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 Security Consultant of the Year 2011. How would that have sounded? To some, rather impressive. To others, something of a show-off.
Still, it’s academic now because I didn’t win at last night’s Security Excellence Awards at London’s Hilton on Park Lane. Brace yourselves though. They allow me to crow about being a finalist from now until the 2012 event!
Last night’s winners? CornerStone. Unfortunately, even in my official capacity as a director of the Association of Security Consultants I know next to nothing about them. Nonetheless, hearty congratulations.
Turning quickly to regular blogging business, I’m gobsmacked at how long it is since my last post! Please accept my apologies. Lots has been keeping me from creating new posts. Some of it has been nice CCTV projects. Some of it has been my verbose contributions to many CCTV discussions on Linkedin. Hard to resist when the world needs to be put to rights!
Until next time; stay focused.
 The Sketchup training course flyer for the IFSEC exhibition With the IFSEC exhibition taking place this week in Birmingham I’ll be spreading the word about our forthcoming training courses in the use of Google’s free Sketchup 3D modeling software. We’re concentrating on its use for the design of CCTV and security systems.
Alongside this, ’3-dimensional design in CCTV & security’ is a new group I’ve just established on the Linkedin social networking website. It is intended to provide a forum for ideas to progress the science & art.
This is a direct link to click. Here are the two documents that occupy either side of the flyer that I’m using to spread news by good old word of mouth:
* Why & who use Sketchup for CCTV design (pdf 207KB)
* Training course promo leaflet (created entirely as an image in Sketchup!) (pdf 1.6MB)
CCTV tweets are now migrating solely to @CCTVgeek, so those kind enough to previously follow me on @simondlambert should redirect their ‘follows’ and I’ll reciprocate.
This is an exciting campaign to spread the word! Your feedback and ideas will be greatly appreciated.
Until next time; stay focused.
Back in 1992, when I was in CCTV sales, I spent one afternoon working out how many pixels would be needed in a camera’s field-of-view to identify a person or read a vehicle number plate. Why? Because I wanted the customer receiving my sales proposal to understand the issues involved. As a consequence of that I hoped that they’d realise my competitors had undermined their own cases by not being so diligent and getting the design wrong.
The Rotakin standard didn’t become public until two years later. So they might have been chewing their pencil over the same issues that very afternoon! No, I’m not claiming guru status here, but I am recalling that I’ve always thought proper design is vital. The Rotakin CCTV test-target did help sales people meet, or fail to meet, their customers’ requirements, measurably, clearly, in a black & white decision (geeky pun intended).
One thing it didn’t do (no criticism meant here as Rotakin’s purpose was more narrow) was give guidance on the steepness of viewing angle when trying to identify people. I think this is fundamentally important, so I’ve created a series of computer generated graphics to illustrate the effects of high angled views. The result is the self-explanatory one-page PDF document that you can download here. It recently appeared in CCTV Image magazine as a cut-out-and-keep feature. I want you to use it freely to illustrate this factor to your customers, colleagues or suppliers.
Until next time; stay focused.
 A couple of my articles that have just been published in CCTV Image magazine promise further information at Lambert & Associates website.
Ok, my metaphorical pants were down when the online issue hit the web today: a tad earlier than it figured in my plan for this week!
The cut-out-and-keep page illustrating camera views from steep angles will be available here in a couple of days.
Also, details of our forthcoming courses teaching Google’s Sketchup 3D software and its use in CCTV design will be announced. In the meantime, get in touch if you’re keen to know more about this.
Until then; stay focused.
Computers cannot be trusted. Anyone who uses one knows that. As the old quip goes: if Bill Gates was in hospital in intensive care he would sure hope the life support machine wasn’t running Windows ME. Those crashes and reboots wouldn’t do much for his wellbeing!
