With ongoing advances in camera technology, the best performance CCTV camera systems and hardware are now a viable option for your home or business and can be easily customised to your specific needs. Selecting the right combination of camera specs, additional features and optimising camera placement will allow your CCTV system to function at its best.
There are many things to consider when choosing a CCTV camera system for your home or business. Image quality, camera positioning, lighting, scalability, and audio recording capability are all factors that need to be considered when choosing your system. The hard disk and Network Video Recorder (NVR) settings will determine how much footage you wish to be able record.
Let’s take a closer look…
Image Quality
Image & video quality are the biggest factor in regards to recording space required by the system. The higher quality the footage, the more recording space is required. Often there are compromises that can be made to get the best quality footage whilst being able to store more data.
Resolution – The size of the image measured in pixels.
Frame Rate – The number of images taken per second. Lower values will allow more footage to be recorded but will look less fluid when being played back.
Bitrate – The number of bits that are transmitted per second over a digital network.
Bitrate Type – Constant Bit Rate and Variable Bit Rate, CBR & VBR respectively, determine the number of bits written for a given time segment. As the names suggest, CBR will write the same amount of data per second, whereas VBR will write a variable amount of data per second whilst retaining a consistent video quality.
Encoding – This is the process of turning video data into ones and zeros on a hard disk. We recommend using the H.265 (HEVC) encoding method as it allows for more recording time whilst preserving video quality.
Camera Positioning
This will be largely be dependent on the layout of your premises and what areas you wish to monitor. The ideal height to position CCTV cameras is 2.8 metres or above and angled downward.
Scalability
This is largely determined by the number of ports on the NVR. If four cameras are enough to cover the premises of your home or business then a four port NVR is suitable for your needs. However, if you wish to start out with four cameras and add more down the road, you may need to consider an eight or sixteen port NVR.
Additional Features
Many cameras now come with a wide variety of advanced features such as motion detection, people counting, heat maps, number plate and facial recognition, and colour at night. These features can be configured to provide notifications to your smartphone so you can monitor your home or business from wherever you are.