe they also will do it for you for a fee. I would suggest changing your nvrs web port from 80 to something like 81 or 85 because many ISPs block port 80.

There are many choices out there for cameras. It really comes down to a balance between budget and performance. There is cheap no name type of equipment that offers super low cost but you cant rely on it. There are brands like Dahua and Hikvision which many here have chosen for their relative low cost and good performance. And there are brands like Axis that are very feature rich and dependable but much higher priced. As said, the vms software will likely depend on your camera choices. Many manufacturers offer free software for use with their cameras and many of them will support other manufacturers cameras but there may be a connection license fee per camera. There is also software such as Blue Iris, Milestone and others. For commercial / Institutional IP cameras, we use Video Insight VMS. You can purchase the software itself but we always get the whole setup from them. Everything preinstalled on server grade rack mount dells. The setups are customizable, I have installs that are Dell towers with a 2TB HDD to ones that are multiple Rack mount servers, each with 24TB of storage. It's a nice solution. There are no connection license fees if you use Advidia cameras (I believe they're oem'd by Hikvision). Small warning: if purchasing their rack mount servers, you will need to purchase mounting rails because they don't come with them. A job I'm on right now has Brickcom cameras and so far I'm liking their performance.

Hello and welcome. Be sure to get your questions posted and I'm sure they'll be answered in good time.

To make it easier for yourself so you don't have to worry to remember to turn it on, you can set it up in scheduling so that it only records at night.

Hello and welcome.

The hikvision dS-7716nI-SP/16 has 16 port Poe and it can take up to 4 sata drives with each up to 4TB. From what I understand on many embedded nvrs is that you're somewhat limited to the same manufacturer's cameras. There may be some interchanging between brands and then there is onvif which you should read up on. But I believe it's best to stay within the same nvr and camera brand.

The elevator emergency hand set should have 2 spare pairs then. Can those be used

Look into the scheduling menu. That will tell you how the recording behavior is set. Also, the setup for each individual input on the dvr should have some setup for continued recording or motion recording, etc. I'm assuming the dvr is one of those no name Chinese models that just say h.264 dvr on the front. There should be manufacturers info somewhere, either on a sticker underneath the unit or in the manual.

It's kind of hard for a cable to an elevator to have much separation from others because their is typically only one travel cable to the car. By chance, do you have any line lock or sync feature enabled. Any chance of an alternate power source? Is this video going pair, a spare pair in the cat 5 to the emergency handset?

Hi John, Keep in mind that dvr cards and ip cameras are two different things. Ip cameras connect via Ethernet cables (cat 5 or cat 6) and can usually be powered by Poe. The dvr cards for a computer are for accepting the input of analog cameras. The card you're speaking of with VGA style inputs sounds like some of the brands I've seen, such as eyemax, where each connector has 8 BNC pigtails for connecting analog cameras

That's the key, right there. Break it down piece by piece to find where the problem is.

If all the cameras are out, it may be a power issue. Off the top of my head, I'd say the power supply feeding all the cameras is dead (or powered down) The camera view that was briefly showing may have just been the last images from the camera and shutting it off and back on again just cleared it out.