This is the security camera solution your restaurant should be using

If you’re a restaurant owner, then you know that security is of the utmost importance. You want to make sure that your customers and employees are safe and protected while they’re in your establishment. That’s why it’s important to select the right security camera solution for your restaurant. In this blog post, I’ll discuss the differences in security camera systems that you should be aware of before you buy, and which security cameras and recording systems I’ve worked with restaurants in implementing.

Your Restaurant’s Requirements:

There are a few key things to keep in mind when selecting restaurant security cameras:

-How many cameras do you need?

-Where will you place the cameras?

-How long do you want to keep the recordings for?

-What’s your budget?

These are all important questions that you’ll need to answer before settling on a security camera solution for your restaurant. Let’s dig into each.

How many cameras do you need, and where should you put them?

Break down your location out into two sections: Indoor and Outdoor. Let’s start with your indoor cameras.

Write out each area you’d like to have coverage in, and walk the area looking for a corner location on the ceiling that has a good view of the desired area. Restaurants often have a couple of cameras in the same location behind the counter, one to provide context view out in the restaurant, and one or more to keep a close eye on the register drawers.

Cameras that are close to their target, like those cash register viewing cameras that essentially look straight down, don’t need to be any higher resolution than 1080p (2 Megapixel). That’s more than enough pixels to get a nice crisp image of what’s happening behind the counter.

The locations that you’d like to be able to grab specific details, like facial features from across the room, you’ll want to have at least a 4 Megapixel camera. Don’t go above 4k (8 Megapixel)–at that point you’ll be using more recording disk space than it’s worth.

Outdoors is going to have a similar process, where you walk the perimeter of your property and note what corners or exterior walls have a good view of the area you’d like to cover. You’ll want to try to keep the camera over 9 feet off the ground to help avoid vandalism.

There’s an extra complication when considering the outdoor camera locations for your property–You need to account for drilling a hole through for the power and data for the camera. There’s many ways to get data and power to cameras, I usually go the route of cameras that have PoE (Power over Ethernet) so that you only need to run 1 type of cable for everything, and only 1 cable to each camera. No separate power cables and no coaxial cables. Know, however, the limitation to this is that the cables should not be run further than 300 feet between the camera and a PoE switch (or a PoE network recorder).

Once you’ve got all the locations picked out, and noted whether each one would need to be a 2MP or a higher resolution camera, tally up the totals of each.

So that we have an example, I picked this restaurant from my own to use.

If I were adding cameras to this building and only needed to cover these two sides of the building, I would probably put a high resolution outdoor camera at each corner on each face, aimed in towards the doors, and one camera mounted on the 2nd level facing the parking lot across the street. That would be 5 total cameras for the exterior for this building.

This part of the design is somewhat open to interpretation, because it’s really about what the restaurant owner is trying to catch on those cameras.

Since this is a made-up example, this is what my list currently looks like:

5x High resolution outdoor cameras

3x 2 Megapixel Indoor cameras (for behind the counter)

8x High resolution indoor cameras

16 Total cameras, that’s a great start.

How long do you want to keep the recordings for?

This is kind of a trick question, because it depends heavily on whether or not you intend to record only when motion is happening in the scene, or always record. There’s pro’s and con’s to each. Record always, and you’re going to need a LOT of hard drives to store the data for a long period of time. Recording on motion will let you get substantially further on the same storage space, but you risk having missing footage if the motion was too far away to trigger the detection.

There’s a third option that’s been emerging lately in software solutions like DW Spectrum, Wisenet Wave, and NX Witness (These are all similar software that is OEM’ed). They offer a hybrid option, where a low resolution/low frames per second version will be recorded if no motion is happening, but will switch to recording the full resolution/full framerate when motion occurs. It’s not as space efficient as motion only, but this way no one can claim something happened at a time where there was no video footage to confirm it.

These differences may not have changed your mind on how long you’d like to keep recorded footage for just yet, but revisit the idea when we look at the amount of storage you’ll need.

Later in this article, I’ll show you how to spec two different systems–One using Motion only and a traditional NVR style recorder, and another using one of those VMS systems that has Motion + LowRez. For now, just keep these differences in mind as we go through this next bit.

What’s your budget?

Don’t say ‘as cheap as possible’ because that’s how you get a security system that doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t meet the requirements we discussed. You don’t want to make an investment that later can’t make an identification with.

Let’s talk realistic budget. If you go ultra-ultra cheap, you can buy a kit of 8 cameras and a basic recorder online for less than $1500 which will work, but you’re unlikely to get good picture quality and the retention out of it you’re looking for.

Realistically, we’re going to be paying between $100 and $1000 per camera, plus the cost of the recording solution. I’ll include a price comparison between the case studies below.

Picking the right cameras

There’s a few brands that are safe picks for industry standard compliant network cameras that have great looking options no matter the scenario. Axis Communications, Hanwha Techwin, and Avigilon are the three giants in the scene right now, and with any of these you’re probably going to be just fine. Each has a huge number of camera options, each intended for a different scenario or customer preference. For this, I’m going to be focusing on Hanwha’s cameras, because I know their entire product line off by heart and know them to be very reliable, with a great warranty should something go wrong.

