Video camera technology has come a long way, even in just the past few years. Driven by the demand for high quality resolution, low cost cameras in cell phones and tablets, enormous advances have been made in both the quality and cost of digital video capture devices.

A high definition digital video surveillance camera can be purchased from any number of suppliers for a couple hundred dollars. These cameras make use of existing network infrastructure to enable a quick, easy deployment in most existing structures. Today’s surveillance cameras are now available in 8K quality resolution. At 30fps (frames per second) and at continuous motion recording, these cameras will -without question- deliver the type of video that will accurately depict what actually happened in each field of view.

The video management software (VMS) is the brains of the operation. The characteristics of an ideal VMS are as follows:

• Collect and organize the video streams from each of the cameras.
• Mark the incoming video with metadata, describing the date and time, camera location, etc.
• Provide a means to search through the video and select portions of interest.
• Replay the selected portion of the video stream with the standard video capabilities (rewind, fast forward, slow motion, etc).
• Export the selected portions of video in a standard format for use by outside entities.
• Integrate to multi-tiered storage automatically.
• Provide a means to view live feeds from all the cameras in the system.

The use of IP-cameras, which send the video streams in digital form, allow the use of computer servers to act as the initial video storage platform. The use of a PC-based storage unit has many advantages.

• Industry standard RAID hard disk drive storage
• RAID disk storage allows for the failure of a single drive without losing data
• Easily expand the storage capacity (within reason)

The data storage requirements of the video vault can be calculated by examining the requirements of the system. In order to provide good value as evidence, video must be of high resolution and a high frame rate so that nothing is missed. In order to be considered valid and unaltered, evidence must be presented in the same resolution and frame rate that it was captured.  

If we assume HD video (1280×1024) and industry standard H.264 video format, standard quality, 24 hour a day continuous surveillance, and a 30fps capture rate we calculate a daily storage requirement of 33.33GB for a single camera, or 100GB per day for a system using three cameras. This means that a standard 1TB hard drive will hold 10-days’ worth of video before it will need to be moved to other storage.

Now, how do we scale that to many -many- more cameras?

An ideal video archive media would provide long-term storage retention for a video surveillance system.

• It should not require additional network bandwidth.
• It should be rugged.
• It should provide fast access to stored videos.
• Video quality should not degrade over time.

A removable video storage system meets all the requirements listed above. Unlike hard disk only based storage provided by a traditional storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS) solution, a multi-tiered system requires no additional network bandwidth because the LTO storage platform is accessed directly by the PC. The LTO cartridges are about the size of a hockey puck and can withstand a drop of three feet onto a concrete floor. Video access is at very high speeds, approaching 300MB per second. LTO cartridges have an advertised shelf life of 30 years and will not degrade with use over time.