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Hybrid Systems Enable a Slow Migration
The system integrator's perspectiveThe Latest from SIW
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By Brendan Daly
The choices involved in moving from an analog CCTV system to a networked IP video system (digital video) can be daunting. While the final design looks simple enough and is easy to comprehend, the number of design decisions to be made and the complexity involved can be dizzying.
You know that moving to a digital system is the way to move forward, but where do you start? Do you need to rip out everything and start from scratch? And if not, what part of your infrastructure needs to stay and what parts must go? Can an IP and analog systems be mixed?
The good news is there is a way to “stick your toe in the water” and move forward at a pace that meets your comfort level (and budget) — by creating a “hybrid” video system, which is a mix of analog and network (digital) technology in one solution. A well-designed hybrid system allows you to maximize the returns from the existing analog technology investment, keeping various analog technologies until it makes sense to replace them. Current and future expenditures can be applied to digital technologies, to move the video technology forward.
Technology overview
The easiest way to think of IP video-based surveillance systems is that they take what we think of as “video” and convert it to a format that computers talk in, which we call “data.” Data can easily be stored, manipulated and transmitted across a computer network in the same way that your e-mail, Web pages, etc. are sent to your desktop. So once the video information is in the form of data it is no longer bound by the restrictions we are used to for analog video.
The I and P in “IP video” stand for “Internet Protocol” — a standard that allows computers to talk across the world's largest network, the Internet, and is also the standard used by corporate networks. The big deal with IP networking is that every device on the network can talk to every other device (with permission) no matter how far away it is. And because you are using a universally accepted standard, integration between different systems and networks is possible. So there is no need to “home run” cables anymore. Viewing, recording and control can be done from any computer (or computing device like PDA or cell phone) connected on the network, even if the network is the Internet.
By using IP video, it's generally cheaper and easier to get new video cameras installed and recording, and it is very easy to get video data back out of the system. This means video is not locked away in your command center and if you choose you can start sharing the video with other parts of your organization (production, facilities, management, etc) and have them start sharing in the system costs while increasing security's overall value.
In a full IP solution, the video information is never analog. It comes out of the IP camera as data and goes straight across the network. In the hybrid scenario, we need to take the existing analog video and convert it to IP. What happens from here is based on what level of hybrid system you want to go to. For this article, I will take a CCTV system through three phases of hybrid integration and we can see how they tie in together.
