|
|
- VCRs have gone to join 8 tracks
- The heart and soul of your security system for home or business
is the device which records the activity your cameras see. For
the last quarter century, the VCR or video cassette recorder
has been used in various forms and incarnations to store and
provide video evidence for all matters in commercial and residential
environments. Because VCRs used tape which has a finite recording
time, TL or time lapse recording was developed to expand the
time allowed on a single tape.
-
- People are generally busy or lazy (take your pick) and dont
want to spend their time changing tapes, so VCRs were developed
with features to rewind and start the recording process again.
Some VCRs had "daisy chain" features, which started
one recorder after the last one ran to the end of the tape.
-
- Multiplexers and quad processors were also used to maximize
the use of the VCR, by sharing space (as a quad would do) or
sharing time (that a multiplexer would do) to fit more cameras
in the smae length of tape. The drawbacks of quad recording with
a VCR was low image quality, and multiplexers used would make
images seem to move jumpy and irregular.
-
- VCRs are now obsolete, and all of the minor modifications
made to VCRs were used in the development of the digital video
recorders that we use today. Though the early DVRs didn't have
the capacity, and video retention of tape, advances in hard drive
(the medium used to store video in a DVR) technology have boosted
strage times and now allow better quality video.
-
- How long can a DVR record?
- The most frequently asked question when people are deciding
on a DVR is how long it will record. Most modern digital video
recorders have many features which allow them to be finely tuned
to the needs of the user. The same recorder with 80 or 160 or
500GB can give many different results based on the settings made
when the user installs the machine.
-
- Motion detection can help in making the storage space last
without sacrificing quality or having to add too much in HDD
space. By recording only when there is activity in selected zones,
Motion detection makes it so the DVR works sigificantly less
and fills the hard drives more slowly.
-
- Resolution high or low?
- As a rule, always record in the highest resolutiuon available
to your DVR. recognition of vehicles, plates people is much more
important usually than frame rate. Many security
recorders are now able to accomplish high resolution recording
at the higher frame rates, and new compression technologies are
being used to do this with smaller drive space used as well.
(more on h2.64 compression in future articles) High resolution
provides the best quality evidence, easier recognition, and is
easier on the eyes when reviewing recorded video.
-
-
- Stay tuned...
-
- Upcoming articles for digital video recorders
- Legal concerns about digital video recordings
- What to use when and where.
- MPEG, H2.64, JPEG, Wavelet?
- Network recording yea or nay.
- Servers off site or remotely set up
- Digital security recording do's and don'ts
- optimizing your digital security system
-
-
-
- ICU1.com
-
- Digital Security Recorders,
Digital Video recorders
|
|
