Unique system for a Curling club

[ytsejamr 0]

Hi there,

 

I'm writing on behalf of my local curling club. For those that need a little refresher, curling is an Olympic sport played on ice. See here for lots of info . . . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curling

 

So in our club we currently have 4 very old analog CCTV cameras that are mounted to the ceiling looking straight down on to the far set of circles. We have four sheets of ice with a "warm room" on one end with glass windows overlooking the sheets. The camera signals are sent back to the warm room where they're connected to old 13" TV monitors via an RCA connection. The quality of both the cameras and monitors is pretty bad.

 

For reference, this is a picture from inside the club out on the ice

(not mine, just grabbed it off of Google images)

 

We're looking to upgrade this system, but we also have some specific goals in mind with regards to broadcasting these camera feeds over the internet as well as recording locally(or remotely) each match or game.

 

I would love some help/suggestions for our setup.

 

We're looking for the following:

- 4 cameras per sheet (16 total). 2 cameras looking straight down at the circles (houses they're called), and one camera at each end of the sheet looking down the ice.

- 2 monitors in the warm room per sheet displaying the 2 cameras looking down at the circles. These monitors help the audience follow along and see what's happening in the "house".

 

That's the easy part. What we want to be able to do, is at any one time broadcast/record any or all of the 4 games that would be occurring on each sheet.

 

I have been working all year on a simple broadcasting solution for our current setup. I've taken a laptop and a webcam and I've tied into our existing camera feed via an rca splitter. I've brought that signal into my computer using a cheap usb capture device. I then take those two feeds and combine them with some screen captures (of some custom software I've written), input those into broadcasting software (XSplit Broadcaster) and broadcast out to Justin.TV . . . see here: http://www.justin.tv/rochestercurling (check the previous videos) Take note of the poor quality of the far house camera.

 

So that's where I am. I've been researching and can't figure out if we should stick with analog cameras or go to IP cameras.

 

My first thought was that we could put a PC at each sheet and bring the 4 camera signals in using a PCI card, but we still need to show the 2 cameras on the monitors.

 

Bandwidth will of course be an issue, but we can most likely get that upgraded to handle the 4 simultaneous uploads (streams)

 

I'm rambling here . . . how about some specific questions:

 

1) Would you stick with analog or go with IP Cameras?

2) Can IP Cameras be displayed full screen on monitors?

3) Power would probably be an issue, so these cameras would need to be powered remotely? PoE?

4) Like most people unfamiliar with cctv . . . higher quality, high definition? is desired, but I'm not sure is necessary. I doubt we'll be able to broadcast at full HD, so the only thing that might benefit from HD would be the monitors.

5) Right now we have a "rotation issue" The far house cameras are rotated 90 degrees to cover more of the sheet. Therefore the TV monitors are also rotated 90 degrees. This caused me all sorts of problems when I brought that signal into my computer to broadcast. I eventually found software (ManyCam) that lets you rotate a source 90 degrees. Would this still be an issue?

 

As far as software, I think we'll end up with a very specific requirement. I may end up writing it myself. The goal is to be able to broadcast as I mentioned before, but also for the club members to be able to access a "library" of past games to be able to view and analyze. We'd like to use these videos for training purposes as well. So the software would probably end up being custom. It'll have to be very user friendly . . i.e. one big Record button that anyone can press and a stop button. Then a site where they can go search/view their broadcasts. But I digress . .

 

And of course the (million?) dollar question . . . budget. I heard a very non-firm figure of $10k (usd) thrown around. I'm not sure how much play there is in that. We're a very member driven club. The club itself is not for profit and relies on the members to work on and install improvements.

 

Thoughts? Questions? Answers? Can it be done? I'm just looking for some ideas/guidance. All would be much appreciated.

 

Thanks,

 

-Brian

[Soundy 1]

It certainly is possible to do all of that, some parts easier than others. I think the biggest issue you're going to run into is with the "broadcasting", and that just because of the bandwidth requirements - you won't be able to do it directly, you'll need to stream to some kind of re-streaming service like Ustream, and that will limit the ability of people to search recorded video.

