Camera system for real time monitoring of distant locations (to see problem remotely)

Hi all, first of all I'm totally new to this and forgive me if it's not the right place to ask this.

What I want to do: we are a group of people and we are doing a project involving a lot of hardware. The problem is that we are in separate and distant location. When we are trying to solve our problem it's really difficult to do this over the phone without seeing the structure.

I think the solution would be to install a camera system. We have to do real time monitoring. The quality doesn't have to be the best. So I guess a webcam could be an idea?

The problem is, as I told you, I don't know a thing about camera system. I made some research on the net and I found a lot of PC DVR based system. I'm not sure if we need this.

Please, could you point me to a good reference site? Or supplier? We would like to be able to implement a solution as soon as possible. Money is not a problem, we have a good budget. The only thing is that hiring a company is not possible. We have to do the installation ourself.

Thank you a lot for your help.

You may use a regular digital video camera, a web-cam or a CCTV camera.

I'm not an expert in this area, so hopefully someone more experienced will post a better solution. The following questions should help us to understand your problem better:

• What kind of video do you need (resolution, quality)?
• Do you need a fixed camera?
• Do you need a wireless camera?
• Do you want to move your camera remotely (from the same location, from distant location)?
• Do you need several people to see the problem simultaneously?
• Do you need the system to have any interaction like text chat, video chat, voice chat?

• What kind of video do you need (resolution, quality)?
  This is a though question, since I don't know anything about cameras. I would say something average. We always work in pair, so someone will be with the camera to give details. The camera will be more something like an tool to help us communicate rather than a monitoring system.
  
• Do you need a fixed camera?
  No, I need to be able to move the camera around. So the camera need not to be too big. This is one of the reason I was thinking about a regular webcam or a bullet camera. I don't think we need a wireless camera, as long as we have a long enough cable.
  
• Do you need a wireless camera?
  As I said we don't "need" a wireless camera. But, for sure I'm going to look into this. If a wireless camera is not too expensive it can be a really good idea.
  
• Do you want to move your camera remotely (from the same location, from distant location)?
  No, the camera can be static.
  
• Do you need several people to see the problem simultaneously?
  Not really. It could come handy, but I don't need this.
  
• Do you need the system to have any interaction like text chat, video chat, voice chat?
  This is a "nice to have". At first I was looking for a really simple solution. Something like a good webcam and Skype. But I never used it and I don't know since it's free if the quality will be that good. Plus I'm a little bit worried about security issues (if streaming a video call is as easy as sniffing a MSN chat, this is definitively an issue).

The last two items are no show stopers. We just want to be able to have real time video from point A to point B.

Thanks a lot for your help!

I tried Skype before and I wasn't satisied with the video quality. May be it was due to slow connection, so I suggest you to try it.

Although I use Skype, I don't like it because it is using p2p technology. The reason for that is that I don't want any traffic coming through my computer and I don't want my chats to come through computers of others.

Many other programs support only low resolutions, so they will be of no help for you either.

Another problem is that a fixed camera gives better details. You will need to keep you camera as steady as possible to get better results. You may also use a tripod or something like this, although I haven't seen any tripods for web-cams.


Using a digital camera attached to a laptop via firewire will probably be inconvenient.