When will we get 720p security cameras?

SideWinder

SideWinder

SideWinder

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With so many HD video cameras, televisions and other equipment that has the ability to view/record in HD, when will HD cameras become more popular? Any companies currently using them?

I'm sure the police and other security services have been unable to capture the criminal/s or successfully evaulate what happened because the picture quality was too low.

Thoughts...?
 
when they become cheaper, the recorders become cheaper and storage becomes cheaper
 
Im usre they exist already, the problem is sfinding enough space to store all of the video. If you have a few cameras and keep a months data then youll need some pretty badass storage just for the video.
 
Or better compression technology. But still, at 720p you're talking huge amounts of data flowing in every second.
 
Well think of it like this, where I work we have 10 cameras and they record 3 months worth of footage, they capture 3 frames a second. Wonder how much storage we'd need?!

Edit: if I done this correctly we'd need roughly 205,020GB or 205TB to record with the same settings in 720p
 
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But surely with better compression you could squeeze that down to around 3TB.

Based on X264 @ 720p 30fps (10 x 3fps) an hour's footage would be ~1.3Gb, so 24 hours would be roughly 31.2Gb and over the course of 3 months (90 days) would need 2808Gb or 2.8TB.

That includes sound as well which you could ignore saving a few GB. Obviously though to be able to do compress x264 at 720p 30fps you will need some pretty beefy hardware.
 
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Morba said:
Only as good as the detector then. I'd prefer constant recording.
Click to expand...
I think detection is easy. You could detect any single pixel variation from one frame capture to the next. The hard part is the algorithm to decide what's something important to record, and what's not. What would be good for a static camera is identifying areas of "allowed movement" and general change from tiny movements in the camera position or the sun position etc. Take the picture on the vitamin D site - you could "draw" a line around that flower and call it "plant". The software would then be able to predict the amount of movement to expect from wind etc, and discount that if the rest of the scene is mostly static.
 
I used to work in a CCTV control room for a city centre, back then for normal 640 x 480 they had 120TB (240TB inc back up) of storage for 80 something cameras. But they did all run 24 / 7 and record via fibre optic at 12fps when not on spot, and on spot 24fps. It used some ganky old storage though... I guess with todays cheap HDDs they could possibly do 720 in the coming years. It would be better for procecutions.
 
PMKeates said:
I think detection is easy. You could detect any single pixel variation from one frame capture to the next. The hard part is the algorithm to decide what's something important to record, and what's not. What would be good for a static camera is identifying areas of "allowed movement" and general change from tiny movements in the camera position or the sun position etc. Take the picture on the vitamin D site - you could "draw" a line around that flower and call it "plant". The software would then be able to predict the amount of movement to expect from wind etc, and discount that if the rest of the scene is mostly static.
Click to expand...

This is has been standard technology for years. The latest software is able to tell the difference between a cat for example and a person, there is even software which alerts when group of people gather together, useful on large city centre systems where it's difficult to actively monitor all cameras.

As to the OP's question, yes. Axis for one do a 'true' HD 720p camera, other manufacturers are selling 7mp cctv cameras, albeit running at ~10fps. Storage is cheap, a 1TB SV35 drive (designed for constant read/writes on CCTV systems) are around £130 quid.
 
MadMossy said:
But surely with better compression you could squeeze that down to around 3TB.

Based on X264 @ 720p 30fps (10 x 3fps) an hour's footage would be ~1.3Gb, so 24 hours would be roughly 31.2Gb and over the course of 3 months (90 days) would need 2808Gb or 2.8TB.

That includes sound as well which you could ignore saving a few GB. Obviously though to be able to do compress x264 at 720p 30fps you will need some pretty beefy hardware.
Click to expand...

Maybe so but you have other problems then. You need something beefy to compress the video feed especially if you have more than one camera.

We have 32 cameras at connected to two 16 camera recorders. Compressing 16 x 720p feeds would need some beef. Also we record at 10fps as 3fps is useless to use so lots of storage space would be needed.

I;m sure you can get systems which do it now but they won;t be cheap.
 
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