Having trouble justifying the cost of your proposed CCTV system?
It’s a common enough problem for many users, writes Gary James of digital CCTV manufacturer Visimetrics.
But what if a good quality recorded image with top notch audio is all that stands between you and losing 50 grand every day you’re open? Welcome to surveillance, casino style. The cost benefit analysis of CCTV for casino operators is possibly the easiest on paper. But as with everything there is a catch, which is that nobody demands as much from their kit as the gaming industry and just to raise the stakes (sorry), a typical casino represents a technically demanding environment for both equipment and installers alike. There are some applications one could think of where many parameters converge to demand similarly high standards of performance and installation capabilities (monitoring of "at risk" prison cells and charge desk areas spring to mind), but to a manufacturer or installer of CCTV equipment, nobody quite has the full house of issues like a casino.
Lets start with the sharp end. For those of you who have a led a sheltered life, a casino has dim ambient lighting with lots of neon spotlights and flashing displays about the place. The stuff you are trying to see (cards, chips and so on) is sitting on a nice dark green, blue or (worst case) red background. So that’s about one of the harshest environments you could conjure up for any camera. The icing on the cake is that they’re often very smoky, so the lens is going to get filthy as well. Then you have the audio, critical as without this (and almost uniquely to this application), the pictures are worthless. Just to make this more difficult, you have the further problem of the tables being close together, so it’s easy for the audio to get confused. The final problem of course is that the décor is always to a very high standard and the aesthetic of a hardcore camera/lens combo is some way from merging seamlessly with this!
So, what compromises are made? In my experience to date, pretty much none. Those installing and maintaining surveillance systems for casino operators have, with years of experience, successfully integrated CCTV and microphones into this environment. Through careful product selection and sheer ingenuity are delivering the images, and sound, required by the security staff to detect and prevent fraud and theft, all on a significant financial scale. If you’re ever tempted to cheat – don’t, they will have you. Instead, go down the road and steal something from a retailer, be recorded at one image per second (1ips) with maximum image compression on a digital video recorder (DVR) with no download facility for the police and get away with it…..
The other oddity about casinos is that they are almost the last bastion (apart from town centre spot monitor recording) of the good old VCR running in real time (three-hour mode). So why has digital recording not completely taken over here too? Well, the answer is all about the basics – high image quality and synchronised audio across multiple cameras are still beyond many DVRs, and those machines that can offer these two key attributes have generally tended to be at the galactic end of the price scale. Remember here that VCRs are really, really cheap and as long as you keep them serviced and change the media, they are a great way of recording high quality pictures with sound. So, any digital machine deployed by a casino must tick the boxes as far as image and audio quality are concerned before it gets to first base.
There are other factors too, like the fast frame rate (real time, or 25ips) and high image quality combining with the audio component to mean relatively large file sizes for digital recorders, the knock on effect being the requirement to offer exceptional hard disk capacities. Fortunately the availability of affordable, high capacity hard disk drives has ensured that even a machine occupying a third of the space of an old VCR can, with its 2.25 Terabyte capacity, easily record several cameras worth of audio and video for the prescribed period. So the technology, both in terms of image compression and hard disk capacity is now able to meet the challenges the gaming environment presents.
But, as previously mentioned, surveillance teams in this space demand the very best and then some. Look at the two images of the roulette wheel below (taken from the same DVR at the same time) and you’ll see that there are even more hoops we manufacturers are asked to jump through in order to deliver the goods. To be honest, it’s been a refreshing challenge. Developing kit for deployment in casinos takes you firstly back to some CCTV basics (understand just how good the picture needs to be, before you settle on a compression method, not the other way around), then fires you into the cutting edge as the users demand greater performance from their new toys. Because gaming disputes must be settled quite literally there and then, within seconds of a bet being placed, ease of use becomes interdependent with picture and sound quality. No down time, latency in delivering live or recorded images or anything that could be described as generally messing about to find a picture, is acceptable. I bet there’s no other application like it.
