Advice for 45 2mp cameras and 18 month video storage on 8700k.

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MagicPagic

n3wb
Nov 22, 2017
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Good day guys,

I read most of the threads in this forum about building big systems. I am replacing an old security camera system in our family business.
From the good people in here I chose i7-8700k with 16gb, SSD main drive, and enough space inside the case for 6 10tb purple drives (I got the first one already to test the performance).

I need about 45 2mp cameras, which will record at full resolution, but at 7fps-10fps (to save on space). I need to store the video for 18 month as part of our insurance requirements. I read that BI can handle up to 900 MP/s, so this PC should be ok for that. Right?

1. I haven't decided on the rest of the equipment - switches, routers, cameras, external storage (network or USB3?). Can anyone with similar systems share their recommendations on the equipment?

2. Everyone recommends Dahua starlight from Andy. Those are a bit pricey for us. Most of the business has lights on 24/7 so we do not need night vision (15 out of 45 cameras will need night vision). No PTZ needed. Even fixed lens (2.8 or 3.6) will probably be good enough. Are there any IP cameras that you can recommend in the $50-$70 range? Do any come with black domes so that people won't know which direction the camera is pointing?

3. Does BI support h.265? Are there any cameras in the above price range that offer h.265?

4. When BI moves old footage to external storage (network or USB3?), can I still view and search it from within BI, or I need some other app for that?

5. How much storage does 900 MP/s take for one day/week if the cameras record non-stop? The cameras will be set on motion detection, but about 10 will record 24/7 and the rest will record about 30% of the time.

Thank you for your advice.
 
1. Haven't done a setup quit that large yet so can't make switch recommendations. Can't go wrong with Cisco though

2. I've used Dahua IPC-HDW4431C-A. They are 4mp cameras but can be tuned down. They seem to be a solid camera and are around $50 each. Great night vision for the price too.

3. Yes - Above camera is h.265 and BI supports h.265 however BI does not support hardware acceleration on h.265

4. Yes - BI databases everything. As long as you let BI to move the video via the "clips and Archiving" and not moving the video manually.

5. That's hard to calculate for a "motion only" setting. However my 2.1MP camera @ 15FPS is around 230kB/sec or around 1.1GB/hour on 24/7 recording.
 
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Yes, that camera seems like the best value for it's price. And the sample pictures were good enough for my needs. Are there any verifocals in the $50-$70 range?

I tried several storage calculators and most say that I might need around 200tb to store 12 month of video at 5-7 fps at medium quality. Wow. That will cost a pretty penny.
 
Good day guys,

I read most of the threads in this forum about building big systems. I am replacing an old security camera system in our family business.
From the good people in here I chose i7-8700k with 16gb, SSD main drive, and enough space inside the case for 6 10tb purple drives (I got the first one already to test the performance).
i would up the SSD to at least 64gb....128gb are cheap
i would start with 3 10tb drives spilt 45 cams 15~ per drive or so

I need about 45 2mp cameras, which will record at full resolution, but at 7fps-10fps (to save on space). I need to store the video for 18 month as part of our insurance requirements. I read that BI can handle up to 900 MP/s, so this PC should be ok for that. Right?
im at 515mp/s on older i7gen3 25 cam's with some room left over

1. I haven't decided on the rest of the equipment - switches, routers, cameras, external storage (network or USB3?). Can anyone with similar systems share their recommendations on the equipment?
i would get 3-4 poe 16 port switchs with gig uplink so if one fails for some reason only 15 cameras are down

2. Everyone recommends Dahua starlight from Andy. Those are a bit pricey for us. Most of the business has lights on 24/7 so we do not need night vision (15 out of 45 cameras will need night vision). No PTZ needed. Even fixed lens (2.8 or 3.6) will probably be good enough. Are there any IP cameras that you can recommend in the $50-$70 range? Do any come with black domes so that people won't know which direction the camera is pointing?
Dahua starlight for sure on the 15 dark area's....

3. Does BI support h.265? Are there any cameras in the above price range that offer h.265?
sitck to h264 bi isnt really ready yet should be soon

4. When BI moves old footage to external storage (network or USB3?), can I still view and search it from within BI, or I need some other app for that?
yes


Thank you for your advice.



and thats just how i would do it many ways of doing it
 
@Dasstrum
Good idea. I'll add the HDs as the existing ones get full.

@ldasilva
The SSD is 128GB. So that is perfect. Great idea on splitting the load between 3 harddrives!! 3-4 switches is also a good idea.

I am testing BI with a few older cams and it all runs smoothly. If you are using motion detection, do you use the camera internal motion detection (if it exists) or the BI? I assume if I let BI do motion detection on 45 cams, it might melt the pc, no?
 
