Security DVR Record Time Calculator

Use this calculator to figure out what how much record time you need. Each DVR we building and stock is different. Since there are no real typical security applications, the amount of record time varies on the individual preference. This calculator has all the factors you could want. You can adjust frames per second, number of cameras and video resolution. All of this affects the amount of hard drive space you will have on hand. We up sale our all of our customers so they have the right amount of space to comfortably capture and keep video on hand.

Set Cameras To Motion Detection To Save Hard Drive Space

Most of you might be new to CCTV if you are reading this. This headline is important for many reasons. Depending on what type of security DVR you have setting your security cameras to motion detection will save you room on your hard drive. Also it is very effective in playing back video, so that you do not have to search back through video. Some PC based DVRs have advanced settings where it would skip to higher changes in pixels to show overall video and data. But for DVRs without the bells and whistles then this is a great way to manage your hard drive space.

You Need 250GIG Hard Drive To Handle 4 Security Cameras Or More

If you are in the begining stages of trying to find out how much hard drive space you need in order to be able to have enough video on hand to review data, we suggest 250GIG or higher. Depending on how many security camears you have will depict how much hard drive space you will need. The calculator above lets you play with different hard drive space in contrast to how many security cameras you will have. The more cameras you have the more hard drive space you will need. Also remember we are doing our math based on real-time recording. Each camera at real-time recording (30 frames per second) can record 6gig per camera per day. So with 4 cameras you can compute 24gig per day. Divide that by 250 gigs and you can see how many days you will have before the video will be lost or when the hard drive will loop over old data. As you add more security cameras to your CCTV security dvr, the more hard drive space you will need to keep up with the security cameras.

H.264 Video Compression Saves Hard Drive Space

If you have not heard by now hardware compression is the way of the future in the CCTV industry. Four years ago this technology was only for PC based DVRS, but now it can be found on many standalone units. This is great now, everyone can afford to see in high definition. That is not all you get by having H.264 compression. You can save on hard drive space, the video is compressed much smaller than MPEG4 or MJPEG formats. So when shopping look for whether a unit has H.264 compression.