On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 02:25:21PM -0700, Paul Johnson wrote: > Brian Nelson <pyro@debian.org> writes: > > >> Having used security cameras as part of my job, I can safely say that > >> every digital camera system blows balls. If you want usable footage, > >> go analog for this project. Whoever has to look at the footage for > >> some minute detail will thank you for it. > > > > What about using analog cameras through a capture card? Would that be > > good enough quality? > > No. Needs to be all-analog. Analog to digital conversion adds an > irreversible pixelation. At least with an all-analog system, if you see > someone you want to get a better look at, you can go back to your analog > source and digitally zoom in and sharpen it at whatever resolution you > find appropriate instead of whatever the camera system happens to be. > With a digital system, you can't do that at all. See someone you want > to get a better look at? Well, too bad, your digital camera has already > given them that wonderful, pixelated-suspect-on-COPS look. > > > Also, what kind of minute detail are you talking about? I'm sure he'd > > like to be able to recognize faces, but I'm not sure he'd need more > > detail than that. > > Then the digital answer will cost more and not deliver for this person. It could be useful to combine the two approaches. You could have an analogue camera and recording system, and also feed the signal into a capture card. The motion package would make timestamped movie recordings whenever anything happened on camera, which you could then review on the PC without having to mess about with sequential-access storage devices aka VCRs. If you then needed to see more detail you could easily find the right spot on the video tape by using the timestamps. (BTW even analogue sources are quantised vertically :-) ) I found the woody version of motion didn't always produce a movie when I thought it should according to the config. I installed version 3.0.6-0.1 which did DWIM. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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