 

I can think of a solution that should do all of the above with megapixel cameras and a Vigil recorder and HD Viewer, but it would at least double your budget... and the other problem you'll find with megapixel, if you want to store past games for any significant amount of time, is that the storage and bandwidth requirements would escalate substantially, especially since you're probably gonna want it at a full 30fps.

 

So, you're probably looking at starting with analog video, or VGA IP cameras (might be preferable, in case you want to move up to megapixel later, as storage costs decrease). You might want to look at cameras with remote zoom/focus (pan/tilt isn't needed) for the house cameras, so it's possible to zoom in on the house... don't know how often that would be used, but it could be a useful feature (yes, I do watch curling... I'm Canadian and we learned a bit of curling in PE class in high school )

 

Instead of rotating the house cameras, consider just having something with a wider field of view - to show you more of the ice - you'll have some "wasted" space to the sides, but it will eliminate the rotation problem.

 

For display, you can't display just two cameras without either stretching or cropping the view... a two-by-two grid of four cameras works better, and this would let you show all four cameras for the sheet.

[ytsejamr 0]

Thanks for the reply. I think to begin with the broadcasting will be handled by a 3rd party piece of software (XSplit, VidBlaster). That shouldn't be much of an issue. They have the option of recording locally so we could probably work with that.

 

I'm still more caught up in the specifics of what type of cameras, cabling and monitors we would need. I guess we could even forget about the broadcasting/computer end and just make sure we have video out on all 4 cameras (per sheet) available to be input into a computer at some point (i.e. with a 4 channel pci board . . . Osprey).

 

I guess at that point it becomes a simple closed system. I didn't mention audio, but we may want to have 1 or 2 microphones per sheet (above the houses?) Maybe use a camera with a mic?

 

As far as monitors. We really only need to see the two house cameras. I suppose we could show all 4, though it's not really necessary. The purpose of those monitors is to be able to see the stones in the house. So maybe two big monitors per sheet would work, do a split screen with one house and one behind the sheet camera per monitor? So what kind of monitors are out there that can do split screen?

 

Thanks again . . .

 

-Brian

[Soundy 1]

Well, a number of TVs will do Picture-in-Picture from multiple inputs, but that just gives you one little picture inside the big picture. This is normally the kind of thing that would be done by a multiplexer, or the DVR itself (many cards have a multiplexed output).

 

Again, two cameras on a split-screen is uncommon, as there's no way to get a proper full display... it would probably work in this case if you're just showing the sheets, because you'd have a long, narrow view that could have the sides cropped off... but finding a mux or DVR that will give you that display will be, I suspect, virtually impossible - you'd need some sort of broadcast switcher to give you that level of control. Honestly, a two-by-two quad split with all four cameras would be MUCH MUCH MUCH simpler to implement.

 

If you don't need to record, the display system could be easily done with some analog cameras and a "quad" box, like this: http://www.gviss.com/products/quadsmultiplexers/gvq4chrtcbr.php

 

This has daisy-chained inputs, which feed the signals back out again, so you could then run all the cameras into a DVR for recording - four sheets, four cameras per sheet, 16 total... 16-channel DVR and you're good to go.

[Guest]

Well, a number of TVs will do Picture-in-Picture from multiple inputs, but that just gives you one little picture inside the big picture. This is normally the kind of thing that would be done by a multiplexer, or the DVR itself (many cards have a multiplexed output).

 

Again, two cameras on a split-screen is uncommon, as there's no way to get a proper full display... it would probably work in this case if you're just showing the sheets, because you'd have a long, narrow view that could have the sides cropped off... but finding a mux or DVR that will give you that display will be, I suspect, virtually impossible - you'd need some sort of broadcast switcher to give you that level of control. Honestly, a two-by-two quad split with all four cameras would be MUCH MUCH MUCH simpler to implement.

 

If you don't need to record, the display system could be easily done with some analog cameras and a "quad" box, like this: http://www.gviss.com/products/quadsmultiplexers/gvq4chrtcbr.php

 

This has daisy-chained inputs, which feed the signals back out again, so you could then run all the cameras into a DVR for recording - four sheets, four cameras per sheet, 16 total... 16-channel DVR and you're good to go.

 

 

Matt

 

The FourSight quad will allow the custom croping and scaling of up to 4 images, so you could set up a two camera split either in vertical or horizontal mode.

 

Ilkie