- Posts: 1
- Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2017 9:38 am
Tue Sep 19, 2017 10:04 am
Hi all,
i'm completely naive to the professional sort of production and equipment you're discussing here, so please excuse my ignorance. Also, i'm no native speaker.
We are working in research and doing behavioral analysis. For this, we film mice in a semi-natural surrounding. Recordings are done continuous for several days @25fps and in 12hr segments. Usually 8am-8pm-8am...
Except for monitoring, we don't need to stream the video.
The cameras we are using are GigE cameras. We managed to use a white balance setting to basically get the same image quality (brightness and clolour) in daylight conditions and in low-light (mimicking "night").
We also employ binning for good sensitivity and colours in both light conditions.
So these two processes are done already in the camera.
Currently, these cameras send the data to a couple of workstations next door in a server rack via the LAN infrastructure. Distance is about 10 meters.
Although we could plug in theoretically 8 cameras to 2 GigE framegrabbers, we keep losing frames because the computer can't keep up encoding to the H264 format (LEAD). So we end up with 4 cameras max.
The codec supports multi-threading, currently using 4 threads.
The goal would be do record at least 6 cameras in parallel to a system, with an added bonus of seeing a live, no lag video feed. (It goes down to 1fps during recording)
So, save for massive computer upgrades of CPU or, even more complicated, CUDA technology, i'm currently out of options.
I'd like to stress again that we had to go the way we did to allow us in the end to record at day and night conditions and have good image quality.
Can anyone suggest an infrastructure which allows us to keep the cameras but also to record 6+ cameras in parallel?
I'm curious whether there are dedicated machines for a) encoding to a reasonably compressed and good quality and b) recording the compressed video?
What costs am i looking at?
I'm sorry if anybody got bored with the explanation
Thank you very much for constructive criticism and suggestions!
i'm completely naive to the professional sort of production and equipment you're discussing here, so please excuse my ignorance. Also, i'm no native speaker.
We are working in research and doing behavioral analysis. For this, we film mice in a semi-natural surrounding. Recordings are done continuous for several days @25fps and in 12hr segments. Usually 8am-8pm-8am...
Except for monitoring, we don't need to stream the video.
The cameras we are using are GigE cameras. We managed to use a white balance setting to basically get the same image quality (brightness and clolour) in daylight conditions and in low-light (mimicking "night").
We also employ binning for good sensitivity and colours in both light conditions.
So these two processes are done already in the camera.
Currently, these cameras send the data to a couple of workstations next door in a server rack via the LAN infrastructure. Distance is about 10 meters.
Although we could plug in theoretically 8 cameras to 2 GigE framegrabbers, we keep losing frames because the computer can't keep up encoding to the H264 format (LEAD). So we end up with 4 cameras max.
The codec supports multi-threading, currently using 4 threads.
The goal would be do record at least 6 cameras in parallel to a system, with an added bonus of seeing a live, no lag video feed. (It goes down to 1fps during recording)
So, save for massive computer upgrades of CPU or, even more complicated, CUDA technology, i'm currently out of options.
I'd like to stress again that we had to go the way we did to allow us in the end to record at day and night conditions and have good image quality.
Can anyone suggest an infrastructure which allows us to keep the cameras but also to record 6+ cameras in parallel?
I'm curious whether there are dedicated machines for a) encoding to a reasonably compressed and good quality and b) recording the compressed video?
What costs am i looking at?
I'm sorry if anybody got bored with the explanation
Thank you very much for constructive criticism and suggestions!