Page 154 - Security Today, September 2017

BECOMING THE B
The great news about today’s video surveillance technology and solutions is that they provide clearer and more detailed video and images than ever before. The cameras are linked into the company’s network, so they can be operated remotely, and data can be shared instantly. The challenge, of course, is that the high-resolution video take up a fair amount of network bandwidth and storage. And the last thing your customers – especially their IT managers – want is video footage slowing down the entire network and taking up too much storage space.
So, where’s the tradeoff? Your customers will say they want both: HD video and lower bandwidth usage. The IT managers have other needs and uses for their networks bandwidth, but realize the value and need for high definition network video. The common denominator is that they’re all looking to you to be the hero with all the answers.
The easy answer is for your end user customer to pay for greater bandwidth and more storage. But, once that gets shot down in committee, there are a few other paths you can take to lower the bandwidth usage for your HD cameras and system.
You can start by selecting a compression format that best suits your needs. For example, if you want to increase your storage, you may choose to go with the h.264 compression format. Most HD video surveillance users are partial to h.264 over M-JPEG because of the way the compression works. It doesn’t capture each frame as a separate entity like M-JPEG. This results using less bandwidth and storage space without sacrificing image detail.
Another approach is to lower your frames per second. Just because you have the ability to record at a higher fps rate these days, doesn’t mean you have to use it. The industry standard is about 5-7 frames per second,
13 | ScanSource Networking and Security Focus FALL 2017
A