IP video is being used to provide event-wide CCTV surveillance for the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, held each year at Edinburgh Castle.
First staged in 1950, the Edinburgh Military Tattoo is the largest show of its kind in the world, attracting over 200,000 visitors each year and an international TV audience of around 100 million.
As with any high-profile event the Tattoo has demanding security, in which CCTV plays an important role. To monitor both public safety and potential security risks requires surveillance. Following the investigation of current CCTV technology, the Tattoo’s organisers chose IndigoVision as it provided a flexible and scalable solution.
Colonel Richard Hambleton, Managing Director, The Edinburgh Military Tattoo, said of the IndigoVision system: “We have a terrific CCTV surveillance system that now provides the Tattoo with a really flexible solution for this year’s event and the future. The video quality is fantastic and the distributed nature of the system means we can easily deploy and relocate cameras as necessary without expensive re-cabling.”
The event controller and security staff use ‘Control Center’, IndigoVision’s enterprise IP video and alarm management software, running on a dual-monitor PC, to view live and recorded video from any of the cameras around the event. The cameras are IndigoVision’s external PTZ IP Domes, which only require a single CAT-5 connection to the network.
The cameras are recorded at 4SIF, 25fps for a minimum of 31 days using IndigoVision’s standalone Network Video Recorders (NVRs), which each have a removable disk drive. This allows video footage to be reviewed by external agencies in the event of an incident. The Tattoo has chosen to deploy three NVRs, with a total storage of 2.25TB, in a redundant fault-tolerant configuration. Two NVRs continually record video, with the third unit acting as a failover back-up. In the event of a failure the back-up NVR will automatically start recording the video from the failed unit.
IndigoVision’s compression technology and use of features such as Activity Controlled Framerate (ACF) means that DVD-quality MPEG-4 video can be streamed and recorded with minimal bandwidth and storage requirement, the makers say. ACF is built into the IndigoVision IP domes and controls the amount of video that is transmitted on to the network. When the scene is inactive, the framerate is reduced, as soon as any motion is detected in the scene the framerate is automatically set to maximum.
