Each morning on my drive to the office I listen to the business breakfast show here in Dubai, and I hear all these people saying that the worst is over and that “green shoots of recovery” are beginning to appear in the financial markets. That’s not too surprising. I don’t think that anyone here in the UAE ever actually admitted that there was a problem in the first place, despite all the cancelled and down-scaled projects. But as I drive along over the Business Bay Crossing and I look around, there are still lots of cranes, and lots of buses full of guys coming in from the labour camps. And in the middle of the night down in the marina you still see all the unfinished towers lit up like christmas trees seven days a week with the sound of jackhammers and generators 24 hours a day.

I feel a little isolated from the real world out here. It’s hard to judge what’s going on out there. I get the feeling that all these people who’ve lost their jobs probably aren’t factoring into the equation so much yet. It’s probably a predictably slow time of year for retail anyway, but what’s it going to look like at Christmas? Maybe a lot of those people who’ve lost their jobs have already bought and paid for their holidays, so maybe we won’t even begin to see the impact until after the summertime. I don’t know.

It’s still busy here, though, and there are still a fair number of pink English holidaymakers appearing on the beach!

…or maybe not so easy.

Okay, so we know it’s maybe not *quite* that easy, but even so, I’m generally bemused by why people don’t do the basic math when they’re designing a system to work out how much storage they *could* need.

It particularly amazes me when I see specifications come from clients or consultants, and they say something like “…and the digital video recorder shall be provided with 500GB of hard disk drive providing 30 days of internal storage…”, and then I flick backwards and forwards through the pages and can’t find anywhere that tells me what frame rate, what resolution, what video quality, what compression algorithm or whether they’ll tolerate event/motion driven recording or continuous recording.

Inevitably the client gets his 500GB drive and he gets his 30 days of storage, but everything else is up for grabs.

I remember reading somewhere about a company that had built in the ability to degrade stored image quality over time in order to cram more data onto the disk. This came up again the other day over on www.ipvideomarket.info and I have to say again what a terrible idea I think this is. You (the system installer) have no control over which video is valuable and which is not, and the value of the video can change with time and circumstances – also beyond your control. When I consider the various murder investigations we’ve been involved in throughout Ireland over the past years, I remember a significant number where footage relating to the crime was not recovered until perhaps two weeks after the event. I can imagine the conversation we’d be having with the police (on behalf of the murder victim’s family) to explain why they can’t get an ID on a fuzzy-looking suspect because we “threw away” the resolution.

Dropping frames isn’t quite so bad, but it’s still impossible for the DVR to tell which frames are the useful ones and which aren’t if they’ve all got motion in them. I could maybe live with some sort of prioritisation scheme that defined areas of most interest and threw away less interesting frames after a while…but that’s still a risky thing to do.

All of these techniques are really just *tricks* to help one installer undercut the price of another installer with smoke and mirrors by cutting down the size of the drives. It’s no benefit to the client at all apart from maybe just getting a marginally lower price.

There’s nothing wrong with being inventive when it comes to compression as long as what comes out the end remains usable for the intended purpose. So by all means use H.264 if the jurisdiction you’re in doesn’t have a problem with the evidentiary quality of the video (some people only want to see M-JPEG for evidence because it’s effectively a sequence of stills rather than what the barristers might describe as “the concocted imaginings of some electronic contraption that bear absolutely no relationship to the events at the exact moment my client is alleged to have been at the scene”).

Motion based recording is a risk. I’ve seen so many issues where the storage calculations have been made for a site to get 30 days recording with – say – 30% motion, then a spider decides to set up house across the front of the camera housing, and suddenly you’ve actually got 100% motion – or the engineer sets up a motion mask to cut out passing traffic, and the next day it rains, so suddenly the camera can see car headlights reflected off what used to be a nice empty black asphalt car park.

I’m not aware of cases where anyone has maliciously caused motion in front of cameras in order to eat up storage and thereby destroy video evidence, but I wouldn’t rule the possibility out.

