Recording and Capture

High quality HD and SD recording systems; Eco-watch has the expertise to provide systems that ensure that the integrity of your HD and SD video footage is kept intact. If you want to present this in full HD on large screens, in a foyer or visitor centre or share with the media and broadcasters, it is important that images are recorded in the very highest quality. We design and implement these systems. Your video must be transmitted and stored either uncompressed or compressed using professional codecs (e.g. HDV, HDCAM, DVCPro or DVCAM) to keep the quality high. This type of quality digital footage can be stored on digital tape or hard disk drive.

Eco-watch work with you to determine what is best for you. Often this depends on the size of your system, your aims and budget. Hard drives are the easiest and safest way in which to store video but not the cheapest. We provide fast disk arrays for projects that require this. Footage stored on hard drives is easier to edit into highlighted clips or films and share between multiple screens and presentations.

Standard quality DVR recording systems; there are some projects where capturing in HD and SD video quality are not key at the initial stage. Often as a first phase of any project it is more important to work out where wildlife is and how it is moving through a particular habitat, than recording the highest quality footage. Eco-watch design systems for monitoring wildlife. This may use standard DVR recorders that produce MPEG2, MPEG4 and H.264 video. Directly projecting or playing the video back through large screens is possible using these compressed formats, although the image quality is noticeably poorer than SD or HD. Footage collected in DVR formats is not in good enough quality to edit into clips and short films, or offer to the media. If the aim of your project is primarily to measure presence or absence of species within an environment at low cost then we may recommend this option.

Motion detection and time lapse recording; both motion detection and time lapse can be used to trigger recording in either HD, SD or DVR formats depending on what best fits your project, and the wildlife you want to record.

Eco-watch design and implement static systems typically set up in a central location or control room that is a hub for video and audio feeds. We also design and manufacture portable units that can be set out in the field for extended periods with cameras attached to them.

Our DVR, SD and HD systems are high quality and enable motion detection parameters, such as sensitivity and threshold, to be set by your team. You can choose where you want to record your images e.g. hard drive or flash card. Time lapse parameters can also be set including the interval and duration of recording.

The iCube™ recording of environmental data and wildlife activity. After many years of research and development Eco-watch has deigned a computer based system that records both video (MPEG2, MPEG4, SD and HD) and data (e.g. temperature, humidity, weather conditions) simultaneously from multiple cameras and loggers. We use this as the backbone for many projects where generation of wildlife "stories" and monitoring entire environments are key. The computer interface used to control the iCube™ is intuitive and easy to use, recording can be triggered using motion detection, scheduled or time lapse.

The iCube™ links the video and data you collect together into a database, a wildlife video diary, that you can query to find out if / how changes in the environment have affected wildlife behaviour. It simultaneously streams video in WMV or flv formats so that live images from any camera can be embedded within websites, and streams data so that this can be represented as interactive dials, gauges and real-time graphs.