What has this to do with the Independent CCTV Consultant blog being frozen for so long? Computers. They’re magic. Upgrade your WordPress from v2 to v3 and find yourself mysteriously locked out of your own admin page! Then, in between running the CCTV consultancy business, spend hours and hours reading solutions in online forums from other ‘sufferers’ of this hurdle. If you’ve suffered the “you do not have sufficient permissions to access this page” you might like to check the following, which turned out to be where my upgrade had corrupted a key file on the WordPress server.
 Look in your root WordPress directory and find the wp-config.php file. You can open it in your web authoring application, e.g. Dreamweaver. In there you will find a line such as $table_prefix = ‘Your_wp_’;
Now log into your MySQL datadase using, say, phpMyAdmin and browse the table called user_meta and check that the appropriate keys reflect your table_prefix string (above). If they don’t you can have the same lock-out that I did. Why? Mine was your_wp rather than Your_wp! That tiny discrepancy was all it took to wreak havoc. A quick edit in the wp-config.php file and all was well again.
As a consequence of the hours and hours spent hunting for this tiny problem, I’ve learned a lot about what goes on under the bonnet (or hood if you’re Stateside), and now I can write this post! Credit goes to the clever fellow who wrote this post from which the image was sourced.
Until next time; stay focused.
 Simon Lambert, immortalized by Rick Coleman The Security Institute (TSI) had its annual conference earlier this week at the very agreeable Oakley Court hotel in Windsor. Very nice. The Queen has a house nearby, you know. I was fortunate to be invited to join the great and the good for their barbeque on Tuesday evening.
The day’s earlier torrential downpours held off during the balmy evening on the terrace and lawn with the Thames flowing by. Amongst the chums with whom I ate, drank and waxed lyrical, putting the security world to rights, were Gordon Tyerman of CCTV Training Ltd, Brian Sims the editor of Info4Security, James Walker of Dallmeier, an old colleague from Reliance Electronics in the early 1990s, and Mike Bluestone of TSI, formerly a fellow council member at the ASC, the Association of Security Consultants.
Thanks to Carly Huckle of TSI for being so kind as to invited me to an enjoyable gathering. I must get around to actually joining TSI one day soon!
One highlight of the evening was receiving a fine caricature by artist Rick Coleman. He did the assembled crowd proud with some wonderful drawings and a nice chap to boot.
One of the most interesting jobs we independent CCTV consultants are hired to undertake is the comparison of digital video recorders (usually abbreviated to DVR) especially on behalf of our customers who might be non-technical people. We enjoy getting into the nitty-gritty of testing the performance and foibles of various manufacturers’ DVR offerings, while the aforementioned customers usually avoid it like the plague! It’s an ‘Anoraks Only’ zone.
 Squashed by the GUI. Ouch. This work has highlighted the third of the annoying aspects of CCTV; particularly regarding DVRs and their software-driven interfaces hosted on a pc screen. The problem is that digitized CCTV images (both live and recorded) are displayed to the CCTV operator by the machine’s GUI (graphical user interface)(pronounced “goo-ee”, if you were wondering) on a computer screen. That display is made up of an array of pixels, each capable of showing almost any colour you care to name. Wouldn’t it make sense to achieve best picture clarity for the viewer by arranging for each pixel in the footage to correspond with a single pixel on the display? Surely, yes, because the alternatives reduce picture quality. Here’s how they do it:
If the image is displayed using fewer pixels than the footage actually contains (we technical people call that ‘smaller’) then many of the picture details simply get ‘ignored’ by the display because the software driving the display has to recreate the image (‘downsample’) so that each of the display’s pixels knows what colour to show. The downsampling software can sully the CCTV image too.
By the same argument, if the image is displayed using more pixels than the footage actually contains (we technical people call that ‘bigger’) then many of the picture details simply get created by the display equipment. Significantly, the software driving the display has to recreate the image (‘upsample’) so that each of the display’s pixels knows what colour to show. The upsampling software can sully the CCTV image too. It is simply fabricating its detailed information.
