What video recording/monitoring setups are you using?

Tools
1

I’m looking into options for some basic video monitoring of experiment campaigns. Ideally, I’d like to have a few cameras set up from different angles to monitor experiments as they run. I’d like enough video quality to be able to tell what is going on, flexible mounting options for cameras, and the ability to do some sort of web streaming for remote monitoring. Currently I’m using a 1080p USB webcam (this one) and have been using either the built-in Ubuntu camera app or motion to record. I’m using this setup to record experiments and manually reviewing recordings to troubleshoot errors. I have a few issues with this setup: I’d like better image quality (in terms of higher resolution and better close-distance focusing) from the camera, and I haven’t figured out web streaming with motion yet. Has anyone set up a similar camera system? What works well? What should I avoid?

2

From my own experience, several points need to be considered before deploying the whole system:

  1. What kind of camera
    If you need close focus, I’ve used the Logitech Brio as a good choice.
    If you want multiple angles, you might want to consider IP cameras (vs. USB webcams). They connect directly to your network and are designed for remote monitoring and streaming. For example, the Amcrest IP2M-841.

  2. Mounting location, ceiling mount or floor mount.

  3. Streaming and remote monitoring
    Are you ready to step into cloud storage or customize your local RTMP server?

  4. Network bandwidth considerations for data streaming with multiple cameras.

Hope this helps.

3

Thanks for your response, those are all good points! The amcrest camera /ip cameras more generally look like good options for monitoring our entire experiment from different angles.

4

Pi Zero 2 W with Pi Camera streaming to YouTube (public, unlisted, or private depending on needs) then provides a lot of flexibility in terms of sharing, embedding, etc.

5

A livestream we ran for an openflexure microscope:

6

A workaround that Daniel Persaud used due to only having a WPA2-Enterprise network available was hooking up a webcam to a computer in the lab and using Chrome Remote Desktop.

7

We have a number of active YouTube livestreams:

For example:

Various related issues: