I am a firefighter and have been helping another local fire station with a haunted fire station fundraiser. Last year we decided to put IR video cameras in the building to capture some of the more hilarious and outrageous scares and moments of panic and make a commemorative DVD for the people who helped. I was the one that set all this up and edited the video for the DVD. Since it was going to be very low light I used analog security cameras (IR, 420 TVL) connected to a PC with a video capture card. In the end it worked but even though I used raw DV for the video encoding before mastering the DVD in the end it looked really obvious that all the footage was shot with a security camera.

This year I want to improve the quality. I plan to abandon using analog video and go all digital. I’ve looked at using IP cameras but all of the reasonably priced ones max at 640x480 and the video quality is crap. I have looked at using webcams with the IR filter removed but recording from multiple webcams not only runs into USB cable length issues but also hits some USB limitations.

Right now it seems like the best way to do this is going to be to find some inexpensive digital camcorders and mount them around the building and collect the SD cards at the end of each night and copy them off to a hard drive. I figure that I can either find a cheap camera that supports night filming or buy some cheap ones off eBay and remove the IR filter myself. It would be nice to get something that records in 16:9 and 720p. Given enough resolution I can always desaturate it (color is useless in IR) and downsample it and get some good quality video for DVD.

Any suggestions on candidate video cameras? Any ideas?

7/31/2012 11:06:41 AM

For anything HD, you really want this:

https://www.dropcam.com/

Subscribe to the DVR service, and you can just export the videos as needed.

Yeah, not cheap.

7/31/2012 1:56:38 PM

Thanks but this building does not have Internet access. Cloud-based solutions are a no-go. (Also super expensive for what I am trying to do.)

7/31/2012 4:15:45 PM

Could you run USB cams on donated laptops/netbooks/computers?

7/31/2012 9:04:47 PM

i've got one of these http://columbus.craigslist.org/ele/3073613205.html

its like 10 years old, but it has a feature called Nightshot which basically shoots in a green tint but is great in low light environments...i used to use it to video-document buildings with no power before planning construction renovations inside, and the footage came out pretty well...saved everything to a miniDV tape, but if these things are going for $150 nowadays, you might want to check on some other Sony products and see if you can find a cheapo digital camcorder that you could setup

Quote :

"NightShot O Lux infrared system with color mode for recording in total darkness"

7/31/2012 9:20:42 PM