Rlyss

How come the security cameras in stores are such bad quality? You see some footage on the news about an armed robbery or something and it's black and white, all grainy and skips and jumps, is in fast forward or has every second frame skipped. You can hardly make out anything in the video.

Why aren't they good quality, like a normal video camera? Is it because the space needed to store such high quality (I'd have thought average quality) images is too much? Or has it got to do with privacy, having people unrecognizable to preserve their privacy if they're just going about their business?

shakran

exactly. Stores can hold 8 hours on a regular VHS tape with a security camera. To get broadcast quality video, they'd first have to abandon the VHS format and go with a miniDV camera, which would jack the price up and only get them 1 hour per tape.

Also, what you see on TV is lower quality than what is on the security tape, because every time you copy analog video, you reduce it's quality - just like when you make xeroxes of xeroxes - each generation brings lower quality - and the tape gets copied at least once because the store isn't gonna give the original to a TV station.

Mephisto2

They also reuse the tapes again and again and again...

Mr Mephisto

jorgelito

That sort of defeats the point doesn't it? I mean, if you can't see detail, RE: tell the differences or recognize people, then, what kind of security is that? Any defense attorney would have a field day with that in court.

Mephisto2

And they do.


Mr Mephisto

martinguerre

it's just a matter of how much does the camera cost vs. the loss it might prevent.

you can bet vegas casinos aren't using grainy tapes, or substandard equipment. the 7-11 down the block? yeah...it's probably crap.

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jorgelito

*slaps forehead*

It's funny, I've never really thought about it before I guess I always took it for granted.

It's kinda like a weird cat-and-mouse game: Stores are too cheap to pay for good security (which would probably reduce insurance/liability), invest in shoddy security, yet can't deter or prosecute theft when it occurs, leading to a loss. It just seems so shortsighted to me. Wouldn't a decent security system simply pay for itself after a while?

iamnormal

Have you seen the price of lawers? Most times it's cheaper not to prosecute.

Slavakion

I've heard of instances where a store is so cheap that it has a camera in an obvious position. But it's really just plastic with a little red LED.

Cowman

What? Why would a store need a lawyer to prosecute someone?

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irseg

Well real cameras can be made of plastic and have a red LED too. But I know what you mean. The place where I work has a fake camera pointed at the back door. The best part is that even if it was real, it's mounted on the corner of the building in a way that you could easily walk up behind it and destroy the thing, completely unseen. I don't know why they even bothered.

Fallon

Alright, here's what I know about these camera's.
They run on a modified recorder in the way that it records. They can set the cameras to record in time-lapse, so with a standard vhs tape, which some systems don't take, instead of 6 hours, they can cover like 14. Now, with at least the store I worked at, the system was old. But it recorded people relatively well. Enough so that you could make out their faces and defining features on each of the 3 cameras we had. I do not believe we had a standard VHS tape.
Also, if I remember correctly, in one of my classes someone did a feasability study for a park on equipment like this and they found digital equpiment which would get them decent quality would be at least $25k with the cameras, servers, wiring, installation etc. And then you need to be able to devote a portion of the building off to said closet and the power was quite a bit. The dummy cameras are about 20 bucks with minimal power usage so sadly sometimes that's where some companies go.

sprocket

Someone should develop a system that records high quality feeds to divx or something similar. Why are we still using tapes? I mean.. we can fit a weeks worth of encoded footage on a harddisk. Hmm...

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shakran

they have systems like that. Trouble is, systems like that are used by video professionals. Anything that's used by video professionals carries one HELL of a price tag. Lemme give you an example.

I've got a thing called a steadybag. It's basically a beanbag made out of a very thick black waterproof canvas, and it has a carrying strap. The only thing that makes it different from a beanbag is its shape. You put it on any surface and then put your camera on top of it and it lets you get steady video without a tripod. $70. For a beanbag. And that's the cheap one. If I wanted the nice one I'd go with a cinnesaddle, which is $150. For a bean bag.

the CHEAPEST camera I've ever seen used at a TV station is around $7,000 to start with. Then each battery is $600. Then the light is $300 and the dichroic filter for it is $120. Then the rain cover is another $300. The shotgun microphone is $1,000 minimum, and the wireless lapel mic is $600 for a shitty one. That's right at $10,000 for a camera that barely qualifies as good quality. And the tripod adds over a grand to that price.

My camera is $35,000, the batteries are $1000 (I have 4), the shotgun is $2000, the other shotgun is $1,000, the wireless lapel mic is $1,500. Fortunately the light and rain cover cost the same. And mine's still not anywhere near top of the line. Good thing the station pays for it.

The point is, if something's used by the broadcast industry, the price gets jacked beyond recognition, well above what a store can afford.

Rlyss

I don't mean necessarily like broadcast quality studio cameras, for example my Sony Handycam only cost about $500 and it's television quality, you can make out everything perfectly. The quality on security cameras look like it comes from the 1920s. Is that because the quality has to be so bad in order to fit the footage on a regular VHS tape over 14 hours or so?

shakran

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.

