Geovision quirks?

[what2be 0]

A few questions, as ive been lurking in here a few weeks and havent seen anything on this...

 

I recently bought a nightclub and it had a old gv-800 that they were using with a 16 camera system. I realized that the gv-800 rated at 120fps went down to 7.5 with all 16 cams so I went and bought a new gv-1480, which puts me back at 30fps with all 16 cams. I also upgraded some of the cameras (all were old b/w and 1 color ptz) to some hi res b/w I got from supercircuits.

 

Heres my questions..

 

1) Im extremely dissapointed with these b/w cameras. I bought them with auto-iris for the inside cams and I dont know if they sold me the wrong lens's or if its some other problem, but I can barely get a focused picture, and even then only the center of the picture is in focus, the rest is blurry. The part numbers on the auto-iris lens are for video driven cameras but when I switch the camera from dc to video driven the screen gets bright white and I lose the picture. Any idea whats wrong?

 

2) I had some fixed lens manual iris lens's from the older cameras that I put on my new cameras but the picture still looks like crap to me. I mean, its hard to describe the quality of the picture, but either Im too picky or I just expect more from a video system. Im looking at these pictures in daylight with plenty of light, so its not a low light issue. the picture is pretty clear all the way through, but still not perfect to me. Any suggestions? I have geovision 7.02 software and have the recording quality at 4, geo mpg compression and window size at 720x480 de-interlaced. (display and record). My processor utilization is about 45 percent. ati 9800 vid card, 2 gigs ram, 3.2 gig processor, 800mhz fsb. Pc runs perfect. (i was formerly a computer network engineer before the nightclub purchase So im fairly confident its not a pc issue). I feel comfortable with the software, and have been playing with it alot. I followed Rory's advice from a previous post and set sat and hue to 0 for the b/w cameras, but it didnt seem to do anything. Is the problem the cameras? Cheap chinese junk? Or the lens? or both?

 

 

Im thinking of sending all the supercircuit stuff back and buying better cameras, but before I did that I was curious..

 

2) i was told not to go color, even for the outside cameras, but the outside is lit well, and I was considering a couple of pelco spectra III se PTZ's for the north and west corners of the building, and then going with either some toshiba ik-540a (b&w hi res cam) or some extreme ex-26 (b&w infrared) and/or some toshiba ik-64wda's. (color/b&w) I think I can get away with using the color toshibas in the entryway of the club as well as the exit area, and even outside for a few shots but im not sure if they auto change to b/w when the light gets low or you have to manually set them by a timer or some other method. Does anyone have experience with these cameras and can shed some input?

 

 

3) I know toshiba mentions a signal to noise ratio that is benificial to pc based digital recorders as a selling point. Does it really matter what camera you use between a vhs type recorder and a pc? There was a big blurb on the toshiba site when I was reading up on the ik-64wda about how important the signal to noise ratio is when using a digital recorder. Is this true or just marketing?

 

4) lastly, regarding the web based remote viewer, I have a 768k up stream out of my geovision machine to the internet. When I try to look at the 16 cam shot with the web viewer, it only shows some of the cam feeds. Is there a way to specify what you want the quality and pic size to be when viewing remotely from the web application? I cant seem to find it and when I click around on camera size from the web application is says 320x320 but its greyed out and im unable to change it. Any ideas whats going on there?

 

 

Thanks for any replies...

 

Geoff

[scottj 0]

Geoff,

 

1.) Not too sure about your camera issue, it sounds like the AGC (Auto Gain Control) setting in the DVR software could use some adjustment, but then again it could just be cheap cameras. May just need to adjust the iris, some people use a little pen torch to make the iris open wide, then adjust the camera from there.

 

2.) Digital video quality looks different then your traditional analog VHS or "looped" system. I have seen only a couple systems on the market that offer relatively close quality video, both were extremely expensive. If you can tolerate the digital recorded quality but wish to improve the live display feed you can approach this a couple different ways. You could add the DSP real time display board which will enhance your displayed video. It does this by accelerating the display frame rate to 30 FPS per channel during live view, while the system still records at the 7.5 FPS per channel (GV-800 model).

You could also add a lopp through board tot he sstem. This wil do notihng more than split the video off so you can send it off to an external monitor such as a TV, CCTV monitor, ect. Same concept as using a multiplexer.

 

 

2.) Color cameras outside work fine. I personally only use color cameras, no need to go back 20 years in technology. As for the Pelco Spectra III's, awesome camera. So are the Kalatel CyberDome PTZ cameras, and they both work very well with the Geo software. The Extreme cameras are great if you need IR or need coverage in specialty environment areas, basically all of these types of cameras are good quality so it really depends on your budget and what appeals to your liking.

 

3.) Toshiba SNR? Not familar with their products.

 

4.) A 784k upload bandwidth will work very well with the web based viewer. The issue with you not being able to set the resolution is because you have the web server configured to stream 720x480. In order to change this, go back to the main screen locally and reconfigure the WebCam Server. You will have the option in a dropdown to change the remote resolution. Change this to 320x24, or 640x480 De-Interlaced. Also I would recommend changing the bandwidth limit under the "RPB" tab to about 350k. If you do not set an upper limit, the system will attempt to use all available bandwidth from your service and cause network congestion which generally leads to packet loss and the router locking up. Just my recommendation.

 

 

scottj

[rory 0]

Also set up each camera on a CCTV monitor, or even a TV, first. Make sure you get perfect video on that before connecting to the DVR.

 

Id check the lenses, post a link to cameras and lenses if you can.