Control Centre Manual Manual version 1.02 March 2009
smots Control Centre USER Guide (Administrator Guide follows at end of document) smots Control Centre login Pick your user category from the drop down list and then input your own password. (Administrators may create unique password/camera viewing rights for as many users as they wish). Your password is private to you alone. Page 1
Quick Guide 1.Click Live Video 2.Click and drag camera(s) across to viewing pane (or house symbol for whole set) 6. Presets may be set by administrators and can allow you to quickly go to a camera position. To select a preset click the number or select from the drop down names menu. Page 2 3. Select viewing layout 7.Click on speaker or A on your keyboard to listen or click on mic or S to speak. Use your headset or dedicated PC microphone. Click again to stop. You may listen to any number of cameras at once but you may only speak to one camera location at a time. 4.Click on camera of interest, it will be surrounded by yellow border focus and cross-hairs appear in middle of screen. 8. Video and 2 way audio is permanently recording and confirmed by red dot icon on all cameras. 5.Click on image to move camera in direction desired. Close to crosshairs moves slowly, further away moves quickly. Clicking on left central box zooms in (+) and right central box zooms out (-) 9.CPU indicator shows how well your pc is coping with the multiple video streams. If it goes to red, you should reduce number of open streams.
10.Images can be moved by dragging to the desired pane (when wanting to move focus pane, it is easier to drag another pane into its position otherwise you will start moving the focus pane camera pan tilt zoom. 12. You can make a camera 14.Stop all video by clicking of interest full screen by here clicking here (or F6 on keyboard). 13.You can select lecture 15.Instant replay (10, 15, 30 theatre view (no menus) by seconds on selected camera clicking here (or F11). 11. If you have dual screens you can extend the video pane(s) onto a second monitor often useful for vital signs. 16.Presets can be selected by pressing the numbered buttons or selecting from the drop down box. Page 3 17. Presets can be created by selecting the number you want to use from the drop down list, then moving the camera to the position you prefer, then press the write symbol to store it. 18. Live BOOKMARKING! You can now right click the pane and add a comment which will then be available to you in the playback window
19. Playback view works as with live view. You can drag cameras across to viewing pane and select views as with live. 22. Select time of interest using calendar and time entry point OR place mouse on time bar and drag to section of interest. The + or symbols allow you to zoom in or out on the time line. A single click will select that time with blue vertical bar. Page 4 20. Press chainlink symbol to synchronise time on all cameras when fast forwarding or searching. Orange box surrounds all sync d images. 23. You can bookmark a piece of video by clicking here and inserting your notes in the popup window. See note 18 re live bookmarking too! Bookmarks can be viewed by clicking View, Bookmarks. 21. Export to mpeg4 by pressing this button. 24.Tape transport controls apply here.
25. You can search using time based thumbnails by clicking view here. Page 5 26. You can start playback from the point you want by double clicking the frame of interest.
27.Click here to export video for permanent retention. (Video is overwritten after around two weeks and cannot be retrieved unless exported.) 29. Exported incidents are playable in Control Centre style using Incident Player but also as mpeg4 video using QuickTime or other compatible playback software. The raw mpeg4 files are held in a sub folder of the incident folder called Footage. Page 6 28. Export menu lets you select multiple cameras from a given time/date. Do NOT protect recordings as this wastes disc space. Name incident and browse to location which can be your local drive, a network drive, or even a memory stick. 30.Format of exported Incident folder with mpeg4 in the Footage folder. NB. We do not recommend burning video DVD as this is very slow. It is much better to use a DVD as a storage medium for the computer file, or indeed use a stick or network drive. Note that each hour from each camera uses about 500mb. Therefore 4 cameras for 1 hour use about 2gb. The incident can be exported with Incident Player as a package for playback in the same Control Centre format on any machine. Click Copy Incident Player.
Page 7 Administrator Guide
smots Control Centre ADMINISTRATOR Guide 30. Download the Control Center software from http://www.smots.org/smotsinstaller.zip. Read the readme.txt file FIRST. 31. Log in as ADMINISTRATOR with the usual password. 32. Now you will see the additional Site Setup button 33. This section is strictly for smots personnel or experienced users with authority to change the system setup. 34. Scotia UK plc will always setup your smots boxes and NVRs (network video recorders) with the IP address, subnet, and gateway provided by your IT department. We will also where available set an NTP time server address to ensure that all smots units are synchronised to the same time. The Control Center application is freely available to registered users of smots. There are no licence restrictions. We do recommend however that for maintenance of security and bandwidth usage, you only install smots where it is likely to be used by lecturers and teaching staff. It should NOT be supplied to students. The network traffic per smots box can be up to 4mbps but with activity controlled framerate it is typically nearer 1 to 2 mbps, dropping to zero when there is no activity. This ensures that the system runs very efficiently even when hundreds of cameras are in use. 35. We always set smots boxes to use TCP/IP but if you prefer and if your network switches support it, you may ask us to set them to Multicast. You must in any case ensure that your managed network switch has IGMP Snooping set to ON. 36. TCP/IP allows a maximum of 8 viewers of a particular camera, remembering that one of these is the NVR. 37. Multicast allows unlimited viewers. 38. There is code available to allow you to implement a web page viewer with two video streams, this allowing viewing over the network without the Control Center application. We can set the output of the smots boxes to dual stream giving a high bandwidth internal LAN stream and a lower bandwidth external WAN stream. See next page.. Page 8
