# Surveillance Camera(s)



## StradivariusBone (Jul 30, 2014)

I apologize in advance if this has been posted anywhere else, I tried searching for it but found a lot of threads on cameras for performance purposes. Long story short, our building was robbed the other night. All that was taken was a Rosco 1600 fog machine and a couple gallons of juice, but that's still about $1,000 in replacement so it's a pain for us to deal with being a HS PAC. 

Security is an issue as many people have keys to the building and I've come in a handful of mornings to find lights left on, doors propped, etc and I'm done with it. I'm about 90% certain that this was due to a teacher who has keys and is authorized to use the building for rehearsal purposes not securing things. Either a door was left open or one of his charges is involved. There is no sign of forced entry, it's well known that his group was in the building after hours when the fogger went AWOL. It's not rocket science. 

As an interim measure I'm planning on taking an old webcam and laptop and setting up a camera to record the hall looking toward the stage, but I was wondering what the 'booth might recommend.

We are pretty well wired for POE ethernet access points, but only one is actually used so I was considering looking at POE cameras, but I don't have much knowledge for what to look for in that regard. I know we've got unused drops in all the right places though (over stage, over house, over the workshop, lobby, etc). It'd just be a matter of buying the right setup and patching it in. 

I've thought about the Harbor Freight deal, but they aren't currently accepting PO's so I'd have no way to buy it. Plus that'd mean running a lot of cable when I don't really need to. 

We do have an external camera network that dumps video to a hard drive, but it's password protected and the admin that installed it has left. We're trying to get in touch with him, but if anyone knows a trick for bypassing the password that'd be helpful. We are exploring pulling the drive and contacting the old admin. 

Anything you all might suggest would be helpful!


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## Amiers (Jul 30, 2014)

I would put in an order for a company to come out and do the install. It will save you a lot and I mean alot of time messing around with it and the price point versus time and energy is worth it. However if you are trying to be on the more stealthy side and do it on your own dime then you could go with DropCams. They do require power and you have to pay for the online DVR service if you want it to record but it is definitely worth it. They run on wireless and have a pretty decent resolution.


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## FMEng (Jul 30, 2014)

I have a small D-Link camera in an equipment room, and it works great. I like it because it is completely self contained. All it needs is power and wi-fi, or PPoE. It records upon motion detection to an on board flash card. They are insanely cheap for what they can do. Amazon has the DCS-930L for $33.


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## venuetech (Jul 31, 2014)

Did you say this was a High School? My school district has a policy regarding security cameras, so i suspect your school district would have policy regarding this, be sure to check with a district administrator before you place a camera. Or you may find yourself on the wrong end of the stick.
Our policy outlines how the cameras and placement must be approved and who can view/review any recordings
The IT department deals with them the most as they hold and manage the servers and software licencing for dealing with multiple district wide PTZ cameras. once in place the day to day camera management is left to the building secretary.

whoever works with your district security cameras may have a spare that can be moved to a problem area as needed.


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## StradivariusBone (Jul 31, 2014)

It is a high school. The policy that is apparent (I have yet to and will be doing research on this) is choose your own adventure. Some schools have a ton of security cameras while others have none. I'm going to work through my IT person first to see if she's cool with this idea, but I know another theatre in our district installed their own that overlooks the sound and light booths with IR cameras. I'd rather have something covering the shop in addition, hence the IP camera idea. 

But yeah, I'll check the red tape before proceeding.


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## themuzicman (Aug 3, 2014)

You're going to spend as much for a good surveillance package as you will to replace your gear. Replace your gear, give everyone the lecture on how to lock stuff up, and make the admins install the cameras on their dime, not yours. $1000 isn't a terribly large sum in the budget of a theater, and not worth installing a ton of cameras for. If it continues, that's when I would look into the cameras.


