Sawbones

What's with the big vacant concrete slab next to your house?

Thank you... perfectly put. And if you remove the bright sky from your FOV, you may find that the camera's dynamic range goes a LOT further. Even a non-WDR camera can sometimes function adequately if you cone-down the FOV. ********* Edit *********** In other words, put the very top of the frame just below the top of the treeline. Right about at the level of that top horizontal bar that goes across the lanai would be ideal. ********* Edit *********** And that's a VERY nice house you have... kudos!

Try to get less sky in your field-of-view... you'll find that will improve the picture quite a bit. And you don't need the camera looking up anyway... Nobody ever said "Gosh! Wish I had more sky in that picture!" It should be looking down.

hahah, I wish. Just big couch babies. Dobes are 11 year old, 8 year. Shepard is 7 months old. Little white mean dog we rescued from the pound is 5 years old. His name is Convict The bicycle riding, book thumping crew rings the doorbell and before I can get there, they are usually standing in the middle of the street with the "Ohhh never mind look in their eyes" Anyway, guess I'll place the order for 2 cameras to play around with today. P3367-VE at 5MP for front P3384-VE for pool area Play with these, then decide on the others. Looks like the only 33 series that has IR is the P3364-LVE Be wary of built-in IR... it attracts bugs and spiders, which will web up your cameras, or trigger your motion-detection.

Are the Dobermans named Zeus and Apollo? Because that would be full of win.

A German Shepherd and two Dobermans? That's a big deterrent right there.

ActiveX controls are popular exploits for malware.

I'd get both; there is strength in redundancy (having recordings/images in more than one place). When the Tweek Squad burglarizes your home to fund their Methamphetamine habit, redundancy prevents them from making off with all the evidence. I've seen commercial burglars steal DVRs, and tear down cameras... but those types of burglars typically have a LOT of time when they hit a business during the night. A burglar hitting a residential home in an actual neighborhood (and that's usually going to happen during the day) is unlikely to take the time to climb ladders, get up to the camera mounting locations, get the right hex-wrench to remove the security screws, and remove a an SD card/tear-down the camera. They might steal your DVR (unless it's in a hardened location, like a secured room, or large safe), but I've never seen residential burglars take the time to climb up and rip out well-mounted dome cameras. I've seen them cut the cables to bullet cameras, or redirect/vandalize them (which is considerably easier), but domes are a lot tougher, and would require a prybar or crowbar to remove from a wall/soffit. This also makes noise, and attracts attention. Between emailed alerts, a central NVR, and some internal flash storage, I don't think you're going to have too much trouble retaining some evidence. And what's more, when your phone buzzes, and you check your email to see some shady-looking van backing into your driveway, all you need to do is call the police or a neighbor to check out what's happening. The last time I called the police to my home, there were here in two minutes flat. Timely alerts are the key.

That is true... but I've wrestled with Zoneminder in the past, and been left quite frustrated... and I've been using Linux steadily since the 2.0 kernel. The selection of Linux NVR software is pretty slim... although Exacq is an option.

how do you find the mixing of cameras and the operation headaches? With the mixing the brands I guess you have to have that NVR instead of using the built in one that the mobotix has. No headaches at all. The cameras all record to the central NVR, but also record internally to SD cards (in the case of the mobotix), FTP server off-site (in the case of one particular camera), and to email. I have a record of what happened in multiple places, so even if somebody manages to make off with the NVR, I still have photographic record of the event. The NVR is running Luxriot, BTW.

You will not be disappointed. Honestly? Hard-wired sensors are the ONLY way to get alerts... video-motion alerts send you so many false alarms that you end up turning them off just to save your sanity. That guarantees that you won't be paying attention when something actually happens. Go hard-wired, or go home. Seriously.

