In the near future we plan to add to this section new articles, tips, tricks and in-depth information about CCTV lenses, compression, IP video design practices, networking principles and video storage.

On our website you can find IP video and CCTV glossary where you can find explanation of widely used words, like  focal lenght of a lens, camera format, auto iris,  H.264 and many others.

Also you can find here articles about field of view calculation, wide angle lens, cctv compression, network bandwidth and cctv storage calculation and more.

Bellow you can find most interesting external CCTV design resources:

There is a document called “CCTV Operational Requirements Manual” from UK Home Office Scientific Development Branch. This manual helps to understand a concept of recognition, detection and identification used in IP Video System Design Tool.

There is a very interesting and useful video from FBI. This video explains how to avoid common CCTV design problems such as using wrong camera lenses, installing cameras in the wrong locations, using low FPS and wrong compression and much more:

Bob Dolph (Security Sales and Integration) has written an article about this video.

Here is a preliminary version of a video tutorial on how to add a site plan to IP Video System Design Tool, find optimal camera locations, calculate camera lenses and required camera resolution.

Wide angle lens have many advantages for CCTV and IP video surveillance. The first advantage is wide field of view. See images above. The second advantage is quite good low-light performance. And last but not least,  wide angle lens provide good depth of field in compare with telephoto lenses.  Well known drawbacks of wide angle lens are possible geometrical distortion which appears as visible curvatures at the edges of a camera image and higher requirements for the camera resolution.

This is a reason to find a proper balance between the wide field of view and possible drawbacks of wide angle lenses.

To find a proper focal length for wide angle lens the CCTV designer needs to perform many calculations. To ease the lens selection the designer can use special 3D CCTV design software where you can clearly see all 3 paramteres: actual field of view, lens distortions and camera resolution.

Focal length is a distance between the entrance lens and the image sensor where rays of light are focused. The lens focal length and the size of camera sensor determine a CCTV camera field of view. The shorter the focal length, the wider the field of view.

In the past rotating focal length calculators made out of paper were good and simple tools for quick calculation of the field of view.

Now it is time to use comprehensive CCTV CAD /CAE software for CCTV design, like CCTV Design Tool or IP Video System Design Tool.

Apart from the focal length calculator this software has 3D engine for automatic design and visualization of all elements of video surveillance systems.

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