Help - in over my head - 32-40 camera system

[overmyhead]

Hi all,

We have a project coming up where we will have 32-40 IP cameras w/PoE. To be absolutely clear, we are the "end user" and the system is going to be specified by an engineer we have engaged (part of an M&E firm). After an initial chat, it looks like they are going to specify Axis branded cameras, which I am happy with, though we will know which models next week - we are after lifetime cost/reliability.

The bit where I am concerned is the NVR part of it. Some of the external cameras and communal area cameras will be running 24/7. For the cameras in corridors, I was thinking of maybe having these on video motion detection to save space assuming the software/hardware will pick it up reliably. I want to get high quality recordings in case we have to use that video as evidence or to identify people.

I have not managed to find an NVR which can handle the above, but that may be because we haven't researched enough, or that we are looking at everything and assuming it should be able to handle 25fps 1080p or 2mp on all channels which may not be realistic or necessary?

We are not the kind of annoying people who like to always second guess professional input, but have learned from experience it is foolish to not be educated or prepared.

Thanks!

 

[Dodutils]

Having Axis cameras running for 10 years 24/24 I can say they are very reliable (but as always you can get a bad serie), some here will say Dahua or Hikvision are as good and cheaper but as the engineer will specify Axis models this is no point of discussion, unless once you now the Axis model and check with Dahua or Hikvision for example you see a huge price difference would require a discussion with this engineer.

Then 24/24 record vs Motion detection some will say motion is crap and because it may miss "the" important event (I am hearing @nayr screaming ;-) and some will say yes it could miss events but it would lower disk usage/bandwidth a lot and if surveillance zone is not very important then may be you could go for motion detection only.

All depend of the risk level you are ready to accept, you should ask you engineer to fill a risk matrix for your project.

You can also lower some recording down to 720p 10 img/s or even 5 img/s, again all depend of how important is the zone the camera is viewing/recording, the choice of recording equipment is also important (are you going to choose HDD or SSD, are you going to have RAID or not, local and/or external video records backup...).

I would say that your should the full proposal of the engineer see the price and if it is a concern and want/need to lower it then start thinking according to the risk matrix.

 

[fenderman]

Wait, you are paying an M&E firm, spending 1000 or more per camera and you are concerned about staving storage space? Storage is the cheapest portion of this setup...did they not recommend a storage solution? Why not use axis end to end? they have their own vms...

 

[c hris527]

I have a quote from TYCO in my hand to install 9 cameras with a NVR, 30 day storage(12gb) raid. Almost $ 27,000 and they will not even do the cable pulls, that is subcontracted out at additional cost. They are using Pelco cameras and NVR. I bet your job will be well over 50k before it gets done.

 

[Q™]

I'll do it for $40k @overmyhead! But your powers that be will have to accept Dahua equipment!

 

[hmjgriffon]

I also find it hilarious that you'll spend a metric fuck ton on axis and then be worried about hard drive space, hard drive space is cheap, if you're gonna cheap out on that you might as well cheap out on the cameras too

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

[randytsuch]

So you know you can buy a NVR without HDDs, and add them yourself (or your contractor can do it).
Or add more HDD's to a NVR, depending on the NVR.
Looks like Axis has a PC based NVR, which would make it really easy to add more HDD capacity.
Make sure you use Western Digital Purple drives. They are cheap compared to the rest of your system.

 

[hmjgriffon]

So you know you can buy a NVR without HDDs, and add them yourself (or your contractor can do it).
Or add more HDD's to a NVR, depending on the NVR.
Looks like Axis has a PC based NVR, which would make it really easy to add more HDD capacity.
Make sure you use Western Digital Purple drives. They are cheap compared to the rest of your system.

Some who has actually installed this stuff would know better but from what I have seen all of the high end solutions have rack mounted servers that run their own linux based softwares and have options of external storage arrays. there's no point in having $1,000 dollars cameras though that may not even record stuff you needed to record. I've got my (in comparison) el cheapo 2mp cameras recording 24/7 and the alerts are only to notify me. I'd rather have a week of continuous recording than miss something because I wanted a month worth on certain cameras.

