How to Meet
the Demands of
High-Quality Video
By Alicia Delgado
High-quality video is becoming increasingly popular for
mobile video providers and customers. As video technologies and
specifications progress, end-users are eager to improve their current
surveillance system or establish a new one at paramount standards.
On any given day, Account Executives (AEs) at Safety Vision, LLC
(a mobile video provider) receive requests to install a surveillance
system on a fleet of twelve buses, with high definition cameras up to
4k resolution. Safety Vision is adept enough to accommodate requests
of this nature, and AEs play an important role in educating potential
and existing customers on all that is required to successfully achieve
those high-quality video specifications. Without large amounts of
storage space and powerful, up-to-date computers for video playback,
customers could easily find themselves in a scenario where recording
space reaches capacity sooner than expected and the viewing
experience is plagued by distorted videos that lag.
Video terms explained
At the basis of video quality is frame rate, resolution, and bitrate.
Expressed as fps (frames per second), frame rate is the speed at
which images are played. These days, the standard for a blockbuster
action movie is 24fps, which means there are 24 images played every
single second of the movie. Therefore, after roughly two-hours, there
were 172,800 images played – which is quite a lot of data.
Resolution, a term most people are familiar with due to the
abundance of television ad sales, is the number of pixels per frame.
If the blockbuster movie mentioned above was viewed on a 720p
TV, each second of the film was 720 pixels tall and 1280 pixels wide;
equating to 921,600 pixels per frame. On the other hand, if the same
movie were viewed on a 4k TV, there were roughly 8.3 million pixels
on the screen per frame (3840 pixels tall and 2160 pixels wide) – which
is nearly ten times the amount of pixels and data in every single frame
of the film in comparison to 720p resolution.
Lastly bitrate, expressed as kilobits per second (kbps) or megabits
per second (mbps), represents the amount of data processed per
second of video. Typically, as resolution and frame rate increases,
bitrate should as well to accommodate the additional influx of video
data. A codec* is used to compress all video data as it is created, in
order to reduce file size to an amount that is easy to transfer, store,
and view. For high-quality video, a high bitrate is necessary and
results in the codec compressing more and more data to achieve
smaller file sizes and simultaneously maintain quality. Thus, if the
blockbuster movie were captured in 4k resolution at 24fps but had
a low bitrate; the compression would override the camera quality
by blurring more and more pixels to achieve the low bitrate and
reduced file sizes. This results in a viewing experience that could be
disappointing for the viewer, even though the camera is 4k.
Achieving high-quality video in your fleets
While there are more specification factors that determine video
quality, frame rate and resolution are some of the most discussed
specs among Safety
Vision AEs and clients.
However, bitrate also
plays an important
role in determining
video playback quality
and thus, should be
a standard topic of
720p video resolution
discussion for those
looking to implement
or transition their
onboard video system.
Additionally, simply
finding a video provider
that can meet these
specs is not enough -
there needs to be strong
foundations from the 4k resolution
end-users as well. So,
what is required?
A fast and dependable internet connection is vital for the success of
video data transferring. As previously mentioned, the bitrate affects
file size, which affects upload and download speeds when attempting
to transfer videos to the internet. To maintain video quality, bitrate,
and file sizes, the internet’s bandwidth (which determines data
upload and download speeds) must be able to manage and transfer
all the data. If not, some of the data would be lost and result in video
playback that studders. Therefore, customers would lose video
quality and experience slow viewing speeds.
Further, as seen in the blockbuster movie example discussed,
high frame rates and resolutions drastically impact the amount of
data to be transferred
and stored. When
considering the number
of hours fleets would like
to record, the amount of
storage required to hold
all that data will vary
greatly depending on
resolution and frame rate;
the difference could be
in terabytes of data. This
directly costs more time
and money because fleets not only have to purchase drives that
are capable of storing massive amounts of data, but they will also
experience long download times no matter how they decide to
offload their video (by hand or wirelessly).
Even with a trustworthy internet connection and large amounts
of storage space, video quality cannot be achieved without an
up-to-date computer capable of playing back multiple, compressed
data files. The computer’s processing components must be built
to accommodate and read the data it receives. Noting the large
amount of data that is ingrained in 4k quality video that is
processed at higher frame rates, the computer’s processor will have
to work much harder and faster to read all the information it has
been given. Without the foundation of an up-to-date computer and
large enough monitor(s), video lags or studders and high-quality
viewing is be lost.
Alicia Delgado is the Knowledge and Communications Strategist for Safety
Vision, LLC.
* To learn more about video compression, please read our previous article: https://view.
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