Zak Posted October 20, 2005 Share Posted October 20, 2005 Lee Tracey Congratulations on the longest post I have ever read on here . But very informative. Obviously some clients would pay for the right amount of cameras and right capacity DVR to be useful in such scenarios - but I am pretty sure that if installers started pointing out how dire the situation is from your perspective then the UK will soon not be Europe's biggest spender of CCTV! Regarding your proposed seminar, if it would improve quality of footage, leading to less wasted police time and enhance convictions, then why don't the police/government cover the cost? Also, if you really want to do it, if you marketed it correctly over a significant period of time with the major suppliers, inspectorates and other key people, then perhaps you would get the 500 people. And if they pay in advance and didn't turn up, you would have covered your costs. It is a pretty bold and eye-opening statement to say that 80% of all CCTV installations are redundant from a Police point of view and not do anything about it. Zak Tankel - Managing Director - Security First (UK) - www.securityfirst.uk.com Disclaimer: Any comments or opinions expressed by me are my own as a member of the public and not of my employer or Company. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ian.cant Posted October 20, 2005 Share Posted October 20, 2005 Excellent post Lee, very eye opening in some respects. I don Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Lee Tracey Posted October 20, 2005 Share Posted October 20, 2005 Congratulations on the longest post I have ever read on here . But very informative. Obviously some clients would pay for the right amount of cameras and right capacity DVR to be useful in such scenarios - but I am pretty sure that if installers started pointing out how dire the situation is from your perspective then the UK will soon not be Europe's biggest spender of CCTV! Regarding your proposed seminar, if it would improve quality of footage, leading to less wasted police time and enhance convictions, then why don't the police/government cover the cost? Also, if you really want to do it, if you marketed it correctly over a significant period of time with the major suppliers, inspectorates and other key people, then perhaps you would get the 500 people. And if they pay in advance and didn't turn up, you would have covered your costs. It is a pretty bold and eye-opening statement to say that 80% of all CCTV installations are redundant from a Police point of view and not do anything about it. Do something about it!!! The action was to employ Professor Martin Gill to carry out a survey and write a report. That has now been done but what next? I can send you a copy of the Martin Gill report but it is long and I would need an email address that could accept big postings. I have tried to send it to others but it has bounced back because they had a limited space email address. If there was a way that it could be provided on this site so that any interested party could download it then that must be a good thing. I like your comment about it being an eye opening statement etc. It is not actually true that we are not trying to do something about it. I am a consulting engineer to the Forensic Imaging Division of West Midlands Police and in my small way I am trying to do something. The Force Forensic Video Analyst Dannie Parkes is also trying to do something. We both write articles and speak at conferences and this does mean having to name some DVR's. Mostly this gets me the hatred of the manufacturers who list me as a trouble-maker. You have to break eggs to make an omlette. It is only in this last month or so that the message has seeped upwards. It is just not possible to get a giant organisation like the British Government activated in a different direction from the course they are on now but we are trying as two little minnows in a pond. The key to all this is the insurance companies. If the insurance companies would accept a minimum standard and refuse insurance cover for any CCTV system below the quality standard then we would all win. You, as an installer, would win because you would be able to provide a decent installation of quality for a fair price and the idiot cheapjack down the road who can always do if for less but does not know if his backside is screwed, bored, riveted, countersunk or reamed would be out of the picture. Let me ask a question! I am due to retire at the end of this year and I have been considering offering a DVR on the market to installers. It is a 16 channel camera input that will record at 25 images per second on all channels at the same time and produce close to DVD quality on playback of recovered images. It will also record lip-sync audio with every channel. It is both a DVR and a server and will support up to eight hard drives internally and any size of NAS on the network - it has all the features you could ever desire and would cost installers about £2,880. But the really big aspect is that it makes high quality images of only 4K. This means that if you start with 16 cameras X 4K per image x 25 images per second x 60 seconds in a minute x 60 minutes in an hour x 24 hours in a day x 31 days you will arrive at the terabyte size of storage you need. If you change the 4K figure to that required by most DVR's, to produce DVD level quality, then you will have a figure more in the region of 27K to 57K. Now do the calculation with the new figure. Then work out the cost difference in terabyte storage needed. Or for smaller systems the difference in gigabyte storage of hard drives. So the question is: would installers buy it or would they go for the cheapest unit on the market? Another aspect to consider when purchasing a DVR: You start with a high grade camera ( most are these days ) and this creates a digital image which is then changed to an analogue image output and fed to the analogue input of the DVR. The DVR then converts this back to digital and stores it on a hard drive. The DVR ( the bad ones ) then convert it back to analogue to display on a composite monitor. All these conversions reduce the original high quality camera image of about 400 TV lines down to about 240 TV lines on the recovered video from the DVR - a bit daft? A DVR should be able to provide digital images to a DVD writer or CD writer where they stay digital and thereby cut out the final D/A conversion and the final loss. Second question: I have been told that on this forum there was a long posting from many people about the performance of the LJD company. I cannot find it. Is it still stored somewhere or has it been removed? Lee Tracey Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Lee Tracey Posted October 20, 2005 Share Posted October 20, 2005 Excellent post Lee, very eye opening in some respects.I don Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ian.cant Posted October 20, 2005 Share Posted October 20, 2005 Your spot on, changing isnt easy, cost driven purchases of CCTV in my opinion will rarely if ever, be changed in reality. I have long since given up on that as an ideal. What would be a good start would be minimum specifications in situations