Many within the surveillance industry are deploying IP video surveillance cameras and networked recorders using the same design and engineering strategies used for building analog CCTV camera and DVR-based systems. On the surface this makes sense: surveillance is surveillance; the fundamental optics and geometry remains the same regardless of the medium. What isn’t the same is how the IP systems operate under day and night conditions.
As H.264 adoption rates increase, many security executives are finding that during the night recording activity and, consequently, storage consumption increase significantly. The reason isn’t due to activity in the field of view; it is because of the way H.264 works and the way surveillance recorders use video motion detection to determine when to record.