18 months is a staggeringly long time for continuous recording, and really quite long even for motion triggered recording. Are you sure you need to keep all video that long, or just video relevant to any insurance claims you open?

Lets say you were to encode the video at 2 Mbps, which would not be entirely unreasonable for a 2MP camera at 7 FPS. Google says 2 Mbps * 18 months = 11.8338472 terabytes. That is already bigger than any single hard drive and that is just for one camera, and at a lower bit rate than I would run myself.

Of course if the insurance company doesn't stipulate what kind of video quality you need, you could satisfy an 18 month requirement by recording a low resolution sub-stream (something like 640x480 resolution) with a bit rate limit of, say, 128 Kbps. That is just 757.366223 gigabytes for 18 months of video. Much more manageable. I'd do that on a secondary system and let the primary system do good quality recordings with a more sane retention time.
 
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Do you mind sharing what possible scenario could cause an insurance company to require 18 months of storage? The costs to achieve this is large as you've likely calculated.

Not to mention the potential for loss of data due to any number of system failures.
 
Personally, if I had to archive that much data, I'd look for a tape backup system. You could store a few years worth on, relatively, inexpensive tape and restore the files if needed. You could also recycle the tapes after the 18 months and save a little more that way.
 
Maybe something you already know, but something I learned when considering something similar to what your trying to achieve with our insurance company. If for any reason the camera system is down, insurance can refuse to cover things since it's part of the whole insurance policy. So because of that, the small cost deduction it even made compared to the risk, and the complexity of there camera requirements, I keep insurance out of the equation. This way I don't have to worry about giving my insurance company another reason to not cover something, but still having plenty of camera security that I can use for the same purpose if needed.

On another note, I have 26 cameras running @ 4mp/10fps mostly h265 and all but one only recording motion. My 9TB of storage will only last me slightly over a month generally.
 
I can't get into too much details about the insurance. The reason we need about 12-18 months is because we had customers who claim they fell on our property 6-8 months ago. They hire lawyers and file a claim to our insurance company. By that time our cameras have already overwritten any video of that accident. For that reason, some entrepreneuring lawyers and customers wait at least 6 month to guarantee that there won't be any proof of the "accident." I have no issues with real accidents and we had those and we helped our clients with that. What I do not like are the fake accidents with the only intent to milk our insurance company. We know those accidents never happened, but we have no way of proving that. We would gladly go to court and explain that it is very suspicious that a client had an accident on our property, never came to us for any help (medical attention, ambulance or just to scream at us), then waited 6 month and then hired an lawyer. These claims are not for $100 or $1000. These claims are for $50,000 and $100,000. So the accident should have been pretty severe and would require an ambulance. But the insurance company will prefer to settle than to go to court. We had 4 of those claims already and our previous insurance company has dropped us. Now a new policy is almost twice as expensive due to those fake accidents. It is cheaper for us to build this system and have a solid proof that these types of fake accidents didn't and will not happen. Now the issue is that I have to record every square foot of the property where our customers have access and save it for 12-18 month. With some time, I hope the policy price will go lower once we stop having these fake accidents.

I really like the idea that I can record two substreams - one low-res for long duration (for insurance) and the other high res for short duration (30 days is more than enough for theft and other security stuff). Now how do I do that? Build two systems that connect to the same camera set, but configure each camera for two substreams. How does BI choose which substream to connect and record?

This forum is amazing!! So much useful information!!
 
Only way to do it is to clone the camera and change which channel the camera is pulling the video from. Then have the cloned camera that is pulling the substream record to a different folder and the main cameras recording at full resolution saving to a different folder.

Also if you clone a camera it doesn't use any additional processing however I'm not sure if pulling a substream will essentially be like a 2nd camera or not and use addition processing
 
Dasstrum said:
Also if you clone a camera it doesn't use any additional processing however I'm not sure if pulling a substream will essentially be like a 2nd camera or not and use addition processing
Click to expand...
pulling the substream will use more power as its a different feed than the main...but it should be low as the streams are low res...
 
Does each stream have a separate network connection and login in camera settings? How do I setup this in BI? My old IP cameras have two streams (main and sub). When I connect these cameras to BI there are no options on which stream to pull. Am I misunderstanding how this works or am I missing something?
 
MagicPagic said:
Does each stream have a separate network connection and login in camera settings? How do I setup this in BI? My old IP cameras have two streams (main and sub). When I connect these cameras to BI there are no options on which stream to pull. Am I misunderstanding how this works or am I missing something?
Click to expand...
there is a different URL for each...generally, selecting cam no 2 in the blue iris video>configuration setting will pull the substream on popular models
 
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