On some of our large sites where the impact of a small percentage of cameras generating too much footage can be quite significant, we’re having to factor in the time of an engineer connecting to site remotely maybe once a week just to check for *hungry* cameras, often then adjusting motion masks to account for seasonal changes. This is in addition to the continual preventative maintenance that keeps the cameras clean and insect-free.

We used a few machines from a company called ICRealTime a while ago. They make life extremely simple by basically just selling machines that record live, full resolution for one month. Period. No frame rate settings, no video quality adjustments and no motion masks. So, that’s the end of problems with spiders and rain. They were nice easy machines to use too, I don’t think we had problems with them in the field and they recorded at 4CIF unlike a lot of similarly priced middle-of-the-road embedded machines for about the same price that were 2CIF or worse.

Really, you want to be as pessimistic as possible when you’re doing the storage calcs, but when you’re price constrained that can be a problem – and on big systems with big RAID arrays a 10-20% reduction in storage converts into big money.

Interestingly, every halving of frame rate halves the amount of storage you need at the same quality. But the *significance* of that halving in frame rate isn’t a linear thing. The difference between 25 and 12.5fps (PAL) is huge, whereas the difference between 2 and 1fps is negligible, really. So rather than *guessing* your activity levels (and getting it wrong because a spider gets in the way), why not just reduce the frame rate (if you can) and record continually instead of on motion?

But when I received an email from John Honovich over at ipvideomarket.info it came as quite a pleasant surprise. Hey, we’ve only been live for a few days, for crying out loud! Anyway, what a very useful and well executed little website he has, particularly from a news aggregation point of view. I don’t think anyone could have done it any better; and when you couple this with the effort he’s put into gathering information and links to all the major players in the IP sector, and throwing in a fair chunk of his own industry expertise I think you’d really have to be impressed with what he’s done.

Certainly there’s a whole lot of stuff over there that I’m not even going to attempt to replicate over here…so that saves me a pile of work!

I haven’t even begun to trawl through all of the useful stuff on John’s site yet, but one of the things I did read was his summary of IMS Market Research’s report on the IP video market.

A few years ago I was dogged by a guy from IMS asking me questions about the security sector here in Ireland. I got the feeling that I was just the only person who would talk to him, so he was determined to ask me every possible question…then I thought “hey, what if the only people IMS get their data from are people who’re willing to talk rather than people who actually know the facts?”. I’m sure it’s not entirely the case, but I think it probably has some effect on their figures, and when you read some of the stuff they include in their reports you have to question their sources.

I think it’s interesting the company names they include as references in some of their reports. They’re most often the “big names” in the business – and I guess that’s got a lot to do with market recognition – but are the big names really the best people to ask? I know here in Ireland, the least innovative, least forward looking companies I can think of would be some of those very same “big names” you’d see listed as sources in IMS reports. And the “big name” guys who are working with newer technologies are often tied in with specific manufacturers that might not necessarily be the best but come from sister companies.

John’s report contains another couple of ideas about what drives the changeover to IP CCTV. In my view, a standard resolution colour internal minidome at a price comparable to a conventional mini dome is the key. In the majority of applications we see here the minidome is by far the most heavily used camera, and as such, this drives the cost of the project. We’re still in a position where the cheapest IP minidome we can get is almost 3 times the price of a reasonable low cost conventional minidome.

I’ve spoken to a few of the manufacturers about this and generally they just nod and smile and say “yes, but look at our fabulous mega-pixel cameras”. Sure, that’s great, but we can’t get M&E consultants or clients to understand standard cameras as it is…and when you’re putting a camera in a restricted space like a lobby or a stairwell the value of mega-pixel is questionable.

The problem I’m solving with a cheap minidome or box camera is “how do I sell this person a system?”, and if the customer doesn’t know (or doesn’t care) about the real security/management problems of the premises then that’s the only problem that matters to them.

Megapixel and other high-functionality cameras solve different problems, usually for different people.