Rlyss

Ah, thank you shakran, I've been wondering about all this for a while. They seem to identify lots of the burglars with the grainy video so I suppose if it didn't work it wouldn't still be around. Thanks for clearing it up for me

jorgelito

Hmmmmm.........what about recording to a hard drive that's big enough to hold say...one week's worth of taping. Then either back up to CD/DVD and start over again. I mean hard drives are relatively cheaper yes? So let's say, I record the cash register using Rlyss's camcorder or maybe even a web-cam(?) and dump it straight to a hard drive. Would that work?

CityOfAngels

Or if recording to a hard drive is too expensive, they could develop security-only camera set-ups where the tape used is large enough to fit an entire day on it. Sure, it would be a big-ass tape, but if they developed it for security only, whatever system they put together would be able to handle it.

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WillyPete

Or buffering.

Buffer a higher quality feed to a drive, which in turn gets read off to a video tape with the dropped frames 1 hour later.
If a burglary happens, then you hit a button, the buffer stays on the disk and copies to a backup tape for emergencies. You get hi-quality + the lower reference to the incident.

Anything after that and you at least still have the typical security feed.


If you were a software wiz, you'd write recognition software that would take a hi-res snapshot from a cheap 3mp camera when it detected a face turned in its direction.
Add that to a grainy, skippy security video and you have a good id reference, plus a reference to the suspect's actions.

1010011010

Another reason security tapes are often jerky is because multiple cameras will be recorded onto a single tape in a round robin fashion. The tape you finally see is when someone has cut out all the frames captured from Cameras B and C, and only the images from Camera A are left.

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kazoo

When I began working for an international bank equipment company, we were just starting the changeover from film cameras (35 and 70mm) to video, and the first machines we installed were Beta format. They were modified consumer units and offered up to 96 hours on a standard tape. As we all know, Beta quickly departed the scene in favor of VHS, and manufacturers still originally used commercial chassis recorders with extended time record modes. The problems were:

Consumer grade machines weren't made to run 12/6 with standby the rest of the time
Customers balked at spending money for premium quality tapes and instead bought the cheapest shite they could, and re-used it a hundred times
Customers didn't want to invest in regular PM work on the machines

As a result, I'd find machines with heads full of crud, bad heads, bad head drum bearings, and so forth until it didn't make sense for me to essentially spend 5 hours in the field rebuilding a machine without the necessary bench tools to improve accuracy to an optimum level.

Thankfully, there was a separation in the market and a handful of companies began to specialize in ultra heavy-duty video recorders that could offer up to 480 hours on a single T-120 tape, leaving the consumer machines where they belonged. Mind you, these commercial machines weren't cheap, but didn't require the intensive service frequency of their weaker brothers.

Enter the age of gihugic disk drives at a pittance, and digital recording is where we're at today. DVRs or digital video recorders now combine sequencing scanners and directly input numerous cameras, and offer outstanding quality, but again-good ain't cheap.

Over the same period of time, cameras and lenses have undergone a huge transformation. Vidicon tubes are gone in favor of CCD (charge coupled device) cameras, auto iris lenses have gotten very inexpensive, and video installations no longer need to have heavy piggyback coax with power, since a composite signal can be run over UTP (uniform twisted pair).

Those who don't wish to spend money on upgraded equipment will be stuck with the crap they own. Those who are serious about security can not only tell the hand you're playing in a casino, but whether or not the two gnats on your right shoulder are about to settle down for some hot sticky gnat love.

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Pip

They can wrestle out an amazing amount of information from those grainy tapes sometimes. When our Foregin Minister was stabbed to death in a posh apartment store the perp was caught on a few shoddy cameras. He was wearing a baseball cap and a baggy sweatshirt, so at first it looked like a dead end. But they could pick out his movement patterns and body proportions and compare with the suspects. It was one piece of a flawless evidence against him.
Granted, you won't do this for every shoplifter, but just because you can't identify someone at a glance doesn't mean it's useless.

jorgelito

I guess it really all comes down to cost/benefit. I mean obviously stores that sell donuts are not going to spend for security say like banks, casinos, jewelry stores etc. It makes sense. It probably affects insurance too I would think.

Or how about, "Hey people, stop stealing!". Hehehee....maybe that'll work...

MSD

In my experience, a third of all cameras are just feeds to a TV, no recording. A third are the grainy ones, and the other third don't acutally work, whether by design or neglect.

JohnnyCarson

Many retailers now use DVR's. You can generally have up to 16 cameras hooked up to one. You can get up to 6 months of video saved depending on quality. You can then just enter a specific date and time and the video for that time comes up. It can then be recorded on to a cd-r for the police or whoever. Very cool systems....

KMA-628

Well, no, not really.

Most people that still use VHS operate using time-lapse and thereby get anywhere from 24-72 hours (on average) on one tape (quality really sucks though). And, it is not just the copy-copy-copy problem, but many people record over existing tapes so even their "fresh" footage sucks.