39. Web viewer code can be obtained by going here http://smots.scotiauk.co.uk/iview and right clicking the page and selecting view source. You can then copy the code and insert it into your own web site. The IP addresses for the two streams can be changed to your own. Audio is by default ON for both streams, normally one stream being the video image and the second stream being vital signs or a second camera. 40. All versions of Control Center need a site file to tell them where the cameras are. This is the site database and it can reside on the C: drive of the local computer but it is more manageable if it can be placed on a central server where you only need to update one copy rather than many. It is a very small file (less than 1mb). The Control Center application always stays on the local pc. When you install Control Center one of your first actions on the local pc should be to do the following:- 1. Go to Tools, Options and tick Disable Alert Messages in the Alerts pane (all the time). 2. Next go to the Video and Audio tab and at the bottom Alerts pane, tick Prevent simultaneous listen and speak. 3. Finally, go to the Text and Icons tab and UNtick the selections so that the size is NOT adjusted as the video pane changes. 41. Setting up users and groups. We would recommend that you have at least one user level as well as administrator. You may be happy for users to do most things but you do not wish them to be able to change the basic setup of the system. The group lets you set a package of rights for a particular logon type. One group is administrator, another will usually be smotsuser. We would suggest that you then setup users according to what cameras you wish them to view. You can therefore preclude users from viewing cameras in other areas if you wish. 42. In Site Setup, click Users and Groups in the left hand pane. In the right pane right click and select new user group. This group should be set with NO permissions. You can set the Home site to be a particular group of cameras at this stage. This will always stop that user type viewing any others. Alternatively, you can leave it to the top site level and disable viewing camera by camera in a moment. 43. Click on the Users tab and right click to create a new user. This will be an individual within your organisation. Give them password access as you prefer at this stage. 44. Now you have your user you need to go to each camera, or the group, or indeed the whole site and determine the viewing and control rights associated with that camera. Right click on the camera (or group or site) and select Properties and then User Access tab. 45. User Access settings. In the top window click ADD and from the drop down list, select the user(s) that you wish to add to that camera or sites viewing description. Then click on the newly added user and in the lower window, look at the default permissions that you would like them to have. It is at this stage that you may wish to stop the ability to view for that user, or perhaps just limit whether they can control, or export, or indeed any of the other features listed. You need to do this for each camera, or group, or site, and for each user. This information is stored in the site file and so it makes more sense if the site file is at a central location rather than on everyone s own PCs. 46. Scotia personnel will assist you with this if the information is provided in advance. Page 9
47. Setting up NVR recording. The smots system records continuously to either a soft NVR which is Windows based and runs on your pc, or a hardware NVR which is usually a 500gb or larger drive and can store up to 4 network streams. The NVR will normally be placed at a network communications rack somewhere within the lan on which the cameras are connected. The recordings reap when the drives are full which means that you will usually achieve 2 or 3 weeks recording before the oldest ones are overwritten by the new ones. This is sensible and stops retention of old video which could have implications under the Data Protection Act. Where users need to keep video it must be exported as described in the User section of the manual. NVRs are inherently very reliable and require no maintenance. Scotia will setup the recordings for you and you will see from the site file that the NVR is shown in the Top Site part of the site database. By clicking on it, you can see in the right hand pane, which cameras are assigned to that NVR and whether they are recording or trying to record. The status tab lets you see the drive statistics. Typically the drive should be around 95% full and the number of recordings will be up to 5000. If you see more than 10000 recordings associated with a drive there is a fault and if you click on the recordings tab and file size you will see that there are a lot of very small files (less than 1mb). This is normally an indication that there is a problem on your network with regard to stray packets. If your network switch has IGMP snooping OFF this could cause the problem. It should be ON. 48. You can start a camera recording by firstly right clicking the camera, properties, and recording. Here you should select the NVR that you wish to use. Having done that, go back to the NVR, right click in the recording schedule pane and create a new recording job. See illustration of the window that appears. Usually you will select All the time (24/7) but you can if you wish select different times and days. Remember at the bottom, to click options Enabled and Record audio. Then select OK. 49. You can check the recordings tab which will show trying to record and then within a few seconds recording. 50. Time Settings. If you see time errors whenever you look at the status of an NVR or a camera, this is because the device is not pointing to a synchronised time source. It may have been set to hardware time where we can point all cameras to an NVR to serve time, or even each individual unit maintains its own time. However this will never be perfectly accurate and will cause a time error message to appear on your viewing pc. The solution is to use an NTP time server. 51. The codec configuration can be selected by clicking a camera when in the Site Setup view and then the Configure tab. This should only be accessed with care and your warranty/support status could be affected by indiscriminate changes of settings in this area be aware. We will be pleased to discuss setups by phone/mail BEFORE you change anything here. Page 10
52. Upgrades. The smots system has two soft upgrade levels:- 1. Control Center application which you can always download the latest version of from http://www.smots.org/smotsinstaller.zip 2. Firmware for both the NVR and the Camera hardware units can be supplied by Scotia on a regular basis. BEWARE that upgrading the firmware on a camera or nvr will temporarily stop that video traffic. 3. To upgrade firmware, select site setup page and then Top Site. You can then select all (ctrl A) in the right hand panel, then right click and select Upgrade. You will be prompted to browse to the location of the firmware files previously supplied by Scotia. You can bulk upgrade all devices if you point to the root directory containing all the firmware. This could take somewhere up to one hour in total. 4. Why upgrade Firmware? We often improve video and audio quality and/or storage and bandwidth efficiency by introducing a new version of firmware. It is worth checking periodically by emailing us your details so that we can check for you. 53. SUPPORT. Call +44 (0)845 119 1905. Email support@smots.org with full details (preferred in all circumstances we pick up email quicker than voicemail sometimes!) 54. General Information for your friends and colleagues www.smots.org 55. THANK YOU we really do value the relationship we have with our colleagues in the healthcare profession and if there is something you want to tell us, good or bad, please do so to gordonmcloughlin@scotiauk.com it will be attended to! Manual version 1.01 12/10/08 Page 11