Backfist

Greetings, Forgive me for being a newbie, but I need your advice/opinions. I am presently tasked with selecting a system or components for two interview rooms. At present the rooms have fixed 470 line dome cameras and wall-mounted Crown PZM microphones feeding into Panasonic DVD recorders and Marantz dual-well cassette recorders. The system has worked well in the past. We are unable to go to any type of computer based recording due to the multitude of less than tech saavy users. We need a big red button (record) system. I need your advice on PTZ cameras and controllers. We need to replace the fixed domes with PTZ cameras. The recording distance will be a max. of fifteen feet. The detectives need these to zoom in on suspects. Any thoughts on the cameras/controllers?

As with all government things, hurry up and wait. Hopefully I should have the answer on funding within the next couple of weeks. Once I have my firm dollars I'll probably be back to bug you guys some more. Thanks for checking!

Basically, you would have a megapixel camera in each room that sees the entire room and, with appropriate software, you could zoom in on any area of the room while your recording system still records the whole room. With that type of system you could also zoom in after-the-fact, on playback. There are systems that have very simple file creation and archiving. I'm in the casino field so I'm not familiar with all possibilities in what you want to do but I'm sure there is someone on this board that can help with that. Thanks for your help! The zoom function would be used for close-ups of suspect/victim injuries, facial expressions, clothing, etc. Being in the casino end, your requirements, I'm sure, are much higher and your system requirements are far more complicated. I never realized how in depth this area was till I started looking for this particular setup. Thanks again!

I guess you got me on your first line...megapixel cameras. These would zoom in on your initial fixed point I'm assuming? Or are you referring to a picture-in-picture second camera set-up? I agree on the computer-based recording. The difficult part is the users ability and real-time recording. They prefer the convenience of simply finalizing a real-time DVD and leaving the control room. Saving and burning files is beyond a lot of them I believe.