One campus, two sites,
every camera watched.
Lincoln College and the Lincoln Heritage Museum in Lincoln, Illinois moved off an older exacqVision system. They kept every working camera, cable and encoder. Lookout runs on servers they already owned, with no graphics cards.
Lincoln College
Lincoln College in Lincoln, Illinois has closed as an institution. The campus has not gone away. The arena, the fitness center, the residence halls and the grounds are still being maintained, and they still need watching.
Lincoln Heritage Museum
The Lincoln Heritage Museum is on the same campus. Its cameras protect the collections and exhibits in the museum galleries.
Both sites recorded on exacqVision. Analog cameras were wired to video encoders. A growing set of IP cameras from several vendors had been added over the years. exacqVision servers sat in the middle.
Lookout keeps all of that and replaces only the middle. It watches every camera instead of just recording it, and it tells someone when a person or a vehicle shows up.
Lincoln College
- Server
- Virtual machine, 20 vCPU
- Processor
- Xeon E5-2690 v3, from 2014
- Graphics card
- None
- Cameras
- 71 today: 29 IP cameras at 3 to 6 MP and 42 analog cameras on encoder channels, growing past 175 across the campus
- Motion
- Every camera
- AI
- 20 cameras
- Processor load
- About 50% busy
Lincoln Heritage Museum
- Server
- Virtual machine, 4 vCPU
- Host
- Dell PowerEdge R250, Xeon E-2324G
- Graphics card
- None
- Cameras
- 42 analog cameras on encoder channels
- Motion
- Every camera
- AI
- 4 cameras, and growing
- Processor load
- About 48% busy
Lookout records the stream the camera already sends. It does not decode it and encode it again. At the college, recording all 71 cameras costs about 0.6 of one vCPU.
That leaves the processor for the work that matters: looking at the pictures. At the museum, decoding its cameras for motion takes about a third of one core. AI then checks the moments motion finds, on the cameras chosen for it.
This is why a server processor from 2014 can watch 71 cameras with no graphics card.
- Old hardware reused. A 2014 server watches 71 cameras. The museum runs on a small server it already had.
- Licensing sized to the site. One package covers every recorder; there is no per-camera meter.
- Every working camera watched, not just recorded. Motion is checked on every camera at both sites.
- Alerts instead of hours of footage. People and vehicles raise an alert. Nobody has to scrub through video that nobody watches.
- Managed remotely. Both sites are managed remotely by a small team.
worth keeping?