Car Racing Surveillance in Holland

ACTi and NetAware, a professional Internet solution provider in Holland, have successfully installed an IP surveillance system in Circuit Park Zandvoort, and enabled the world to join the car racing online in real-time.

At Circuit Park Zandvoort (http://www.cpz.nl), Holland's former Formula 1 race-track, 19 analog High Speed Day/Night Domes around the track were installed. Redundant fiber rings have been put around the circut, with a total of five hundred single-mode fibers! No circuits in Europe or even the world has this kind of infrastructure! Each camera is mounted on a pole of 6, 9 or 12 meters high and is connected through a video/data converter onto a single fiber. The signals are being converted back to video/data at the server room. From there the video signals go into the ACTi SED-2120 video servers, which are mounted in ACTi rack mounts.

ACTi SED-2120 was used to convert the analog video to MPEG4 (at 3 Mbit/25 fps). All video servers are connected through the LAN port to a switch, and then to ACTi NVR for recording and playback. A Dell PE server was installed with a attached 6 Terabyte (RAID 5, fiber channel) storage. Video was set to record 365/24/7. Video coming out of ACTi SED-2120 goes through a matrix which is used to control the monitors at race control. Video signals are also distributed to a local CATV system and Internet. The WAN port of ACTi SED-2120 is connected directly to the internet which gives use the opportunity to monitor and look at each camera/video server from around the world!

The system is used during main events like A1GP (www.a1gp.com), DTM (www.dtm.com), Masters of F3, and national races. Pictures of races and events can be found at: http://www.cpz.nl/action/fotoboek/

For Circuit Park Zandvoort, it is very important to have a good working recording and real-time playback solution that could operate at full D1 / 25 fps. ACTi SED-2120 video server and NVR are exactly what the end users are looking for. SED-2120 has two Ethernet ports, that enable the record/playback and online preview can be done at the same time. Also, SED-2120 has built-in composite output, which can be used to connect to the Matrix to the TV Wall to do real-time monitoring. In the meantime, ACTi NVR enables reliable recording and real-time playback, which is the most important part during the racing events!

Both NetAware and the management of Circuit Park Zandvoort are very satisfied with ACTi, and they plan to install a sophisticated wireless 5.x GHz system around the track in Zandvoort this year, and of course, will adopt a ACTi solution.