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## Tex (Aug 5, 2014)

themuzicman said:


> You're going to spend as much for a good surveillance package as you will to replace your gear. Replace your gear, give everyone the lecture on how to lock stuff up, and make the admins install the cameras on their dime, not yours. $1000 isn't a terribly large sum in the budget of a theater, and not worth installing a ton of cameras for. If it continues, that's when I would look into the cameras.


That's easier said than done. I've given "the lecture" about 100 times over the last 20 years and it's been largely ineffective. "Making" admin do anything is above my pay grade and for many years, $1000 was about 60% of my budget. If the OP can get wireless IP cameras for $33, it sounds like a good investment of money and time.


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## StradivariusBone (Aug 5, 2014)

I second what @Tex says, $1,000 is not our nut, but it's also nothing to sneeze at. It means less upgrades, less replacing broken crap, but at least it might mean replacing a non-DMX fogger with one that is. I did low-voltage cabling and install full time every summer while in high school so the install itself is not daunting, just trying to get the right pieces. We actually have an old Samsung DVR that uses coax that I just found, so I'm leaning toward buying cameras to run on our existing coax network and buying cheap day/night cameras. 

I will update the thread as we get more information-


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## Morte615 (Aug 5, 2014)

I don't think this is quite what you are looking for but John Huntington did a blog post awhile back on using POE Cameras in his Haunted House. I am pretty sure he s still on the forums and may have some ideas.
http://controlgeek.net/blog/2012/3/...g-ethernet-infrastructure-for-the-graves.html
http://controlgeek.net/blog/2011/7/2/weird-ac-voltages-in-a-poe-camera-system.html
http://controlgeek.net/blog/2011/7/6/weird-ac-voltages-in-a-poe-camera-system-followup.html


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## JerseyMatt (Sep 9, 2014)

Tex said:


> That's easier said than done. I've given "the lecture" about 100 times over the last 20 years and it's been largely ineffective. "Making" admin do anything is above my pay grade and for many years, $1000 was about 60% of my budget. If the OP can get wireless IP cameras for $33, it sounds like a good investment of money and time.



This is truly a case of you get what you pay for. Those D-link cams are junk. They are VGA resolution (640x480 - think camera phone from 2001), they have no IR (they are blind in the dark), and they are NOT PoE (they have a wall wart that has to be plugged in)... 

I just installed an IP camera system at our playhouse. The cameras themselves were $300 each - and that was at the low end of the product line. Then there's the IP DVR, the PoE switch, etc. They paid almost $2000, and that was with me supplying the equipment at cost and donating the labor to install it. High definition PoE IP cams are not cheap. Basically if they are cheap (say under $150), they are garbage


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## Tex (Sep 9, 2014)

One man's garbage...


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## Chris15 (Sep 9, 2014)

It is all about the right tool for a job.
The last CCTV system I designed ran 10K for the 5 cameras alone, but it 5MP Mobotix dual lens stuff that should last for many years and has certain system architecture benefits. Then I added 10 disks in RAID to give me 20TB of mirrored storage to store it all on, in an enterpirse NAS. Add another like 7k there.
But is that the right solution for every situation, absolutely not.

There are plenty of applications where 640x480 is more than enough resolution - if we're only talking about have evidence enough for an internal enquiry say, vs. trying to identify people outside a building with evidence that will hold up in court...


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## StradivariusBone (Sep 9, 2014)

The most challenging part now is determining the actual product specs on these things. I'm finding this industry is a rabbit hole of crappy tech and fancy dressed-up hardware. I'm leaning a bit more back to the land of coax since our IDF is in another building and I'd rather keep the DVR somewhere more secure. A neighboring PAC used a system built by Revo that uses some kind of balun to send the signal along with power over twisted pair through RJ-12's so he was able to use his building's LAN wiring (although it is isolated from the actual network) to set up his cameras. He loves it and it was around $700. Granted, I don't think it's HD (somewhere around 700TVL I think), but the IR is good enough for him to use it as a blackout camera as well. 

