The operators in North West Leicestershire District Council’s CCTV Control Room are, understandably, very busy people. As well as monitoring images from a large number of CCTV cameras located at Coalville and Ashby-de-la Zouch town centres, they must also be able to react quickly and effectively to any suspicious activity they might observe at various Council-owned properties.
The Control Room is located in what was originally a nightclub situated within the Belvoir Shopping Centre in Coalville. To maximise its efficiency and to ensure that operators can perform at their highest level by exploiting the latest advances in CCTV technology, operations and security manager Gary Hill recently commissioned a refurbishment of the Control Room resulting in a substantial upgrade of its digital video recording capabilities.
Desire to move with the times
“The DVRs which we had been using since our Control Room opened in 2001 were not allowing us to get the best out of the images captured by our cameras,” explained Hill. “With a requirement to store recorded images for 31 days, we were restricted to recording at a maximum rate of five frames per second. Technology has of course advanced quite rapidly, and we therefore wanted to invest in new equipment which could offer us a real-time recording but also provide a higher degree of reliability than our previous DVRs.”
Referring to the specification and procurement process, Hill added: “We took our time to go through an extensive supplier and product selection process to ensure that we not only achieved immediate value for money from our investment in new technology, but also that the DVRs in particular allowed for expansion, if and when our requirements changed.”
Hill and his colleagues invited a number of installers to tender for the project, giving each the freedom to recommend what equipment should be used. “We were impressed with the proposals submitted by Richards CCTV. They were clearly able to demonstrate that they had the experience and expertise to handle this kind of project, and they were able to put a convincing case for using Sanyo ”hybrid’ digital video recorders,” added Hill.
Products specified for the project
Richards CCTV has installed four Sanyo DSR-HB8000 DVRs, each of which has 7 TB of on-board video storage. Two of the DVRs record images from the cameras located within Coalville and Ashby-de-la Zouch town centres, while the third is used to record images captured by cameras deployed to monitor specific Council properties. All three have sufficient capacity to store all recorded video for up to 31 days. The fourth DVR records and stores video for up to seven days of whatever an operator may be observing on a spot monitor.
A DSR-HB8000 records at 400 frames per second and can therefore capture real-time images at full frame rate from each of its 16 camera channels. It uses a unique compression technology called MPEG-4+ which allows rapid high quality transmission over a network and provides fast-forward and reverse playback facilities.
Roger Hands of Richards CCTV explained: “We were naturally delighted to be entrusted to provide the solution for a major client and I am pleased to say that the project has gone very smoothly. The Sanyo DVRs have easily met the client’s immediate expectations and they have some features and functions which the client may choose to use in the future. For example, eight of the cameras connected to each of the DVRs can be IP cameras.”
Hands continued: “The DSR-HB8000 is also equipped with telemetry coaxial control which provides the option to control PTZ cameras, while another feature called Monitor Plus allows other networked DVRs to be accessed. As a direct result, up to 80 cameras can be monitored and controlled from a single DVR.”
Images used in successful prosecutions
Wednesbury-based Richards CCTV is one of the UK’s leading independent CCTV specialist CCTV installation companies, enjoying an enviable reputation built over 30 years for delivering solutions which meet clients’ exacting requirements.
The Sanyo DVRs have already contributed to the ongoing success of the Control Room for North West Leicestershire. According to Gary Hill, high quality video evidence of an attempted armed robbery, as well as of a number physical assaults, has been passed onto the police and resulted in successful prosecutions.
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