Despite all of these applications, experts stress that it is important for campus officials to have reasonable expectations about the performance of their video intelligence solutions. “It’s not going to give you a 100 percent solution for everything,” says Gadi Piran, president and CTO of OnSSI.
One challenge he has noticed in some installations is that campus personnel often don’t look at the monitors because non-event video is visible all of the time. This leads officers and administrators to become jaded. Piran recommends the video system be set up so the monitor only shows video when an analytic solution detects an event. Campus personnel will then pay more attention to the video because it actually means something when it is being displayed.
This solution, however, is only appropriate if the software is sensitive enough so it doesn’t filter out real events. Campus officials must be very careful and work closely with their solutions provider to calibrate the system.
Network Video Storage Costs are Falling
The footprint (amount of room) and heat related to IP video storage are decreasing, which makes it less expensive. Because storage is less costly, now terabyte hard drives are much more common than they were only a year ago.
Improved compression technology is
helping to thin the amount of video being stored on and transmitted via a network. According to Nilsson, H.264 compression can do several things: It can reduce the amount of storage by 50 percent; it can increase the resolution of the cameras while not increasing the amount of storage required; it can increase the frame rate; or a combination of all three, depending on the application.
Of course, increasing the frame rate diminishes the cost savings normally associated with cheaper storage. Grossman points out that users are getting spoiled. “People aren’t saying, ‘Great, I can put in half as many hard drives and save some money.’ They are saying, ‘Great, I can store more frames, store them longer or go to higher resolutions.’” As a result, the amount some campuses spend on storage isn’t going down.
Another way to decrease the storage required of video is to adopt 2/3 D1 resolution. “This lies between 2CIF and 4CIF,” says Banerjee. “It is almost indistinguishable from 4CIF quality, but it uses one third less of the screen and one third less storage. The eye can’t discern the difference.”
Pelco’s Senior Product Manager for Digital Systems Rob Morello says other tools that reduce the amount of video stored or that migrate video based on certain requirements are also beginning to appear. “Some keep video for 30 days or 10 days at a high quality,” he says. “After 10 days, they export it to a different storage device but reduce the image quality and frame rate.”