That being said, one thing I'm noticing is that it is all about application. If you're placing a camera in a smaller room where you only need to see about 30-40' in front of you, these "garbage" cameras seem to do alright. If you're putting that same garbage camera on the side of a building covering a parking lot where it's going to be bleached by the sun and buckets of rain dumped on it day in and out, then it seems your mileage suffers.


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## StradivariusBone (Sep 16, 2014)

Just an update- We lost a drill, charger and bits last week too. Something strange is definitely going on in the theatre, but at this point I'm doing all I can by locking down everything I can, but if people come behind me and leave stuff unlocked there's not much I can do. I've purchased these-

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...7nU4ocKE4Gr2mHSunzNzKvJL89LRQRWa3TRoCnqrw_wcB

to install one in the workshop space where all this went down and I can wire it directly into our existing analog DVR in the adjacent tool closet. I'm planning on using the other one to replace our aging stage camera with one that will help in the blackouts. 

I'll report back with a review of its performance for the good of the thread.


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## AlexDonkle (Sep 17, 2014)

Good luck with the cameras.

If budget's an issue, one trick that's often done is mounting some older broken cameras to supplement the working ones. So long as people can't tell which cameras are working, it helps as a theft deterrent. If you wire both the real and fake locations, you can also move cameras around week-to-week, potentially without anyone noticing (Some large retail stores do this by installing smoked glass domes all over, with only a couple domes actually having live cameras inside)


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## RileyChilds (Oct 14, 2014)

StradivariusBone said:


> I apologize in advance if this has been posted anywhere else, I tried searching for it but found a lot of threads on cameras for performance purposes. Long story short, our building was robbed the other night. All that was taken was a Rosco 1600 fog machine and a couple gallons of juice, but that's still about $1,000 in replacement so it's a pain for us to deal with being a HS PAC.
> 
> Security is an issue as many people have keys to the building and I've come in a handful of mornings to find lights left on, doors propped, etc and I'm done with it. I'm about 90% certain that this was due to a teacher who has keys and is authorized to use the building for rehearsal purposes not securing things. Either a door was left open or one of his charges is involved. There is no sign of forced entry, it's well known that his group was in the building after hours when the fogger went AWOL. It's not rocket science.
> 
> ...


What is the model number of the system? I can help wuth that!


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## StradivariusBone (Oct 15, 2014)

RileyChilds said:


> What is the model number of the system? I can help wuth that!



It's a slightly ancient Samsung SVR-430. The board is some sort of wonky Linux computer with an "OS" (if you can call it that) that is about as useful as talking to a sentient rock and telling it to describe the video to you. I took the CMOS battery out, shorted the terminals and voila! Password deleted. 

Here's where it gets exciting (sorry, I just realized I never updated this thread)- It turns out that all the doors were in fact locked and the building was secured. Except for the roof access hatch, left carelessly open by the team that pressure washed it the previous week. Now here's the exciting part. The roof hatch opens to a fixed ladder below which goes down to a loft about 14' off the ground in the men's dressing room. There is no other access to this loft except for a ledge with a gate that one can place a ladder against to climb up/down. There was a 12' A frame ladder in place that the roof cleaners used to get up there (I did explain it was a bad idea and we never use the loft because there's no safe access), but they left all that there. So these darling children climbed a fence, shimmied across an overhang, climbed up a 60 degree steel roof pitch to the flat deck over the dressing rooms, found the hatch open, climbed in pitch black down a 12' fixed ladder, then down a 12' A frame from a 14' ledge and that's it.

Goes to show- if someone wants to get in, they will find a way. I also retract my blame of the band guys on this one. They did the right thing. 

New plan is to lock the workshop down hardcore every night and we've got a camera overlooking all points of ingress.


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## Amiers (Oct 15, 2014)

Damn kids. I spose you didn't get a decent facial either.


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## StradivariusBone (Oct 15, 2014)

Nope, the outside cameras are awful, not day/night either. But based off where the one was we could tell how they got up and when we put it all together it made sense.


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