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IndigoVision IP-CCTV watches over the Edinburgh Military Tattoo

IndigoVision's complete end-to-end IP Video solution is being used to provide event-wide CCTV surveillance for the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, held each year in the grounds of 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 is a demanding security environment, in which CCTV plays a very important role.  To monitor both public safety and potential security risks requires a high quality surveillance solution.  Following the investigation of current CCTV technology, the Tattoo's organisers chose IndigoVision as it provided a flexible and scalable solution with class-leading video quality.

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 located throughout the event.  The cameras are IndigoVision's high-end 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 easily 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 advanced compression technology and use of features such as Activity Controlled Framerate (ACF) ensures that DVD-quality MPEG-4 video can be streamed and recorded with minimal bandwidth and storage requirement.  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.  Integrated real-time features such as ACF and analytics that operate in the camera at the network edge can only be fully realised because IndigoVision's system is a complete end-to-end solution, with all components designed by IndigoVision.  This ensures maximum performance in any environment.