WRS_Mark

Just out of curiosity, does everyone who is supplying this Dahua equipment disclose to the customer that factory tech support goes on holidays one month out of the year?

Noticed this suspicious individual wandering around on my street the other day:

Avigilon 3MP IR Bullet. Only complaint is the snow creates too much glare for the camera to properly compensate and illuminate my truck. Will look better when the grass appears. Love the adaptive IR and the way it keeps illumination to a minimum until motion is detected.

What are the exposure and gain settings?

 

3MP Avigilon WDR Dome in -22c weather. Luminance is from a street light ~30' south of the pickup.

 

Exposure is 1/30s and max gain is 10db. Truth be told, I haven't had the time to really tune the camera for the best night time shot possible. I just made an arbitrary decision, based on experience on other sites with the H3 gen cameras, to go with that number.

3MP Avigilon WDR Dome in -22c weather. Luminance is from a street light ~30' south of the pickup.

 

Its called a "dummy" camera ...

I rather like "dunny camera" instead. Dunny being Aussie slang for outhouse. Call it the "Sh****r Cam"

I know this is an indoor setting with the sun shining in through the door window, but the same rings true if it is someone walking up in front of headlights in an outdoor setting.

Are wireless ones the way to go for ease of installation or are they unreliable ?

Wireless, as a rule, is always the last resort. I do a lot of wireless and it takes far more planning and troubleshooting to get it done, rather than just to drill a few holes, run some conduit and fish lines up walls. A little over a year ago, I had a customer who insisted I mount up wireless cameras at his business because he didn't want to see those "ugly" Cat5 cables. I went over, did a spectrum analysis and found close to 70 wireless AP's with my net book alone (wireless B & G). The system got hard wired. You may get lucky once in a while in urban areas, but be prepared for phone calls when connectivity is lost due to someone setting up another AP on the same channel.

Are you really going to have your kids dig a 18" deep trench 500'? That is going to take forever. You'd be money ahead renting a trencher. Depending on where it is, we often times knife the conduit into the ground. This is done with a trencher that has a vibrating blade on it. No dirt to shovel back into the hole. Not sure on the budget though. Directional boring will definatley be the most expensive, but least evasive. Good luck.

That was my first thought when I read the post, but it's more fun watching kids dig a 500' trench.

Who uses 12mm conduit? The smallest I would ever use is 16. But usually use 20 because its cheaper.

You wouldn't believe how many people use it. It's crazy. PITA to pull through and it loves to bend.

Thanks tweak'e.

I'll try it your way next time. What I ended up doing was installing it back in the DVR the drive came out of and just transferred the files I needed to flash. Your way makes sense, however, and I will definately try it that way next time (with antivirus off).

Just wondering if anyone has successfully attempted doing a Hard Drive backup using AverMedia's USB Playback Console? I installed the drive in my PC, assigned a drive letter to it, but when I open the Playback Console then try to find the drive using the "Open File" selection, nothing can be located under "Disc Select". Tried it on both a Win 7 box and XP with no luck.

Any ideas?

Where can I get some decent black RG6 Siamese in a pull box? The RG6/U I have now seems to be for satellite/digital (foil around white core, and alum braiding). The foil is a pain to get off.

I know what you mean. This one monster who I do the occasional install for always supplies me with that stuff. I hate it! I think he just does it because A) He gets it cheap and B) He likes to see me angry.

For RG6 Siamese, I like to use these guys:http://www.cctvwholesalers.com/product_p/spool-rg6%201000.htm They aren't cheap, but their cable is top notch (far better than that flotsam I get from the aforementioned individual).

Here's the problem with buying no name hardware off of consumer sites:

Let's say you save $1,300.00 on a $2,500.00 system. That sounds pretty good. But then something happens and that $25,000.00 whateverthehellitisthatyou'retryingtokeepaneyeon is jacked and your playback/video quality/whatever shows unusable garbage or nothing at all...

How far ahead are you?

We pay around $400 for 1000' here in the Bahamas.

Consider yourself lucky

By the time I pay for shipping, I'm not so far ahead of you either. I have found cheaper deals than what I pay, but the cable I buy is pretty high quality. The way I look at it is if I have to go back and rewire everything even once, that $0.10 -$0.15/ft savings isn't going to mean a whole heck of a lot.

This company has installed complete systems at over a dozen of their complexes and I know that they are using junk equip but price talks.

It does. I always tell the customer to call me if they are not happy. But I know the business and where the price needs to be, roughly, that is. So if someone comes in 25-50% less, I know I am going to get that call when something goes down and the recorded video looks like an '80's video game as far as picture quality goes. And that is when the customer unfortunately pays twice.

 

Is there way to clean those scratch off?

 

Try waxing it.

Then he's wasting everybody's time.

