Avigilon demo lined up

[capz 0]

I had a long discussion with a local Avigilon dealer today about our 10 camera project. He's coming shortly to give us a demo for comparison to a top end analog. The quote for the cameras wasn't too bad but the the cost of a 16 camera license was off the charts. Avigilon uses proprietary software so no way around that. The reason we're still interested is he said in 25 years he hasn't seen anything like these cameras. He gave me a brief company history and said they originally designed cameras to view DNA. Sounds like they know how to build cameras. While he does sell Avigilon, he stressed that for cost it might be overkill for our purposes, and went on to say that it's ridiculous for ip cameras to be as expensive as they are. The only time it's cost effective is when you're in a situation where you can use 1 high megapixel camera, like Avigilon 16MP, to monitor a large area that could normally take 50 analogs.

All I know is, if we go analog, I would hate to have a situation where we need to give police video and only have the quality that you see on the news everyday.

[griffonsystems 0]

checkout mobotix, 3mp cam streams direct to nas, free vms.. i have been keeping up with avigilon and they have very good cameras but they are definitely application specific not ones ud roll out for an entire site and not cheap but some really impressive cameras

[CCTVguru1 0]

if you want resolution but dont care about bandwidth, storage or a useable front end client software, use Avigilon or Mobotix.

 

For a full turn key soultion that works, is reliable, has 50% better compression and storage, comes with a range of HD cameras try IndigoVision.

 

It all comes down to your application and if reliability, usability and small bandwidths matter.

[megapixel man 0]

if you want resolution but dont care about bandwidth, storage or a useable front end client software, use Avigilon or Mobotix.

 

For a full turn key soultion that works, is reliable, has 50% better compression and storage, comes with a range of HD cameras try IndigoVision.

 

It all comes down to your application and if reliability, usability and small bandwidths matter.

 

Resolution is key in any surveillance system.

 

Why is the Avigilon or Mobotix front end client software not usable?

 

With the range of HD cameras available from Indego Vision as stated above, are you able to tell me the bit rate on a 2MP, 5MP, 11MP and 16MP Indego Vision camera at the highest image quality available @ max frame rates for each camera, with a minimum of 80% activity in the scene? as I would like to compare the H.264 to other compressions at this level and determine if the Indego Vision compression and storage is 50% better as claimed.

 

Cheers

[CCTVguru1 0]

[it all comes down to your application and if With the range of HD cameras available from Indego Vision as stated above, are you able to tell me the bit rate on a 2MP, 5MP, 11MP and 16MP Indego Vision camera at the highest image quality available @ max frame rates for each camera, with a minimum of 80% activity in the scene? as I would like to compare the H.264 to other compressions at this level and determine if the Indego Vision compression and storage is 50% better as claimed.

 

 

HD means the HD standard of 720p or 1080p.

At this stage these fit most peoples requirements and as such I can not comment on the Avigilon products up to 16MP.

I can only say that JPEG2000 is not an industry standard, which is what Indigo try to adhere to and is why we produce H.264 encoding, which is the TV industry standard and has a lot of room t be further enhanced while remaining with in the standard.

[megapixel man 0]

[it all comes down to your application and if With the range of HD cameras available from Indego Vision as stated above, are you able to tell me the bit rate on a 2MP, 5MP, 11MP and 16MP Indego Vision camera at the highest image quality available @ max frame rates for each camera, with a minimum of 80% activity in the scene? as I would like to compare the H.264 to other compressions at this level and determine if the Indego Vision compression and storage is 50% better as claimed.

 

 

HD means the HD standard of 720p or 1080p.

At this stage these fit most peoples requirements and as such I can not comment on the Avigilon products up to 16MP.

I can only say that JPEG2000 is not an industry standard, which is what Indigo try to adhere to and is why we produce H.264 encoding, which is the TV industry standard and has a lot of room t be further enhanced while remaining with in the standard.

 

Ok, a swipe at the oposition and then a side step.

 

I did a check on the Indego web site and only one HD (720p) camera was listed, hardly a range.