Try Adobe Premier Elements, or Sony Vegas

In my experience you cannot go wrong with Mobotix. I have a half-dozen mounted on my home, and they work great... they never freeze or fail. I also have some Acti cameras in the same system, and they work great when slaved to appropriate sensors. I use reed switches to trigger emailed images when certain gates/doors are opened. Similarly, I also have a few that are attached to PIRs for alerts (Note: Video-motion alerts are teh suck... I did away with any reliance on that method VERY quickly). With what I have now, I know when anyone pulls into my driveway, opens a gate or garage door, walks around outside, drops off a package at my door, etc. False alerts are VERY rare when you use quality, hard-wired sensors. Assuming you use a camera that can take digital I/O, virtually any sensor that you can think of in a standard burglar alarm can be wired to a camera. All of the cameras record to a dedicated PC-based NVR that runs on a Quad-core intel board. 8 Terabytes of drives gives me about three weeks of recorded video. However, I rarely have to access the NVR to see if somebody stopped by, since alerts are emailed to my phone in real time. That said, the NVR has come in handy for traffic accidents that happened on the road in front of my house, trespassers at the neighbors (I can see some adjacent properties in certain views), etc. Assuming a quality brand of camera, lighting is what makes the difference between usable images, and crap. Think carefully about backlighting (eg. dark interior of a home, bright daylight outside, and somebody walking through a doorway from outside... that backlit silhouette is a serious challenge for most cameras), and consider whether certain cameras need to be WDR (or SDR in the case of Acti). I'm in a neighborhood with an HOA that discourages the use of floodlights. This required me to use quite a bit of infrared... which is expensive, but does work. Keep looking until you find a company that knows something about IP cameras. Orlando is a big city, and there should be plenty of people who can do that kind of work.

One thing to bear in mind with the newer Acti cameras... many of them lack digital I/O. I just discovered this when I bought an E86, intending to slave it to a Crow PIR/Microwave sensor. Imagine my surprise when I opened it up, and found no ports to attach the sensor... bad on me for not reading the specs more closely. Just something to think about.

Listen to this advice. Use actual sensors to trigger alerts... not video motion detection. The latter will give you hundreds of false alerts.

The only name that comes immediately to mind with enclosures is Pelco. Some of the guys who do this professionally might know a few others.

How about adding a section on IR illuminators/enclosures/accessories?

Installation can actually be fun and challenging. Except for those hot summer attic crawls. Those universally suck.

I like all of your pictures... pretty sharp.

My problem with proprietary "box" DVRs is that you're locked into somebody's brand, or software. With a regular computer or PC, you have complete control over the OS, the software, and the hardware. You can add hard drives easily. You can put in a RAID. You can change out the motherboard or processor if the system is getting too heavily-loaded with motion-detection or video analytics. You can change network cards if you need a better connection (or you want to team several cards together). In short, you have all the power, and all the flexibility. Not so with proprietary NVRs or DVRs.

I lean toward IP... with PC-based NVRs. You have to look at your specific camera, but some come with vari-focal lenses (where you can change the zoom), and some are fixed-focus. I don't recommend buying into anybody's specific brand or "system." Some companies have excellent cameras in some areas, yet they suck in other areas. Going with a software-based NVR (eg. Milestone, Luxriot, Exacq, etc) gives you the luxury of picking from a variety of cameras and manufacturers. This allows you to tailor your installation to EXACTLY what you want. This, however, presupposes that you KNOW what you want. As a general rule, I avoid system-in-a-box deals. They tend to all be packaged with the same generic cameras... and any experienced installer will tell you that there is no one-size-fits-all camera.

I would do at least three cameras across the front. I'd go to the left of your front door, looking toward the driveway (to cover the door and the front walkway). I also put one on the front-right corner of that house to cover the driveway. And I'd do one on the left corner of that house to give area coverage of the front yard.

Unless you have a ridiculously large home, 32 channels is overkill. I have a 3500 sqft home, and my 16-channel system is overkill... most people make do with four or eight channels.

That's going to be a mess... particularly with a gazillion apartment dwellers running their own wifi. Talk about a nasty RF environment... That said, there are multiple ways to do that. I'd use directional bridges to create PTP links from the various buildings, and pair them with IP cameras. You'd have to make sure you built in enough bandwidth to handle all the streams. That would require multiple APs, spaced out enough on the spectrum to minimize interference. If this is all Greek to you, and you've never done an IP system, you should probably pass on this job. EDIT: In other words, pretty much exactly what Lebowski said.

The d-series can be directly wall-mounted... and still be pretty weatherproof.