 

[Q™]

I also find it hilarious that you'll spend a metric fuck ton on axis and then be worried about hard drive space...

Try as I might I simply cannot find "Metric Fuck Ton" at www.onlineconversion.com

 

[jasauders]

I'd rather have a week of continuous recording than miss something because I wanted a month worth on certain cameras.

That's typically been my outlook as well. I can fine tune motion recordings until I'm blue in the face, but in the end the only way I can *guarantee* footage is captured is with full time recording. Certain cases I do consider (and use) motion detection though. Outdoors I record 24/7, indoors is still typically 24/7, however low traffic areas indoors that I simply want to "kind of monitor" I often put on motion detect. Hard drive storage is cheap enough to take that sting off. Just my 2c.

 

[hmjgriffon]

That's typically been my outlook as well. I can fine tune motion recordings until I'm blue in the face, but in the end the only way I can *guarantee* footage is captured is with full time recording. Certain cases I do consider (and use) motion detection though. Outdoors I record 24/7, indoors is still typically 24/7, however low traffic areas indoors that I simply want to "kind of monitor" I often put on motion detect. Hard drive storage is cheap enough to take that sting off. Just my 2c.

I'll use motion detection to mark things that happen in the timeline, just so later on I can go back and see if anything I might care about happened without looking through hours of footage.

 

[hmjgriffon]

Try as I might I simply cannot find "Metric Fuck Ton" at www.onlineconversion.com View attachment 14342

its right there around a googoplex.

 

[overmyhead]

Thanks for all the replies - a lot to take in!

I can see how my original post indicates I am looking to save hard drive space! Actually, my worry was bandwidth of the NVR (am sure I got this term wrong!?).

If I can have continuous recording, that is great, but if you take 32-40 cameras at say 2mp at a frame rate of say 15fps (average), then what kind of bandwidth will we need? We would want to be able to remotely access, monitor etc if needed. Initially thought there may be an off-the-shelf solution, but couldn't find something suitable as the total the NVRs could handle seemed low. Am happy to build a windows box from scratch with something like Blue Iris if that's the best solution, but would prefer turnkey unless it's big $$$ difference?

In terms of cameras, I don't think we'll be at the $1000 mark, more towards $350 for the internal stuff (small domes in hallways), and a bit more for the externals. Actually UK based so pricing is all relative etc. $27000 for 9 cameras, NVR etc sounds outrageous - but then it may be some serious hardware they're packing! =)

 

[jasauders]

I'll use motion detection to mark things that happen in the timeline, just so later on I can go back and see if anything I might care about happened without looking through hours of footage.

That's not a bad idea as well. I've considered doing that before, just haven't gotten around to it on my current setup. I've found even without it, drilling into a full recording feed really isn't that bad. The software I use can play back at 128x, or I can just drag the slider across and play it back at 4839839x or something obscene. With having a corner lot where most traffic turns down our street, I get a ton of false alarms with motion. Kind of makes you less inclined to check each of them over time. If I notice something is amiss, I'll act on it and check things out. If nothing else, at least the footage is there if I need it.

Thanks for all the replies - a lot to take in!

I can see how my original post indicates I am looking to save hard drive space! Actually, my worry was bandwidth of the NVR (am sure I got this term wrong!?).

There's calculators online that can help with this. At the moment I am running one wireless 640x480 camera at 3 FPS along with six 3 MP cameras at 10 FPS. The bandwidth my server is seeing right now is bouncing a hair below/a hair above 1.5 MB/s. Scaling it up might give you a rough idea, but a bandwidth calculator might help. Bitrate also plays a key role here as well. If nothing else, that's at least a "real world actual number" that I'm seeing with a half dozen 3 MP cams, so I figured I'd at least share that.

 

[hmjgriffon]

Thanks for all the replies - a lot to take in!

I can see how my original post indicates I am looking to save hard drive space! Actually, my worry was bandwidth of the NVR (am sure I got this term wrong!?).