 

Are you willing to share with me why you think Avigilon or Mobotix do not have a useable front end client software? or reliable. Do you have any forst hand experience with this?

 

You mentioned JPEG2000, which is what Avigilon uses and my research tells me that for high resolution video 1080p and above, JPEG2000 is the superior compression, hence why HD Cinema uses it as their standard. In mid resolutions JPEG2000 and H.264 are comparable and for low resolution and bit rates H.264 is a bit better. Am I wrong in this?

 

For multi megapixel surveillance systems I will stick to the advantages of JPEG2000. But my blinkers are not on and am open to learning more.

[CCTVguru1 0]

The client should call for a shoot out and understand their own requirements.

Avigilon is good if you want massive resolution and short storage times (or huge capacity hard drives)

I have 1 site that runs both Indigo and Avigilon on the same system for 2 different uses.

 

IndigoVision is recognized for an excellent user and technician friendly interface.

Most CCTV applications do not need the 3+MP resolution and in my experience do not have the bandwidth to support it and as such many of the MP cameras are not programmed for their max resolution. Also many can not provide full frame rate at full resolution.

 

Do a shoot out and then decide.

[frank3 0]

HD means the HD standard of 720p or 1080p.

At this stage these fit most peoples requirements and as such I can not comment on the Avigilon products up to 16MP.

I can only say that JPEG2000 is not an industry standard, which is what Indigo try to adhere to and is why we produce H.264 encoding, which is the TV industry standard and has a lot of room t be further enhanced while remaining with in the standard.

 

I understand from your post that you work for Indigo Vision, so you're unlikely to recommend your competitors. However, for the benefit of others in this forum, you should keep your claims closer to the truth.

 

First of all, JPEG2000 is an ISO standard which is widely used for digital cinema (movie theaters) and military imaging/surveillance. The only reason it's not being used by the TV industry is that there is always a single fullscreen stream and the resolution is fixed in advance. CCTV needs not play catch up with the TV industry, it can do better.

 

We may be an atypical Avigilon customer, but we have lots of SD analog cameras, rather than megapixel. Even then, JPEG2000 has significant benefits for us. It enabled possibilities and solved problems that other surveillance companies won't even attempt to tackle.

 

Let's say you are monitoring 36 analog cameras on a dual monitor setup. That's 0.3 megapixel per camera for a total of 15 megapixels. Each monitor has 1 megapixel of visible surface, for a total of 2. With JPEG2000, the software isn't streaming and processing 15 megapixels, it's only streaming and processing 2 megapixels, which is what you need for full quality on your monitors. Whatever you throw at it on any computer, it will always scale beautifully. With the H.264 systems we've seen, you couldn't even come close to that efficiency, let alone stream those cameras across the Internet simultaneously.

 

Say we had 36 1080p cameras instead. That would be 72 megapixels of data for our 2 megapixels of monitor surface. JPEG2000 still streams 2 megapixels regardless, or progressively lowers frame rate, quality or resolution if we wish to monitor across the Internet. H.264 would stream 72 megapixels at 30 frames per second (2 gigapixels per second), or downgrade to one frame every few seconds since the computer and network couldn't keep up.

[Privatteer 0]

Bandwidth- 3.1MP 2048x1536 @ 12FPS Ive tested several H.264 cameras and found them running in the range of 5Mbps, and about 12 at 30fps. Limitating perhaps if trying to run more than 8 on a 100Mb connection but gig is easily achievable and ~90 cameras on one segment is more than what most will need. Current system I am working on is quite happily streaming a DVD as a camera input down a 512K adsl connection without major image quality loss.

 

Anything more I say would be based only on one Indigo site that I have discussed with guru1 before but image quality, user friendliness, setup, would all get negative scores from me.

Hopefully others have used it and had better luck.

[Privatteer 0]

I had a long discussion

All I know is, if we go analog, I would hate to have a situation where we need to give police video and only have the quality that you see on the news everyday.

 

16MP is a case of big numbers for big cost. 1.3MP to 5MP cameras are a lot cheaper while providing a substantial improvement over analogue. In many cases I would prefer to have 2 cameras looking from 2 different directions than 1 that's easy to hide from.