About 4 years ago, we saw a new product begin to emerge in the marketplace: Digitial Video Recorder.

The early models came in 4, 8 and 16 channel and had a whooping 80GB hard drive. Based on how you set the DVR: number of cameras, frame rate, frame size, etc., you could get several days.

The price: about $20,000

As the price of hard drives fell in the consumer marketplace, the price of DVR's went down.

Now you can get 400+GB, 16 channel, etc. for about $7-8 grand (commercial-grade machine).

Slowly, we are seeing a boost in DVR sales. There was a time when we installed several VCR's a week, now we rarely see one.

We thought we would see a big boost in demand for these machines after 9/11, but with the corresponding recession, many companies opted to "increase" their security using less expensive means.

Oddly enough, my first client after 9/11 to fully upgrade their security: a dairy.

Even with digital recording, you still operate using time lapse. Average frame-rate is in the teens.

KMA-628

16 channel was pretty much the original style.

I can now do unlimited cameras, unlimited storage (i.e. hard drices), all controlled and all video retrived through one interface. For example: The standard system for Target is unlimited/unlimited. Pretty sweet system made by a Colorado company called Loronix.

32 camera models are starting to become popular for smaller applications. Right now the limit for these systems is storage. It is easy to add cameras, making them work across different hard drives requires a little more work.

KMA-628

Well, no. When mulitple cameras are recorded onto one VHS tape the video is multiplexed. You have to have a multiplexer to play the video back though, a standard Wal-Mart VCR won't even give you an image.

There is, however, usually an analog coax vido out on a mulitplexer that will enable you to record the video you are viewing.

The jerky is usually interference or the power/video settings are tweaked right. Also, since there is usually some sort of zoom involved, the cameras tend to shake a little with even just a little wind.

/BTW - I am a security systems engineer

KMA-628

The funny part is the look on the cops face when you hand him a disc. They tend to just shake their heads, mumble and then babble about needing a tape.

The police have not quite caught up with the technological advances in security systems.

I actually got in the habit of selling a cheapo VCR to my customers so that they could use the video to record to a VCR and give the cops a tape.

The other problem involves evidentiary standards. Because the video is digitial and capable of being edited, the video used in an investigation (and any future legal action) must be watermarked when it is originally recorded.

The problem is that there is not a single standard for watermarking. Every DVR manf. has a different means of doing it. So, if you give the cops a CD or a DVD, they have no way of playing it back.

Because of this, some companies have their machines automatically include viewer software every time the video is burnt or the give the option of burning the video in an .avi file. However, the .avi file cannot be use in court because it is not watermarked.

The industry has made huge advances in the last 5-10 years but still has a long way to go.

/some of the features on the DVR's are really, really cool.

KMA-628

It is funny to compare who spends what on which types of systems. People that should spend a bundle, go super cheap and people you would expect to go cheap don't.

Liability is a big reason for spending money on a security system.

Even if you are a small coffee shop, you are required, by law, to provide a "reasonable level of security" for your customers and your employees. Improper/inadequate systems can get the owner sued if something were to happen.

Fake cameras and cameras that are not recorded are big no-no's as they open you up for a huge potential lawsuit as they provide a "false sense of security".

I have even seen a couple big jury awards after it was found that the system wasn't working properly. Not only do you need to have it, it needs to be maintained properly.

KMA-628

7-11's have very good systems as their liability is very high.

Wanna guess who has a tendency to have the worst systems? Airports.

There was an incident at Denver International Airport where somebody ran through the security line. Because they use VHS, you couldn't even tell if the person was a man or a woman.

A buddy of mine was interviewed on the local news and he showed a copy of digital video from a gas station and compared it to the grainy, VHS compy from the airport.

It made the airport look really, really bad.

However, DIA didn't have the money to upgrade from analog to digital.

tecoyah

My security system involves twelve cameras of high resolution, eight of them with zoom and multi angle(movable). We connect them to three monitors with four way split screen in color, which can be set to full screen. All this is linked to a four hundred GIG hard drive. pretty much record every square inch that is legal, and retain the info for quite some time.

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mac03

I knwo the security systems I have observed. (leaving off locations) use good ole fashion vhs tapes. each tape is ran ALL day. They use a different tape everyday. And each tape once a month. The replace ALL 31 tapes every year. But, come December, these things look liek crap.

Another reason for choppyness is that they are not continuously recording, they are skipping a 1/4 sec to save space.

I have also worked at places that have cameras mounted that have LED lights and move side to side... but they are fake cameras.

pan6467

Actually, having been in C-store management I can say that the true purpose 99% of the C-stores that have cameras do so to catch their workers stealing. They really don't give a crap about customer theft or hold-ups (provided noone is shot) because they have insurance covering it.

However, with your employees it's a different story. They may be bonded (usually not), but they represent at the very least 75% of the theft. Dairy Mart used to train managers to believe every worker was a thief and if you ran a bad audit it was internal theft and you weren't doing your job. 3 bad audits and you lost your job (robberies, shoplifts that were documented and so on were still counted against your audit).

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