If I can have continuous recording, that is great, but if you take 32-40 cameras at say 2mp at a frame rate of say 15fps (average), then what kind of bandwidth will we need? We would want to be able to remotely access, monitor etc if needed. Initially thought there may be an off-the-shelf solution, but couldn't find something suitable as the total the NVRs could handle seemed low. Am happy to build a windows box from scratch with something like Blue Iris if that's the best solution, but would prefer turnkey unless it's big $$$ difference?

In terms of cameras, I don't think we'll be at the $1000 mark, more towards $350 for the internal stuff (small domes in hallways), and a bit more for the externals. Actually UK based so pricing is all relative etc. $27000 for 9 cameras, NVR etc sounds outrageous - but then it may be some serious hardware they're packing! =)

If you find that you are saturating a gigabit link to the NVR or that you think you will need more, find an NVR with 2 nics (not sure if that exists) or build a blue iris server like that, you can even use a rack mounted server with faster links like 10 gig copper, or fiber, you can go with multiple interfaces and bond them together combining the available bandwidth, there are many possibilities to handle that sort of problem.

 

[Dodutils]

If you find that you are saturating a gigabit link to the NVR or that you think you will need more, find an NVR with 2 nics (not sure if that exists) or build a blue iris server like that, you can even use a rack mounted server with faster links like 10 gig copper, or fiber, you can go with multiple interfaces and bond them together combining the available bandwidth, there are many possibilities to handle that sort of problem.

If we have let say 8Mbits H.264 stream per camera x40 this will produce a 320Mbits bandwidth, so there should not be bottleneck on Gigabit if the LAN is dedicated to the cameras.

 

[hmjgriffon]

If we have let say 8Mbits H.264 stream per camera x40 this will produce a 320Mbits bandwidth, so there should not be bottleneck on Gigabit if the LAN is dedicated to the cameras.

you are correct sir, with plenty of bandwidth leftover.

 

[bp2008]

Motion detection won't reduce any system requirements except the amount of storage space you need. You may need to be conservative with bit rates and/or frame rates depending on the NVR's capabilities, but if you get a 32 channel NVR you can expect it to handle 32 cameras well enough.

Dahua cameras and Dahua NVR(s) would be a relatively inexpensive way to do this, perhaps better quality than an Axis system and certainly a lot cheaper. As I understand it, Dahua has some method of combining the resources of multiple NVRs into one unified interface, if needed. Many security companies stick to one brand like Axis because that is what they have always done, not because it is better for their customers. I'm not saying Axis is bad. Far from it. Its just that they aren't way ahead of the game anymore like they may have been 15 years ago, and their pricing is no longer competitive.

 

[looney2ns]

@nayr talked about companies combining multiple 16ch dahua NVRs, and seeing them stacked 10 deep. They can all work together as one unit.
And can be remotely viewed like they were one unit. That's 160 channels to you and me.

Lots of engineers don't consider the cost to the customer at all. And too many customers just take their word for it at face value. Just like our gubernut does with contractors.

A building I was having built years ago with an Architect, he showed me the cost's. One of the items was 15 wrought iron park type benches, @ $260 each!! I had him show me the exact one he was speccing. I told him, I can buy the exact same bench at my big box local store for $40 each!
He looked puzzled, he didn't have a clue of cost's outside of his office and normal supply chains.

 

[hmjgriffon]

@nayr talked about companies combining multiple 16ch dahua NVRs, and seeing them stacked 10 deep. They can all work together as one unit.
And can be remotely viewed like they were one unit. That's 160 channels to you and me.

Lots of engineers don't consider the cost to the customer at all. And too many customers just take their word for it at face value. Just like our gubernut does with contractors.

A building I was having built years ago with an Architect, he showed me the cost's. One of the items was 15 wrought iron park type benches, @ $260 each!! I had him show me the exact one he was speccing. I told him, I can buy the exact same bench at my big box local store for $40 each!
He looked puzzled, he didn't have a clue of cost's outside of his office and normal supply chains.

They are crooks, it was probably markup