CCTV recording devices like about everything else has gone digital. Some of the first recording devices I ever saw were in banks. These security cameras were huge measuring close to a foot squared and a half a foot deep. Of course if you opened it up and looked inside you could understand why they were so large. Along with all the electronics, which were way larger than today's counterparts, were reels of film that was used to capture images. While these security cameras were not really CCTV devices they did serve the same function. A bank teller could push one button and take one picture or press another button and capture images till the film ran out. Then the Feds and local police would have the film developed just like if it was from a 35mm camera. Mean while the bank robbers were able get that much farther away.

When Beta VCR's and then VHS VCR's came out it wasn't too long before someone turned them into a time-lapse recorder. Once done a cassette tape could record for days instead of two hours. It did this by recording fewer frames per second. When they were used in banking facilities it would record at this lower rate until input from alarm would send it into real-time recording. If one of these CCTV systems had multiple security camera inputs it would have to share the video tape. These CCTV systems flipped or sequenced from one camera to the next which meant that it only recorded one security camera at a time. And once the tapes were full or very close to it a new tape would be inserted and the old tape got put in storage in case the images needed to be reviewed. Once that time had passed the tape would be reinserted and recorded over. This happened until the tape was no longer able to record quality images.

Today's best solution is a Surveillance DVR which houses a hard drive or hard drives that it uses to store images on. These hard drives are same as any modern pc hard drive with platters of discs that in essence does the same thing that a VHS tape did. Surveillance DVR's come basically in two forms pc based and imbedded operating systems. While pc based systems work ok they are susceptible to the same problems that pc's encounter such as viruses and crashes. Needless to say neither of these problems is desirable when it comes to recording security cameras. Next is an embedded Surveillance DVR which uses an embedded program usually running on a Linux platform which is much less prone to viruses and crashes. Almost all commercial installations use the embedded Surveillance DVR versus its pc based counterpart.

A Surveillance DVR unlike VHS Recorders can record all of the security cameras at the same time leaving no gaps caused by sequencing. But like video tape it has a finite amount of storage but unlike the VHS tape which was designed to record two hours of security video a hard drive can be hundreds Gigabytes or Terabytes worth of storage. This means that Surveillance Camera Systems can record up to month's worth of security camera images before it starts to record over the oldest security camera images it's hard drives. Also something else to take into consideration is the systems image compression format. You have probably heard of some of these formats like jpeg, jpeg2000, mpeg, and h.264. Starting with jpeg to h.264, jpeg takes up the most space and h.264 takes least room for storage of security camera images. The less space a format requires the more images that can be saved.

Alert Networks, Inc.

Serving Greater Atlanta