CCTV location help and recommendations

wyx087

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It’d be greatly appreciated if people can offer their expertise regarding this topic.

Below is the not-to-scale-or-ratio badly drawn block diagram of front of my house. I would like to install one CCTV somewhere to monitor those in RED, in clockwise order: red square of a parcel box, red round square of my car on the driveway, red line of study window (converted garage), red line of front door.
u4usura8.jpg


Other grey blocks in the image are part of the house, the blue dot is the location of router. The green blob is a small tree that shapes like a Christmas tree, it is there to block view of front door. The transparent triangle is a roof above the front door, under it is a PIR controlled external ceiling light. The PIR area is just enough to reach the car door. The driveway is 2 car lengths, red round square is drawn in the middle of the driveway, where I usually park (1 car household).



I have identified 2 possible locations for DIY install (no external mains wiring, no drill through brick wall, accessible using my current ladder):
- A is next to the front door, on the grey triangle roof, cable through the wooden roof.
- B is on the external wall farthest away from main house, cable through roof edge into the garage attic.


Problem with location A is that it is only suitable for a small camera to prevent clustering the view of front entrance. It is also quite far away from the router with a lot of walls. Good thing with location A is that with its cone of vision, it is able to see whole of driveway covering all approaches to front of the house.

Problem with location B for a fixed camera is that it doesn’t cover other side of the car where someone could walk up to study window unseen. But it’s close to the router for guaranteed wi-fi access and no size restriction.

Perhaps an automatic PTZ camera at B? But which one? Is there a PTZ IP camera that patrols between driveway and looking down at the window, then lock and track on motion? Problem I foresee with PTZ tracking is that it is highly dependent on the camera software, which are usually not great.



On camera recommendation, I’d like motion detection triggered recording and if possible record to a free cloud account. Eg. Y-cam offers free cloud account that keeps recordings for 7 days, this is preferred over IP cameras that record to NAS.

The goal of installing CCTV is to both deter thieves as well as remind parcel delivery man that other parcels inside the parcel box isn’t free for taking. I dislike idea of dummy camera.

All your thoughts are welcome, open to other ideas on locations.




Finally, I do have Synology I can use. Does anyone know if using its surveillance station capabilities will prevent HDD spin-down?
 
As it stand if you limit yourself to one camera you're only doing half a job, you have to settle which half is more important to you.

Depending on distances you'll want a 4 or 6mm 1080p IP camera with a decent sensor (Sony) and ideally array based IR to give you excellent night coverage. If you run a POE camera you can take CAT5 cable straight to the camera (joints concealed in a IP5x junction box for weather protection) or use a CAT5 balun which splits power out if you don't you do have the POE option.
 
Is there a recommendation on which one you would get?

How does these camera lens focal length work? do they have like 5x crop factor? I could go up to camera location with my full frame zoom to look at their focal length.
 
Is there a recommendation on which one you would get?

How does these camera lens focal length work? do they have like 5x crop factor? I could go up to camera location with my full frame zoom to look at their focal length.
I can't personally recommend a camera as such as i tend to build my own or get something from ebay / aliexpress provided i know the insides are what i want. The boards i like are a IPG-53H20PL-A, they have a DSP(Hi3516C) chipset and 1/2.8" SONY IMX122 CMOS Sensor. That provides most of the internal electronics / image sensor. 1080p @ 25fps @ upto 8Mbps, substream of D1 25fps. Nice stable board, its had some nice firmware updates recently (enabling WDR for example) and the image quality is top notch, night vision is also excellent (factoring in the limitations of IP cameras at night vs analogue).

You can use a CCTV lens calculator to get a rough idea of the field of vision vs distance, be careful though as most diagrams are still referencing 4:3 analogue dimensions vs the wide frame of a 720/1080p sensor. As a rough idea use this : http://www.securitycamera2000.com/CCTV/Camera/Reference-2.jpg. 4mm is really the widest i'd go on a lens as they start to fish eye to varying degrees after that. At 4mm i'm able to read licenses plates moving at 20mph down my road from a distance of up to 10m and they are a fraction of the frame so that give you an idea of the details a 2megapixel (1080p) sensor can reproduce. I used to use a 16mm analogue door camera to resolve detail at D1 using a DVR, i swapped that over to a 1080p 12mm camera and found that the detail it was able to achieve outstanding so moved that lens to an 8mm to capture more of the wider scene and still achieve excellent identification.

Lots of really useful content on youtube about IP cameras so worth spending time on there.
 
The green blob is a small tree that shapes like a Christmas tree, it is there to block view of front door.

Struggling here to understand why you would want to block the view of your front door ...
 
For privacy I guess? It's a new house to us, we'd probably keep the tree. Other houses has front door recessed, this house's front door has been extended, so the tree offers similar feel.


Many thanks Sharky, really useful information there. I'll have to measure up and assess what lens I'll need.
 
For privacy I guess? It's a new house to us, we'd probably keep the tree. Other houses has front door recessed, this house's front door has been extended, so the tree offers similar feel.

Fair enough, but the last thing I'd want where the front door's concerned is privacy. The more it's in full view of passers-by the better AFAIC ...
 
I tbink point B but your diagram shows a very narrow fov, fixed angle cctv cameras usually have quite wide angles of view. One should be able to cover from the right of the car all the way to the tree easily. If you pick a camera you can often find vidoes on youtube taken from that model which will let you see image quality and fov.
 
A few tips I got from our CCTV engineers is avoid any sky being in view. The brightness of it ruins image quality in the darker areas and if the sun rises or sets then you won't see anything at these times. There's nothing of interest to see in the sky anyway so it's wasted space. Also, unless you can flood the place with cameras then you only want cameras looking at where the actual crime can be committed. There's no point showing someone say walking into your garden but then not having a camera on the actual front door or car (all of it) where the breaking and entry / crime would be committed etc.