We know we need 3 indoor cameras that look straight down at the register. Those cameras will only really make a difference during work hours, so they don’t need to have anything special for night vision. I’d recommend going with Hanwha’s XND-6010 for these – These are indoor 2 Megapixel cameras and MSRP at the time of writing is $600. If that’s too costly for you, we could drop to the quality line’s QND-6012R1 which is $289 each. They’re a little bigger physically, and the image quality isn’t *quite* as good, but it’s still way better than your average B2C cameras like Wyze or Ring.

For the other 7 indoor cameras, I would recommend either the XND-8020R or the QND-8020R. Both are 5 Megapixel resolution cameras, but the XND-8020R has a wider field of view at 97 degrees. If you need to save on costs, the QND-8020R is a good option, as it’s still much better than the average camera you would find at a retail store.

For the 5 outdoor cameras, I would recommend either the XNV-8081R or the QNV-8080R. Both are 5 Megapixel resolution cameras. The comparison will be similar to the indoor cameras – Quality vs Price. Both are going to blow those B2C cameras out of the water, though.

How much storage will I need?

Next, We’ll need to calculate how much storage we will need for the cameras. I used the calculator at WaveVMS.com to get an estimate, but these should be similar no matter which models you chose as long as the resolution lines up. I’ve assumed here that I want to keep 1 month of recordings, and I calculated approx what that would look like with constant recording, motion only, and motion+low rez for one camera.

Motion Only: ~3.93TB

Motion + LowRez: 4.25 TB

Constant Recording: 7.86 TB

That should give us a good idea of what size models we need to purchase.

Selecting a recording solution

There are two options for a recording solution here – a video recorder like an XRN or a VMS that runs on a software server like Wave. A video recorder is a server that you can purchase and install yourself, which will store your video footage. Wave VMS is a software that runs on a Windows server and requires one time licensing per camera to turn on recording.

The first option would be to use the XRN-1620B1-4TB network video recorder from Hanwha. It has an MSRP of $2,230.00 and can store up to 4TB of footage. That’s before the drives are formatted, so we should expect to get just less than 1 month of footage.

The second option would be to use Wave VMS. It is a software that runs on a Windows server and requires one time licensing per camera to turn on recording, and you’ll need to purchase a computer with a surveillance grade hard drive to store the video on, like a Western Digital Purple or Seagate SkyHawk drive of the appropriate size.

Wave is pretty lightweight, especially with only 16 cameras on a system. All we should need to look for in a PC is that it runs Windows, has an i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and an extra slot we can install an extra hard drive to store our video on. A quick search on Amazon for a PC and hard drive that would work and I found these, which should be more than plenty powerful:

HP Pavilion i5 Tower Computer with GTX 1050 graphics card

Western Digital 4TB Purple SATA drive

Note: If you want to also view the cameras from that PC, make sure it has a halfway decent graphics card.

In addition to the PC itself, we’ll need to pick up a 16 pack of Wave VMS licenses from a distributor like Greybar or CDW. The part number we want is WAVE-PRO-16 and the MSRP for that is $2640.00. That’s a one time cost and includes software updates and technical support perpetually.

The cost difference between those solutions are as clear as the feature set difference, so pick carefully. If at all possible, I would go with Wave VMS. It’s a much more intuitive platform for both the installers and the end users.

Purchase Summary

Let’s summarize the total parts we’ve needed to purchase so far, for each of the solutions. (Prices are approx. based on MSRP at the time of writing)

Solution 1: Cheaper of the options. This will be an XRN-1620B1-4TB recorder with all Q-series cameras, and set to motion only recording for the smallest hard drive requirement.

• $867.00 – 3x QND-6012R1 – Register indoor cameras
• $2590.00 – 7x QND-8020R – Indoor cameras
• $3400.00 – 5x QNV-8080R – Outdoor cameras
• $2230.00 – 1x XRN-1620SA-4TB Recorder
• $9,087.00 – Total

Solution 2: More expensive of the options. This will be a Wave PC built out with all X-series cameras.

• $1800.00 – 3x XND-6010 – Register indoor cameras
• $5425.00 – 7x XND-8020R – Indoor cameras
• $9000.00 – 5x XNV-8081R – Outdoor cameras
• $788.96 – HP Pavilion i5 Tower Computer with GTX 1050 graphics card
• $153.60 – Western Digital 4TB Purple SATA drive
• $2640.00 – 1x WAVE-PRO-16 – Wave VMS Licensing
• $19,807.56 – Total

Note: These do not include the costs of cabling, cable management, and labor. Only accounting for the cost of cameras and recording solutions.

It’s important to pick the right type of solution for both your needs and your budget. Both of these solutions would get the job done in a restaurant environment, the question becomes how much the usability and growth potential you’d like to have. The cheap solution here has 0 room for growth, where the Wave solution would only need additional licenses and a bigger hard drive to be used for more cameras – And with that hardware it could easily support 60-80 cameras.

I hope I was able to shed some light on what goes into a video security system for a restaurant here, and that you can proceed with more confidence as to what you’re getting into with a restaurant surveillance project.