Apart from providing rich source of information within our website, we have also provided external links below to some of the most interesting CCTV design resources:
There is a document called “CCTV Operational Requirements Manual” from UK Home Office Scientific Development Branch. This manual helps to understand the 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.
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 lenses have many advantages for CCTV and IP video surveillance. The first advantage is wide field of view (See images bellow). The second advantage is good low-light performance. And last but not least, wide angle lenses provide good depth of field as compared to telephoto lenses. However these advantages do come with a few drawbacks as well such as the possible geometrical distortion which appears as visible curvatures at the edges of a camera image and higher requirements for the camera resolution.
Hence it is important to maintain 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 parameters: actual field of view, lens distortions and camera resolution.
Our CAD program offers 2D and 3D modeling of video surveillance systems and helps the designer to find optimal places for security cameras on the site plan, check coverage of all cameras, choose proper camera lens, and get estimations of required hard drive storage space and network bandwidth for IP cameras. The user can draw or import a site/floor plan in BMP/JPEG/PNG/PDF/DWG format and then place test 3D objects like cars or men and obstacles like walls and buildings to visualize what the security system operator will see on his/her CCTV monitors.
IP Video System Design Tool is widely used as video surveillance CAD software by security system designers, installers, network administrators and DIYers from more than 120 countries.
Our CAD for CCTV lets the user:
Switch between two-dimensional (2D) site plan or floor plan and three-dimensional (3D) views.
Change any parameter of a security camera: When one parameter changes, related parameters are automatically recalculated.
Zoom in / Zoom out the site plan with mouse wheel for close-up and distant views.
Rotate cameras, change camera height to view them from different perspectives.
See the result in a small 3D preview window and in a large 3D view window (3D view tab).
Get estimations of required HDD storage space for different compression and recording options.
Export two-dimensional (2D ) camera layout, 3D mockups and tables to other software to prepare video surveillance project documentation.
No special PC hardware is required for JVSG computer aided design software. However, in case if you plan to import large site plan/floor plan images or work with large CCTV layouts it is recommended to use a discrete graphics card from ATI or NVidia GeForce with more than 3 GB or RAM.
Please feel free to download a trial version and check out the user comments .