HD is going to need a lot of space although it's usually multi camera setups that will start eating into space. My car's dash cam which is 1080p gets about 8 hours on a 32GB card.

What about just going down the stand alone DVR route? Sometimes it's better to have a few 650TVL cameras covering multiple angles than one HD camera which has blind spots. I had to install this in addition to a multi camera CCTV system to catch people stealing and it worked a treat, very discreet: http://rfconcepts.co.uk/bullet-vf-camera-30eh-sony-effio-700tvl-waterproof-2478.html

This is a good place to look over cameras, I've used them and they are reliable: http://rfconcepts.co.uk/
 
Fair enough, but the last thing I'd want where the front door's concerned is privacy. The more it's in full view of passers-by the better AFAIC ...

Closed road, no passers-by except for 3 to 4 other residences. :p You'd then argue there's no point in the tree, and I do agree. :) But don't care enough to remove a perfectly good tree.

I tbink point B but your diagram shows a very narrow fov, fixed angle cctv cameras usually have quite wide angles of view. One should be able to cover from the right of the car all the way to the tree easily. If you pick a camera you can often find vidoes on youtube taken from that model which will let you see image quality and fov.

The 2 FOV drawing are actually the same. It's copy+paste of the same powerpoint diagram. But yes, I do need to see what lens I need to get to cover the area I wanted.

A few tips I got from our CCTV engineers is avoid any sky being in view. The brightness of it ruins image quality in the darker areas and if the sun rises or sets then you won't see anything at these times. There's nothing of interest to see in the sky anyway so it's wasted space. Also, unless you can flood the place with cameras then you only want cameras looking at where the actual crime can be committed. There's no point showing someone say walking into your garden but then not having a camera on the actual front door or car (all of it) where the breaking and entry / crime would be committed etc.

HD is going to need a lot of space although it's usually multi camera setups that will start eating into space. My car's dash cam which is 1080p gets about 8 hours on a 32GB card.

What about just going down the stand alone DVR route? Sometimes it's better to have a few 650TVL cameras covering multiple angles than one HD camera which has blind spots. I had to install this in addition to a multi camera CCTV system to catch people stealing and it worked a treat, very discreet: http://rfconcepts.co.uk/bullet-vf-camera-30eh-sony-effio-700tvl-waterproof-2478.html

This is a good place to look over cameras, I've used them and they are reliable: http://rfconcepts.co.uk/

Interesting tips, is facial view less important than actual crime? Surely if the CCTV picks up 1 guy walking towards the study window would be enough to convict him for breaking and entry, providing the burglar alarm also gone off?

The other option is to have B pointing at the study window, and/or A looking more downwards. But neither will be able to provide anything other than burglar's baseball cap.

For the bullet camera you linked, looks like I'll need to run a wire all the way to a recorder? I was hoping for a wi-fi based solution and the recorder being a cloud server elsewhere. There's already power to both locations.
 
I'm not sure about the legalities, I don't know about England but I think in Scotland there's no trespassing laws but was recently told by the police that if they catch someone in your garden or in a private lane behind they can still charge them, something to do with intent but I can't remember the exact term they used. Being able to recognise the face would definitely be better, if storage, data transfer etc isn't a problem then definitely go HD. I'd personally go with a wired setup, more reliable but if you don't want to drill then I guess wireless is the only way! lol

We've got 14 cameras with motion detect in zoned areas (we can set the zones) which are all wired using COAX although we are looking at putting a 50 strand in place for logistics reasons (expansion to locations further away) and you can access them remotely. These are all running 600-700TVL, when we were on BT regular internet the remote access was slow but with Virgin in place and a 5Mbps upload it's almost real time when looking at an individual camera. I suspect HD would struggle but not sure. You could always have 30fps to a local recorder and something like 5 fps remote in case you were broken into and they nabbed the storage device, at least you'd still have some imagery?

Another point worth considering is the infrared. 12 of ours have it, but the bullet cam and the x30 zoom PTZ dome don't and are just very sensitive low light instead (switches to B&W). The problem with the infra red is insects - spiders and flying creatures head straight for the red glow as there's no other light and you end up with cobb webs etc. There's an anti spider spray you can get but I've never used it. A far better solution we did is flood the place with lights so not only does it avoid turning the infra red on but it keeps the video footage in colour and provides much better contrast for definition purposes.

It could be worth looking into the flood light and perhaps getting a more powerful motion detect sensor in it so has further distance and therefore not having to get infra red cameras. Infra red draw more power also I think.
 
Ha, my house doesn't require such an elaborate setup. 2 cameras at most! I presume the solution are you talking about is not motion sensor based, you are recording everything?

I have got BT fibre with over 10 Mbps upload, I'm hoping with motion based sensor and on-camera storage, I can avoid having to run a box in the house with wires running to it?
Something like this one: http://www.homemonitor.me/

I've already got a PIR security light (not quite flood light) covering the driveway, the triangle doorway roof had an external ceiling, I've installed PIR sensor to automate it. I guess I could turn off IR for the cameras.
 
Aye it's digital motion sensing using the change in pixels. It means we've got all the footage but can also review fast at just the parts where there is motion. The wind is a sod though! lol

Sounds like you've got most of the stuff sorted, I'd just go with an HD or two. I prefer domes, more discreet and harder to tell where they are pointing. Three of our outdoor ones are domes with on of these being the PTZ. Ironically, they actually suffer less from dirt and rain than the bullet cameras!
 
I'd agree with wired unless you have easy access to the cameras, wifi cameras need to be hard wired to set them up and if they lose their config which can happen.
 
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