June 2008 — News
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Do-It-Yourself IP Video Surveillance in Arkansas
Shaw took three staff members to three days of training to learn about the types of cameras that were available and how to configure them and returned to the district with a fairly good sense of how to design the setup for a school.
The Process of Installation
The process now consists of sitting down with the principal at the school where the installation will go to map out what the perceived needs are. "They put down what they think they want," said Shaw. "We're able to give them different vantage points and pointers." For instance, the principal will often want a camera pointing straight at a door, and Shaw's staff will suggest a slightly different placement to survey more area.
Shaw usually advises against pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras. "The more they move," he said, "The more they break." He said he prefers a fixed camera with a zoom function placed strategically or a Pantel camera that work as a fixed camera until it's needed for motion.
Once the school design is done, it goes to the administrator in charge of the district's crisis committee. That person controls the budget for video surveillance. The two sides--school and district—negotiate, and, as Shaw put it, "We come up with something in the middle."
The technicians go into the school, do the installation of the video server, install and configure the cameras and plug them into the network.
 Wren Solutions software surveillance interface |
That 14-camera installation cost the district between $22,000 and $23,000 for equipment, which included the cameras, a computer acting as a video server, battery backups, power-over-Ethernet devices so the cameras wouldn't require separate power, and a couple of infrared devices to allow particular cameras to capture images in the dark.
The server includes a hard drive of between 60 GB and 100 GB. Shaw estimated that capacity will hold about six to eight weeks worth of recording. While full motion video is 30 frames per second, Shaw said he usually recommends the schools run them at 15 frames per second, unless it's an area where surveillance needs to be non-stop. The video format is standard MPEG-2. Once the drive is filled up, the system records over the oldest data, which is the same scheme used by the older analog cameras still in use at the district.
Where analog cameras are still in use, the IT department adds them to the network through an encoding process that allows the video output to be viewed online.
One of the advantages Shaw sees in running an IP surveillance system over analog is that when the analog cameras broke down, the recording stopped until the unit could be repaired by the vendor. In the IP scenario, when the computer that maintains the recordings goes down, the IT staff can replace it with a duplicate server pulled from inventory.
