Summary

The history of Digital CCTV has generally been a sad tale of resolutions and images which compare unfavorably with analogue systems. As a result, digital system developers have spent their time dreaming up more and more exotic features to try and cover up these shortcomings.

These features are not used by the vast majority of digital surveillance users and installers and only serve to make the systems complex and difficult to learn and navigate.

The truth of the matter is that digital CCTV systems developers of today have lost sight of the real customer needs.

According to our survey of users and installers, the vast majority of people who want CCTV actually only have a few very simple requirements. They want to:

---- be able to view their cameras in high resolutions, close or equal to that found in analogue systems,

---- be able to remotely view live cameras and play back recorded files with similar resolution to that seen on the actual DVR.

That's it! That is really all the average digital CCTV purchaser wants. But because digital quality has always in the past been so very inferior to analogue, developers have tried to make up for the lack of performance in these key areas of need by adding feature after unneeded feature.

Before even looking at software development, we realized we needed a reliable CCTV card which would record and play back at 25 frames a second and which had Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and high resolutions with cutting-edge H.264 hardware compression built into the card itself.

Once we had found the right hardware, we carefully considered what really needs to go into a digital CCTV software system, within the parameters defined by the users. We first threw out every setting which we had never seen an installation use and then threw out everything used by less than 5% of installations. We also discarded any options which related to the inability to deliver 25 frames per second high-resolution viewing and recording as standard.

As a result, you will see that Powamaxx has few settings. Having the high frame rate and resolution and onboard compression has enabled us to reduce now meaningless options to about 10 % of traditional settings and about 5 % of some vendors. Powamaxx is thus simple and intuitive to use, but produces the best quality images available.

An example of this reduction of settings is that there is no need to start and stop remote servers. The remote server is automatically started when the system starts. Also, only one server is required.

Another example is that you do not have to start and stop recording when you need to change settings - all setting changes are made dynamically. Even changes of frame size are made within the currently-recording file. The Powamaxx Playa automatically recognizes that the resolution has changed and adapts to the new size without even a pause. Now you will never lose video because you have forgotten to turn recording on again after making setting adjustments - with Powamaxx, if the system is started, it is recording.

Powamaxx uses the whole screen to view camera images. There are no irritating and redundant bars and controls to reduce the viewing area.

From the start, it was clear to us that the traditional approach of having fixed camera areas on the screen was way off the mark.

Our survey showed us that not all cameras are of equal importance to the user. The general user with 16 cameras did not really want to view 16 tiny cameras, but would want to permanently view certain cameras, cycle through cameras of lesser importance and perhaps not to even view others at all.

This is why we designed Powamaxx to have a variable number of areas or boxes on the screen. The user could then define exactly what should happen in each box - place important cameras in larger, more visible boxes and make several cameras cycle sequentially in another box or boxes.

For instance, if a system had 8 cameras attached, and the user wanted to view the cameras in a larger 4-box format, the Powamaxx matrix could be used to define that box 1 would show camera 3, box 2 would show camera 5, box 3 would cycle through cameras 1, 2 and 4 and that box 4 would cycle through cameras 6, 7 and 8. The user could also define the number of seconds to display each camera before switching to the next one.

In the screenshot of a hotel setup below, 10 boxes are displayed, but there are 16 cameras on the system. There are 2 cameras in the parking area and these are switched every three seconds in the large lower left box. There are 5 cameras covering the floors and these are switched every 2 seconds in the box which contains the Floor 6 camera view currently in the picture below.

In this way, all 16 cameras are covered in the 10 box area. The user has been able to define precisely what is of most importance to him at that time and the areas where he wants larger views are in the larger boxes.

Of course, should the user's requirement and focus areas change in the future, it is a simple matter to change the box layout and the cameras which are shown in each box.