Is it practical to use 1 12mm lens to film entire 100ft hall

[ghurty 0]

If one is trying to film a 100ft hallway, is it practical to use a 12mm lens, or will everything that is near be completely distorted? I am trying to decide between using one 1mp with a 12mm lens or two 1mp with a 2.8mm lens on each end.

Of course the one 1mp w/12mm will be much cheaper but will it be really useable?

Thanks

[buellwinkle 0]

The 12mm lens will not distort the image, heck, the wide angle 2.8mm lens will distort with what's called barreling and the closer you get, the more it will distort the image. With the 12mm lens, objects that are close will need a faster shutter speed to not get motion blur. If you are not sure, get a varifocal lens camera and adjust as needed.

[ghurty 0]

So you believe I would be able to get away with using one 1 megapixel camera with a 12mili meter lens to cover a whole hundred foot hallway?

 

Thanks

[buellwinkle 0]

Get a 1080P or 720P camera, 16:9 format, turn it 90 degrees so you get a portrait view (vs. a typical landscape view). Now everyone will look sideways. Then get BlueIris software, ~$50 and it has a corridor mode that will flip the image 90 degrees to match the camera so for example, instead of a 1080P camera showing you 1080 pixels high, you would get 1980 pixels tall, pretty cool. This more than doubles the effective pixel in your image.

[ghurty 0]

Got it. Thanks. That just reduced my costs.

 

I was looking at a vivotek FD8131. Any experience on how this would handle a hallway (or any experience in general)?

[buellwinkle 0]

I have not used it specifically, but seems affordable for a dome with a varifocal lens and 3-axis but not day/night and no IR LEDs, but if this hall is always lit, then that doesn't matter.

 

I prefer ACTi, their D61 has about the same specs and lower price and without testing both side by side, my instincts would be to go with ACTi over Vivoktek but for about $30 more, get the 2MP version, D62, better low light sensitivity and you can never have too much resolution. The 2MP D62 can be had for less than the Vivotek 1MP.

[ghurty 0]

Thanks for the tip.

 

What is the greatest distance you have used the D62 in a hallway style environment? This is for a school to keep see what is doing with the kids.

[buellwinkle 0]

My installer does a lot of work at schools, I'll give him a call later to see. If you are in So Cal, he's good and reasonable. The schools where he installs use Axis P33 domes (they tried the cheaper M series domes but didn't have the results they expected). Nice thing about Axis is they support corridor mode in many of their cameras and if you have 16 or less, you can use their free Axis Camera Companion app in the camera that records to an SD card or to NAS storage and view the cameras with their free PC app.

 

I know how crowded halls can get when class periods change, I used to tune pianos for the local school district and it's crazy in some middle schools for example. So not sure you'll be able to physically see 100' away with dozens of kids in the hallway. Imagine this, one tall teacher standing 5' away may be enough to block the entire view of the camera at 12mm. So if you ask me, can you see a kid 100' away, the answer is a qualified yes, but if there's nobody blocking the view.

 

I say get one camera, try it out, use the varifocal lens to try different settings, maybe try different mounting locations. When you have it figured out, you can buy the rest you may need and get fixed lenses where you can to save some dough.