PC specs for a restaurant setup?

[chubbyburgerslinger]

Ok, so the time is rapidly approaching for us to shuffle off the mortal coil of our little food truck for the last 4 1/2 years and head to a brick and mortar location. I have been playing with BI at our house setup for about 8 months or so with a pre existing laptop that I have I7-7700 with no issues running 6 cameras. Depending on the size of the building that we eventually decide on,I will need the scalability of up to 20-24 cameras including audio options for the interior of the building. I plan on using 4mp cameras for the clarity with digital zoom (cash drawer, tables, etc).

A few of the questions are:

*Would stand alone microphones be better than integrated units with the cameras?
*How many channels/cameras of audio is BI capable of recording?
*I'm thinking of domes for the inside and bullets outside (I don't like the halo effect from domes using IR) is this good?
*With that many cameras is processor only video good enough or should I look for an additional video card?
*Is it critical for RAID 5 on storage drives or should I just run a RAID 0 setup?

 

[fenderman]

Read the wiki

 

[tangent]

Depending on how bright it is inside the restaurant, 4MP cameras may not add clarity. Instead, make sure you get some nice close face shots at the entrance.

Laws regarding audio recording vary by state. Oregon | Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
Also note, simply owning the property where a conversation takes place doesn't legally make you a 'party' to the conversation.

DO NOT USE RAID! Simply divide up the cameras between the hard drives.

 

[chubbyburgerslinger]

Depending on how bright it is inside the restaurant, 4MP cameras may not add clarity. Instead, make sure you get some nice close face shots at the entrance.

Laws regarding audio recording vary by state. Oregon | Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
Also note, simply owning the property where a conversation takes place doesn't legally make you a 'party' to the conversation.

DO NOT USE RAID! Simply divide up the cameras between the hard drives.

As far as the recording of audio goes to my understanding in Oregon, if you have a sticker/sign at the entrance stating you are under video and audio surveillance that is the agreement.

 

[bp2008]

External microphones are sometimes (not always) better than built-in microphones. Of course your choice of camera will affect whether you can connect an external microphone all. Dahua usually has pretty good built-in microphones and encoding quality as long as you turn OFF the audio noise reduction feature.

Typically the audio stream will be provided by the camera along with the video stream, and Blue Iris has no limits on recording those. Blue Iris can also be configured to record an audio stream coming from a sound card, though this is a less common approach.

 

[bp2008]

You don't need a video card for Blue Iris. The only time one helps is when you are rendering Blue Iris's local console on a very high resolution monitor, where it will cost less CPU time to display all that video if that monitor is connected to a discrete video card. Almost nobody needs this.