 

If you look around there is a number of software packages that support several brands of cameras. eg Nuuo, Milestone, Exacqvision.

License costs vary.

[Twilo123 0]

i saw them briefly at ISC West. picture quality was excellent and their software i have to admit was extremely responsive for any ptz function. i only had a couple of minutes with them but i am sure they have a specific target market. if i remember correctly they now support 3rd party cameras although i am not sure if they re-encode the stream to jpg2000 or leave in it's native format. i would think they are re-encoding on the fly.

[CCTVguru1 0]

Let's say you are monitoring 36 analog cameras on a dual monitor setup. That's 0.3 megapixel per camera for a total of 15 megapixels. Each monitor has 1 megapixel of visible surface, for a total of 2. With JPEG2000, the software isn't streaming and processing 15 megapixels, it's only streaming and processing 2 megapixels, which is what you need for full quality on your monitors. Whatever you throw at it on any computer, it will always scale beautifully. With the H.264 systems we've seen, you couldn't even come close to that efficiency, let alone stream those cameras across the Internet simultaneously.

 

This may be true but you still have to record the full image, which in my understanding is a very bigh bandwidth.

Most video is recorded and not viewed so the live efficiencies you have detailed still do not reduce the bandwidth. Just the PC processing power required and the bandwidth on that part of the LAN. Does the video stream from the camera or via a server for down scalling or multiple clients at the same time.

[frank3 0]

This may be true but you still have to record the full image, which in my understanding is a very bigh bandwidth.

 

Recording is definitely not a bottleneck. A terabyte hard drive is dirt cheap nowadays and those cameras can be set to only record motion, so it's as effective as H.264 in terms of storage. On top of that, the flexibility of JPEG 2000 allows a same stream to age over time. Whereas with H.264 we might be stuck with 10 days for 1080p 30fps (unless we reduce the frame rate upfront), the Avigilon NVR can keep the stream over a year if needed, since it can peel frame rate, quality and resolution layers like you would peel an onion. We configured our NVRs to keep at least a month of full resolution and a year of progressively aged footage.

 

Most video is recorded and not viewed so the live efficiencies you have detailed still do not reduce the bandwidth. Just the PC processing power required and the bandwidth on that part of the LAN. Does the video stream from the camera or via a server for down scalling or multiple clients at the same time.

 

The same principle applies to recorded footage, not just live. It's possible to remotely monitor live cameras over the Internet, yet analyze past footage at the same time, on dozens of cameras. One good example is their thumbnail search feature, which lets you instantly view hundreds of thumbnails for the last hour, the last day or even the whole month. From my understanding, this would be technically impossible with H.264, since you would need to download lots of 1080p pictures, a bandwidth-intensive operation.

 

My point is, for most useful uses of a video surveillance system, megapixel is not needed until you absolutely need to zoom in into details, but other codecs force you to absorb and handle all the megapixels, whether you need them and can handle them or not. Since in most scenarios we don't, I have found the flexibility of JPEG 2000's on-demand behaviour to be much more suitable and powerful.

 

To answer your last question, the NVR decides which parts of the images to transmit. It doesn't need to down-scale or re-encode, it just sends less data than what it receives from cameras. I don't know the details, but I found a YouTube video that gives a better explanation. See around 3:45, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fmle3bkSYQ

All I know is that it does a darn good job, even with our third-party analog cameras.

[megapixel man 0]

i saw them briefly at ISC West. picture quality was excellent and their software i have to admit was extremely responsive for any ptz function. i only had a couple of minutes with them but i am sure they have a specific target market. if i remember correctly they now support 3rd party cameras although i am not sure if they re-encode the stream to jpg2000 or leave in it's native format. i would think they are re-encoding on the fly.

 

I believe that support for 3rd party cameras will be in the V4.0 software. From what I understand there will be no re-encoding to JPEG2000. Ie: if the camera is H.264 it will record in H.264. This will mean that some of the core features of JPEG2000 will not be available for the third party cameras in the Avigilon Control Centre, like lossless compression, data aging and HDSM "high definition stream management".