 Waaaayyyy too wide. Dragged within the GUI. Looking ridiculous. In order to arrange the CCTV images on the GUI, be it a single image or maybe 25 images in a ‘mosaic’ of ‘cameos’, the software almost invariably shrinks or expands the images as described above, thereby reducing clarity. Sometimes the software will ‘auto-fit’ the array of images to fill the screen and change their aspect ratios in order to fill it, giving rather unhelpful distortion of the footage. Sometimes it will allow the operator to arrange and squash the images that they wish to watch into the available screen space by dragging and sizing floating ‘windows’ around the screen, leading to the same unhelpful distortion.
When testing DVRs for my customer I asked each product’s attendant salesman if their GUI included a button that simply set footage to the ideal 1:1 pixel assignment or, at least, something to force the correct aspect ratio to be restored. Their machines didn’t. In fact, only when I spoke to the actual designer of one well-established DVR did I get the response, “What a good idea! We’d not thought of that.” In the words of the average American teenager… “duh?!”
Ok, it’s easy for me to play the smart-arsed armchair expert here, but surelythe people who design these things should be thinking about these things. It strikes me that far too little thought often goes into these products from the point of view of the people who actually use them to do their job. So, the lesson here? Ask this question of your prospective DVR supplier. Heck, if you’ve already got one, ask them too and see the look on their face  and suggest that they get one up on their competitors by putting this into their next software update.
Until next time; stay focused.
Following on the heels of my previous post I can’t ignore some other shortcomings in ways that CCTV footage is displayed by the machines sold in our market.
My point this time is that pictures are often displayed as too narrow. Ok, let’s not lose too much sleep over this one as the effect is not dramatic, but my beef is that it shows a disregard or ignorance of correct technique by those who design the CCTV equipment. This is usually when showing digital video on a computer display. Here’s the explanation:
 Narrow headed Woody. © Disney The normal 4:3 picture when digitized (D1 sampling) is 576 pixels high and 720 pixels wide. Yes, for those good at quick mental arithmetic, 4:3 would strictly mean that the 576 picture lines (from a PAL camera) would dictate that there be 768 pixels horizontally. For reasons of how best to digitally sample TV signals the world some time ago agreed that the sampling process will be designed to actually give 720 pixels. So, to avoid distortion when the picture is displayed they agreed that each pixel will be rectangular. If each pixel is about 7% wider than it is tall then we re-establish the correct 4:3 picture on the screen. Voila!
However, many bits of CCTV software simply display these rectangular pixels as square ones on a computer screen. So, the result is a display where images that are squashed sideways by 7%!
Back to the police radio: “the suspect is an IC1 male wearing yellow and with a really narrow head….Yeah, looks like Woody off that Toy Story movie”?!
The solution to this wrong practice? Be aware of the issue and ask your supplier to show you that their machine does not have this shortcoming. It’s quite likely that they will have this problem, if what I’ve seen around the market is anything to go by! However, the more we as independent CCTV consultants pressure them to get it right the likelier it is that they’ll put some effort into fixing their products when they realise that thier customers not as dumb as they assume.
Until next time; stay focused!
A photograph in a recent issue of that fine CCTV Image magazine, the organ of the CCTV User Group, showed a spanking new CCTV control room. The proud owners had invested in a bank of monitors often known as a video wall. Nothing unusual there, you might say to yourself. Indeed. (My thoughts on how to save money, power consumption and cooling costs in your control room by avoiding the need for a video wall will wait for another day.)  CCTV image with 4:3 aspect ratio In CCTV where, disappointingly, end-users’ technical advice can come from an ex-policemen who doesn’t really know a pixel from a pixie or from a salesman who thinks “codecs” is spelled “codex” (because he once read The Da Vinci Code), we often see regular CCTV images being inappropriately stretched across widescreen monitors. Please, no.