such as Liquor Liscening. As far as i am aware "CCTV with 31 days recording" is all that is required to date. (This is where you get 2fps recordings from. Maybe this situation will start to improve now with the introduction of MPEG4 recorders, as i understand they can record better quality in smaller recording space.) The average corner shop takes the "31 days CCTV" situation and turns it to the minimum or whatever they can get away with. Ive even been asked if i can provide a system for rental just for a few days so they can pass the inspection. I declined of course but no doubt some will buy **** from Ebay to get round it. Anyway, my point is a detailed specification to be used a a minimum acceptable standard that may be used as evidence in courts would be a good step forward. To a degree i suspect thats where you come in an decide whats **** and whats not. Surely we need to cut you out and be certain that what will be presented as evidence is very likley to be good as a very minimum (barring breakdowns). I wonder how much it costs currently to find that, as you say, 80% of recordings are a waste of time evidentially. Surely it would pay to have some kind of standard and to employ an inspector to ensure the standards are met. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zak Posted October 20, 2005 Share Posted October 20, 2005 Second question: I have been told that on this forum there was a long posting from many people about the performance of the LJD company. I cannot find it. Is it still stored somewhere or has it been removed?Lee Tracey Conduct a Search using "Cheap DVR" and some LJD posts will come up. Lee, can you let us know what known brands of DVR's are acceptable/good in your opinion, and which are not? Sometimes a giant company will bid at a loss just to get a specific contract. If I have written the spec then I spot this immediately and that company is out of the deal. I want an installer who has made a fair profit and has the desire and interest to be proud of his work and support it.But I am often brushed aside by the financial departments who only look at the figures. Lee Tracey Unfortunately, I have never known it not to come down to money. Doesn't matter how much cheaper (to the point of ridiculousness), or even if the purchasers know it will cause grief, they will still award to the cheapest bidder. Zak Tankel - Managing Director - Security First (UK) - www.securityfirst.uk.com Disclaimer: Any comments or opinions expressed by me are my own as a member of the public and not of my employer or Company. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Lee Tracey Posted October 20, 2005 Share Posted October 20, 2005 Conduct a Search using "Cheap DVR" and some LJD posts will come up.Lee, can you let us know what known brands of DVR's are acceptable/good in your opinion, and which are not? Can you find my comment about my offering a DVR when I retire at the end of this year and comment back to me Unfortunately, I have never known it not to come down to money. Doesn't matter how much cheaper (to the point of ridiculousness), or even if the purchasers know it will cause grief, they will still award to the cheapest bidder. I have written a comparison chart table and am gradually filling it in, about five different DVR's to a page. As soon as the first page is complete I will post it and then each page in turn - will you come to my funeral when the hitman gets me? I am now going to try to attach the photographs I promised. They are zipped in rar and also in Coreldraw and JPG. Hope they can be unwound. Failed to get the images through zipped. Half way through the screen changes to " Cannot find the page etc." strange. I will unzip and try to send individual images in the next posting. Lee Tracey Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ian.cant Posted October 20, 2005 Share Posted October 20, 2005 So the question is: would installers buy it or would they go for the cheapest unit on the market? I would say its not usually a decision as simple as that, its horses for courses to a degree. Corner shop etc will be cheapest without doubt. Town centre pubs etc maybe that would be a good place to use one but again they tend to push for cheapest. Heres a classic example and i can post a link to the relevant story if i can find it. Called to a sports complex where they complained they could find any recordings on the tapes from the previous night. (This was not my installation btw its an old system and they call me in when they have a problem). They had an old DM Sprite mux (cant recall the model number) connected to a Panasonic VCR (6124 i think it was). There was no video on the tapes but the recorder was recording when the Sprite was put in record mode, if it was left in play or live mode it didnt send video to the VCR. They told me they were having trouble getting the tapes out of the VCR also. I checked the runtime on the VCR which was at 82000 hours or roughly 9 years of continous use, during which the VCR had never been serviced. Surprisingly the recordings were quite good but indeed the the tapes were sticking in the machine. I quoted for 1. The VCR to be serviced. 2. A new VCR (latest Panasonic equivalent). 3. A DM sprite DVR to replace the VCR and Mux so that they would always have recordings. The reason why they need the recordings was, the previous night there had been a bit of a punch up during a presentation night. Someone had been smacked over the head with a large football trophy sustaining a fractured skull. This had all happened in the lobby/reception area which should have provided good images of the incident. Front page news of the local paper etc all high profile so guess what they went with. They bought a new VCR because it was the cheapest option and also because the previous VCR had lasted nearly 10 years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Lee Tracey Posted October 20, 2005 Share Posted October 20, 2005 Conduct a Search using "Cheap DVR" and some LJD posts will come up.Lee, can you let us know what known brands of DVR's are acceptable/good in your opinion, and which are not? Unfortunately, I have never known it not to come down to money. Doesn't matter how much cheaper (to the point of ridiculousness), or even if the purchasers know it will cause grief, they will still award to the cheapest bidder. Will try again with some attachment photographs Will try again with some attachment photographs I sent about six photographs but can only find this one of five young men. Lee Tracey Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zak Posted October 20, 2005 Share Posted October 20, 2005 Were you referring to the DigiFlower from your first post? Is that the machine you want to market? And what is wrong with that picture ? You can almost make out that one of them is on a bike. I am now going to be a lot more diligent when quoting DVR's!! Zak Tankel - Managing Director - Security First (UK) - www.securityfirst.uk.com Disclaimer: Any comments or opinions expressed by me are my own as a member of the public and not of my employer or Company. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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