Hi,
This may sound a little crazy but can some one please answer my quuestions.
I've been wondering about these from a long time.

1. Is there any DVR/DVR Card in the world which can record higher resolution than D1. Something around 1280x1024.

2. Most security camera have ultra clarity when plugged directly into a TV, but when plugged and recorded in a dvr why does the quality drop so much. Is there anyway to overcome this and record footage just as it would appear on a TV.

3. I was considering a GV-2008. To be put into a supermarket . Main activity is in the grocery aisles between 7am to 9pm. I want the very best footage so that its actually worth puting so many cameras and police can easily identify shoplifters. I am looking at 30 fps on each channel at full D1 resolution. I would like the recording to be held for atleast 3 weeks. Would 5 terabytes do the job? I was thinking of getting 5x 1 TB drives and putting them into RAID 5. But i've read somewhere that this may cause problems in terms of a disk failure, it said that if one disk failed than there is a good chance of all others failing in a chain due to read failure when they a trying to rebuild after the first failure. Lastly is Geovision ok with RAID or should I just stick to putting 5x 1tb hdd independently.

For ANALOG capture, not really. It could be done with an HDTV setup, but those aren't really designed for multi-camera surveillance-type use.

For that size, you need to go to megapixel IP cameras, which connect via ethernet and don't require a capture card.



Realtime, uncompressed video takes a LOT of space to store. For most purposes, DVR users want to store a lot of footage (most sites I deal with want 30 days' worth). The way to achieve that is by using lower framerates (regular video is 30fps) and high-ratio lossy compression. And with cheaper units, it's partially due to crappy capture cards as well.



If you really want the "best" picture, go with megapixel IP cameras. That may require a different DVR, though, as I don't know if GeoVision supports IP yet (a friend's company just lost a big account because they use GeoVision and they couldn't supply the IP-cam support the client wanted... we could, so we got them).

You really don't need to run 30fps - even at 15fps, most people would have a hard time telling the difference. 10fps should be more than enough for perfectly usable surveillance video. And if you do go with IP cameras, remember that they take a LOT more storage space than analog - some four times the space at 1280x1024 vs. 640x480, depending on the compression used.

I dunno where you've been reading about RAID, but your information is incorrect: the whole point of RAID 5 is to avoid data loss due to disk failure. The catch is, you have to be on top of it if and when a disk in the array does fail.

If you use all individual disks, one disk dying will destroy all the data on that drive. If you use RAID 0, striping the data across all drives, one disk dying will destroy ALL your data. With RAID 5, you won't lose and data if one disk dies, but you need to replace that disk to maintain the redundancy. If you don't replace it, and another one dies, THEN you lose everything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_5#RAID_5 for more details.

We just set up a RAID 5 system for a client: 32-input, 480fps VIGIL system, 23 analog cameras mostly running a 640x480 and 3fps, and five 1.3MP IP cameras, initially running at 5fps. The machine itself has 3TB storage and was barely keeping three weeks (closer to 19-20 days).

We added an 8-bay Enhance RAID case with eight 1TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration, giving an additional 6.5TB, for a shade under 9.5TB total. That gave them about 82-83 days' worth... they wanted 90 days, so they dropped the IP cams back to 3fps as well.

The other trick to saving space is to configure it to only record on motion, rather than recording constantly. In low-traffic areas, and after-hours, that can save a TON of storage.

1. Yes. It's not cheap and doesn't accept standard cameras. Also the pricing I saw for such systems put it in an extremely high price range. When something makes putting megapixel cameras in look cheap....that's pricey.

2. There is always some loss of clarity when doing an analog to digital conversion and when encoding video.

[quote:e845b2fab8="Thomas"]

1. Yes. It's not cheap and doesn't accept standard cameras. Also the pricing I saw for such systems put it in an extremely high price range. When something makes putting megapixel cameras in look cheap....that's pricey.