Absolutely not. ak357 is being smart. And I agree completely with bpzle. CCTV is my living and I will be damned if I am going to spill the beans on everything I have learned over the years to a public forum, which essentially makes all of my knowledge worthless. That camera system from which ak357 showed a still shot is going to be absolutely amazing once finished. I know that because I'm the guy installing it and helping to get the bugs out of it (corrected a very interesting one tonight). It took him a long time and a fair amount of money buying sample cameras to finally settle on the right model, so to go out and volunteer all that know how would be crazy.

See things as you wish, I know if I was on the other side of this discussion I would certainly want to know exactly what camera those shots came from because they are exceptional. But I can also appreciate the fact that a professional doesn't want the competition, or worse, a potential customer to know exactly what equipment he is using to deliver such a great system. It's a teaser shot, yes. And probably not in the best taste to even post it without giving some information, but that's ak357's decision and far be it for me to criticize smartassism.

The $600 price tag might be a reason for all the troubles. That is an awfully cheap system. I can't even source something in the eight camera with DVR range for $600. Well, I could, but I wouldn't.

Actually, that glare is caused by the translucent material on the outside of the window. If the window was clear and clean, I would assume that you would be able to see outside quite easily. Again, I will be installing those WDR's later this month in a warehouse with similar conditions to bpzle, and am curious to see whether I get the same results.

One thing I did notice about the WDR model that was really nice is that when I installed it earlier this week at a rail car load out facility, the camera was able to reduce the glare caused by light reflecting off of the paint surface of the rail cars, allowing the load out operator to use the cameras to read the car numbers far more easily than the non-WDR Wonwoos I had installed a couple months prior. The biggest downside to the new cameras is that the toggle switch and camera circuit board is now mounted around the inside of the housing, instead of having it mounted right beside the camera lens, like on the older models. I find that to be a major PITA when selecting which function to adjust because depending on how you have the lens turned, it forces you to look at the "up/down, right/left arrows" every time you want to change something. Not what I enjoy doing when standing up on a ladder with a hand held monitor in one hand already.

I hear you on those small screws. Think I mentioned that problem in an earlier post. It gets to be even more fun when it is well below freezing and you try to get those suckers in with shaking hands. Tons of fun.

As for the picture quality, just to clarify, you were looking to be able to get an image past the doorway to the outside when the door opens?

Granted it was a tough scene... but literally nothing I did made anything outside visible. I would barley even classify this camera as having BLC, much less WDR.

First off, sorry to Rory for not replying to his questions. I have been insanely busy with work and just have not had the time or energy to pop in here for more than a few seconds lately.

Secondly, here is a Wonwoo with WDR in action and off:

http://www.youtube.com/user/medgell72#p/a/u/1/ImsspSMpwfc

http://www.youtube.com/user/medgell72#p/a/u/0/fOrXRH5JJk0

The video quality is not the best, as I used my portable, hand held, mini DVR to record this video, but I would appreciate it if bpzle can point out in the "WDR ON" video what it is that he was expecting the WDR function to do aside from what is displayed here. Just curious.

BTW: Yours truly is the model in both videos. If you would like me to star in your company's promotional videos, I will need a trailer (air conditioned, smoking allowed and with wet bar of course), airfare (first class, with a very "liberal" staff on board), plus payment for each day I am on location. I can either wear my khaki shirt with or without the two packs of smokes in the front pockets.

And the few vandal domes they do have, claim IP67 waterproof while CNBs claim IP66.

And IP67 is a bad thing?

I respectfully disagree with your, Rory. The build quality of the latest Wonwoo vs the latest CNB camera sells Wonwoo to me. Picture quality between the two is close (I do slightly prefer the picture quality of the Wonwoo over the latest CNB after checking out both), but the way everything is put together on the Wonwoo justifies the minor price difference, which is important when you have customers 500 miles in every direction.

I agree completely about their great housings, but with one issue: on their armor domes you must use four small, o-ring screws to secure the camera housing to the base. Those things are an absolute PITA to keep hold of when you're mounting the camera to a wall. Last winter I must have dropped 5-6 of them while doing a seven camera install. Fortunately, I was able to pick up replacements, but it is none the less my only problem with the camera. The weather being -14c at the time of installation may have also played a part in having so many drops....

I worked for years in residential excavating where we would trench the power, phone line and coax to houses. Everything from the property line to the house was buried under 8"-12" of sand, warning tape placed over top and then back filled. The coax being used was the cheapest crap out there and I don't recall ever seeing an issue with it unless it was damaged during installation.

For roadways, we would simply run the same cable through conduit. That had more to do with our winters here where you could see 8'-10' of frost pounded under the road and the coinciding heaving.

Not as dramatic as my first posts in this thread, but here is a novel way to install a dome camera in a beauty salon:

Just cut a hole with a knife and drop the sucker in. Very professional. " title="Applause" />

The P&P IP camera is one I installed last night because believe it or not, the dome failed after a week and the local company that did such a magnificent job putting it up there ($150/hour labor rate I'm told) is refusing to come replace it. I really should have taken some pictures of what is going on above the drop tile -scary. Maybe next week when I go back to install a couple more.