Look at it, then think about it. Take the normal 4:3 CCTV picture and stretch it over a typical 16:9 LCD and you end up with a sideways distortion of 33%. That’s a whole 1/3!
 CCTV image with 16:9 aspect ratio Why should this annoy us? Because it’s surely ridiculous to take a picture from a normal CCTV camera with its 4:3 aspect ratio and dumbly stretch it over a big LCD or plasma screen designed for 16:9 widescreen pictures.  There’s no advantageous level of detail being created; just a profound sideways distortion that indicates a disregard for proper system design. So, is any benefit whatsoever? Nope. Can you imagine the CCTV operator calling the police on the radio and telling them, “the suspect is a IC1 male wearing yellow and with a curiously wide head….Yeah, looks like Stewie Griffin off that Family Guy cartoon”?! But more seriously, why tell responders to look for a “fat man” when it’s the video display that has falsely added the weight to his appearance?
This common arrangement, to me, shows ignorance. But that doesn’t stop it being a very common sight in CCTV control rooms around the UK and probably the rest of the world too. Ok, if they’ve bought widescreen LCD monitors in anticipation of displaying HD CCTV images in the future (which are 16:9) then that’s acceptable forward planning. But, please, in the meantime show 4:3 pictures properly. At worst, doing it will give you a black margin down each side of the screen. It’ll be correct for the humans to watch and it will look fine. Honestly.
It flabbergasts me that our industry so rarely bothers to get this right. Of course, some diligent folks do exist, but they are rare, and the aforementioned so-called ‘consultant’ numpties can fool an unwary client just enough to get themselves hired. Please, for your own benefit, make sure you hire CCTV consultants who know what they’re doing. One advantage is that your pictures will be shown to your CCTV operators accurately. The pictures are the reason you bought CCTV in the first place.
Keeping come back, folks. Who knows, one day I might post something that not purely a dig at the other practitioners in the field! Still, I think these points need to be made by someone.
Until next time; stay focused.
 I must start with an apology for the long gap between blog posts. June simply flew by and much of it was spent writing, just not here! I was writing for a presentation I was invited to give at a seminar on 17th June sponsored by The Security Institute as part of their CPD programme (for those sporting a quizzical expression – Continuing Professional Development). It’s important for me to thank Nicky Stokes, MD of ISD Tech Ltd., who invited me to participate and his team who put a lot of work into hosting the event at Dunsfold Aerodrome which is where they film the astoundingly popular Top Gear television programme.
 The ISD Tech team at Dunsfold (Photograph © Simon Lambert. All rights reserved) The subject that I was asked to speak on was my work as an independent CCTV consultant using 3D graphics technology to design CCTV and security systems. This is something that I’ve actively pioneering since 2000. At that time the software was expensive and had a long learning curve, even for a techie type like me. My message to the audience in 2010 is that there is a great array of free software that slowly, slowly others are beginning to use in the security and CCTV industries.
To summarize what I told them: freely available 3D modelling applications include:
- Google Sketchup
- trueSpace 7.6
- Second Life (virtual world)
- Blender
- Unity (video gaming engine)
A package that I intend to trial one day is CCTV Cad which is specifically designed for use in the CCTV industry. However, it comes at a significant price so warrants closer evaluation.
So, why would anyone bother using 3D CGI (Computer Generated Images) in CCTV?
My experience has shown:
- 2D is often vitally misleading. 3D shows the reality.
- A picture replaces 1000 words, and everyone understands.
- CCTV designer, installer and their customer’s confidence is high.
- The costs of fixing failed expectations are kept to a minimum.
- 3D software tools are getting cheaper and more amazing every year.
- Even in 2010 the “wow” factor with 3D is still undeniable.
If you’d like to read more here is a copy of an article that I wrote for ‘CCTV Image’ and ‘CCTV Focus’ magazines explaining the real benefits of using 3D in CCTV design.
Until next time; stay focused.
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