What's a good method for doing a multi-camera system?

[Nazo]

Someone I know is trying to set up a new computer system and they want it to be able to handle security cameras for them as well. A relatively simple recording tool I think is all they need. Maybe capturing images from each camera, say on 5 second intervals. I'm not sure how many he intends to hook up, but, I know even a dual header capture card isn't quite going to cut it. And multiple capture cards just create a mess of conflicts and such. I'm thinking more along the lines of some kind of USB solution. Whatever it is, it needs the software or hardware to be able to handle capturing from all of them in a reasonable manner (can't have that relatively small harddrive filling up with uncompressed full motion video or something after all.) The usual method I see in a non-computerized system is a system set up to pan through each camera and take one shot from each on an interval, and, this is so simple I find it hard to believe a computer can't do it as well. Anyone know of a hardware/software setup capable of handling this for him?

 

[Rix2357]

There are devices specially made for doing what you want. But cheap and quality don't go together. The systems you see where the camera switches every few seconds and a VCR records those images is more or less a cheap implementation of a video security system. Nowdays, most devices record all the images from the camera simultaneously. The only difference is if you want full motion video which is 30fps. To save space/money you can record at say 5fps, which would result in a choppy playback, but that is much better than having 3 second intervals of video. Expect around $1000 for 4 channels of video to maybe $3000 for 16 channels. This is for the quality stuff. There are cheaper stuff, but they are more or less junk if they aren't reliable enough.

 

[Nazo]

Ouch. Probably better let him get that seperately. Mainly I wondered if there was a reasonable costing method I could pre-install for him when I order his computer parts and install everything. Thanks for the info. Actually, the first method combined with a capture card is something worth considering and I'll mention both methods to him (eg the flipping through and recording from each a few frames at a time.) I don't think he's going to want to capture full motion video from all channels (you'd need a raid array to handle all that over any long period of time...)

Really, I'm not 100% sure why he wanted a computer system for this. I didn't want to pry too much since he's kind of a customer and it's not really my business though. ^_^