Best HDMI Out Camera with clean feed

[phxweb]

Hi,

 

Im looking for a small camera to install in the bell tower of a church, There will be three cameras. Ultimately the feed will be to a pc or vision mixer to display the ringing bells to a tv screen in the church below.

 

The cameras need to auto switch on when power is switched on.

 

I also need a clean HDMI out feed.

 

Ive demo'd the system using three gopro's hero 4 blacks, and they work great except that they need to be switched on individually. Which isn't practical as they cameras are up in the bell tower high above easy access. Ive seen ways to switch the gopros on via shorting pins to ground but this method isnt reliable. as they randomly switch off.

 

 

The system will only be used once every month at tops, so the budget isnt great as you can imagine.

 

are they any action cameras or alternatives that anyone could recommend?

 

 

TIA

Edited July 20, 2020 by phxweb

[J Pearce]

I'd probably be looking at security cameras and then adapting to HDMI. There are some fairly good security cameras that output SDI. A cheap £30 SDI-HDMI convertor will get you the desired HDMI, and the cable run is likely to be much easier on coax than HDMI extenders.

[Stuart91]

+1 for security cams.

 

There are some formats that security cameras use (TVI etc.) which are designed to run a full HD signal down bog-standard composite coax. Then use the right converter to get you to HDMI at the other end. This gives you the option of using cheaper coax rather than stuff rated for HD-SDI signals.

[ninjadingle]

Another +1 for SDI cams. Maybe need a camera capable of accepting RS232 control for the power?

[timsabre]

Hd-Sdi will run down cheap coax if the distance isn't massive. It's easily converted to HDMI which the cctv formats are less so.

[Stuart91]

Hd-Sdi will run down cheap coax if the distance isn't massive.

 

Very true, although I'm guessing from the position "in a bell tower" that there might be some length required to get somewhere useful. I'd also be a little concerned about any future modifications or extension.

 

It's easily converted to HDMI which the cctv formats are less so.

 

There's' nothing quite as cheap and ubiquitous as the £30 HDMI-SDI converters, true. Breakout boxes that can produce HDMI, VGA, or composite from a TVI line are around the £80 mark. It's a bit of a trade-off between price on the camera and cabling vs the converters.

[xllx]

You could go with POE powered IP cameras.

 

Nice cheap cable, no need to provide separate power up in the bell tower. Maybe a switch at the base of the bell tower, or home runs to your mixer, depends on cable length. You would be limited to 100 metres per segment.

 

Convert to HDMI down at ground level for your vision mixer.

 

You may find that having the cameras viewable over the internet will be useful, even if it is just for system checks.

 

If the cable length is stupidly long, this may not be a solution but otherwise it could work.

[timsabre]

You could go with POE powered IP cameras.

 

IP camera would be laggy though, especially if you need to convert to HDMI, which in itself needs quite an expensive converter box (or a raspberry pi or something)

 

If you are not going higher than HD res you can run HDSDI down cat-5 with a suitable passive balun at each end and have some pairs spare for DC power.

 

Is there such a thing as NDI CCTV cameras? Then you could run VMix on a PC and not need the vision mixer hardware or a whole load of converter boxes.

 

Edited July 22, 2020 by timsabre

[J Pearce]

There are some NDI cameras around, but they are still quite high priced. You might be able to homebrew something but don’t think NDI has been compiled for raspberry pis etc.

[timsabre]

There are some NDI cameras around, but they are still quite high priced. You might be able to homebrew something but don't think NDI has been compiled for raspberry pis etc.

 

I was reading up on that, apparently NDI-encode is supported on ARM Linux but the Pi is not powerful enough to do anything useful. Shame as with the new Pi camera you could maybe make a cheap NDI camera.

Someone has made an NDI-HDMI decoder using a Pi4 but it drops frames above 720p25 https://dicaffeine.com/

Edited July 22, 2020 by timsabre