DV Surveillance, can it be done?

[kopykat]

Hi,
Recently some damage was done to my car and i suspect one of the neighbors, but without hardcore evidence the police cant do much. I was wondering if there is a way i can use my dv camera to work as a surveillance camera. meaning having lets say the most recent 12 hours always recorded to my hardrive. any suggestions on how to impliment this? what kind of software can be handy in this situation,etc.
Thank you.

[communist]

Either this (http://www.carr-engineering.com/dvio.htm) or this (http://windv.mourek.cz/) tool allows you to specify which nth frame to cap directly from DV devices. So if you set it up to do 1 frame/s or something like that you could record enough hours without filling up your hard drive.

[kopykat]

thanks for the links.
But will this allow me to use one mini-dv tape with my dv camera that will be recycled for hours and hours of surveillance? meaning it will at least have to capture what the camera is recording if not in real-time than with a short delay. and once the tape is full record over the exsisting footage and so on. Cause what i would want is to play my dv camera to view my car through out th nite, and the next day be able to view everything that happened throughout the entire nite.

[communist]

No with this solution you'll have to connect your DV camera to your PC (via firewire/1394) and let the PC handle the recording.

Some cameras have a cheap time lapse feature allowing them to record 1s / min or something like that - if your camera has this feature you could do the recording with the camera in a mini DV tape.

[theReal]

I'd rather buy a cheap CMOS surveillance camera (around 150 Euro for a good color surveillance camera, very small and you can also set it up outdoors). Don't use your precious DV camcorder for that - the more you use it, the faster it breaks!

[scharfis_brain]

software bundeled with digital photo cameras often provide taking series of rhotos with a defined interval, if the camera is directly connected to the PC.
Then the final storage are tons of JPGs with timestamp on your HDD.


This would be IMO the cheapest and best solution.
(Who else has surveillance videos/photos being more resoluted than 2 MPixels?!?)

[ronnylov]

On my Panasonic DV camera there's a function which starts recording if there is any movement in the picture. Could be a useful function if the camera is placed in a way that it normally won't be any movement in front of the camera.