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shakran · 12-07-2004, 05:53 PM

exactly Rlyss. Your Handycam isn't worried about using the least tape to record the most video. To understand this you've gotta know how video tape works. The faster you move tape past a record head, the better the image quality. That's because if you take, say, 5 inches of tape to record one second of video, you have more surface area to record it than if you only take 2 inches to record one second. More surface area means more room to put more image data on the video track, so you can bump up the quality.

The stores are trying to basically record a whole day on just a couple of tapes. It's doable, but you have to blast the quality way the hell down to do it. They'd have to drop the quality even further if they didn't drop some frames. Normal video records at 29.97 frames per second. Store security cam can drop that in half or more. You wind up with jerky images, but you also use less tape. Also remember that most stores have multiple cameras feeding into one tape - - -so you have even more video data you need to account for.

And I didn't mean broadcast quality studio cameras either (those can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars - my $35,000 camera isn't anywhere near studio camera quality

) What I meant was that there are systems which will take good video and record it to tapeless media (hard drives) for later retrieval. BUT, those systems are used by the broadcast industry and are therefore priced somewhere in the stratosphere.

The big killer is the hard drive. If you want good quality video, you need a fast hard drive and it needs to be freaking huge. I did a 1 hour special report last year and it wound up taking up over 150 gigs of HD space when it was done (that's only the finished product. the 16 hours of video I shot would have required several harddrives together to store it all)

And since stores need to keep hold of recordings for at least several days, you're talking about a gargantuan amount of storage that they'd have to pay for - - -it's simply cheaper to hook up a VHS vcr to a few crappy security cameras and hope the video is good enough to identify the criminals.

12-07-2004, 05:53 PM	#16 (permalink)
shakran Tone.	exactly Rlyss. Your Handycam isn't worried about using the least tape to record the most video. To understand this you've gotta know how video tape works. The faster you move tape past a record head, the better the image quality. That's because if you take, say, 5 inches of tape to record one second of video, you have more surface area to record it than if you only take 2 inches to record one second. More surface area means more room to put more image data on the video track, so you can bump up the quality. The stores are trying to basically record a whole day on just a couple of tapes. It's doable, but you have to blast the quality way the hell down to do it. They'd have to drop the quality even further if they didn't drop some frames. Normal video records at 29.97 frames per second. Store security cam can drop that in half or more. You wind up with jerky images, but you also use less tape. Also remember that most stores have multiple cameras feeding into one tape - - -so you have even more video data you need to account for. And I didn't mean broadcast quality studio cameras either (those can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars - my $35,000 camera isn't anywhere near studio camera quality ) What I meant was that there are systems which will take good video and record it to tapeless media (hard drives) for later retrieval. BUT, those systems are used by the broadcast industry and are therefore priced somewhere in the stratosphere. The big killer is the hard drive. If you want good quality video, you need a fast hard drive and it needs to be freaking huge. I did a 1 hour special report last year and it wound up taking up over 150 gigs of HD space when it was done (that's only the finished product. the 16 hours of video I shot would have required several harddrives together to store it all) And since stores need to keep hold of recordings for at least several days, you're talking about a gargantuan amount of storage that they'd have to pay for - - -it's simply cheaper to hook up a VHS vcr to a few crappy security cameras and hope the video is good enough to identify the criminals. Last edited by shakran; 12-08-2004 at 05:16 PM..