These are the questions Downtown Brooklyn owners, managers, boards and store operators ask us most, grouped by the kind of building they come from. Questions about our general terms are in the FAQ further down.
Towers and building-run systems
Our store's recorder sits in the building's telecom room, and only the landlord's engineer has the key. Can our cameras still be repaired?
Yes, but the visit has to be arranged with the building, not just with us. We ask you for the engineer's or manager's contact, confirm with them when the room can be opened and whether they need a certificate of insurance or a contractor sign-in, and book the service call for a time when someone with the key will be there. Most of the work on a store system happens at the recorder and switch, so having that room open is what decides whether the repair is finished in one visit. If the building will not allow regular access, we can usually move the store's recorder into the store itself on the same visit, priced before we do it, so you are not waiting for a key the next time you need a clip.
Our building's managed Wi-Fi works on our phones, but our indoor cameras won't connect to it at all. What is blocking them?
Usually the way the building's network is set up, not the cameras. Many buildings that supply Wi-Fi to every apartment use a sign-in page, keep each device from seeing others on the network, or only offer a frequency band that small cameras cannot use. A phone handles all of that easily. A camera, which has no browser and often needs to talk to a recorder or to other devices in the apartment, cannot. The fixes are to ask the building's provider whether it can register the camera's hardware address or give you a private network, to put your own router behind the building's connection if your lease allows it, or to use cameras that record to a memory card and only need the internet for viewing. We can tell you which applies once we see the camera model and the network name.
The camera on our tower's roof deck shakes in the wind and its mount keeps working loose. Is there a fix that lasts?
Yes. A camera high on a tower meets far more wind than one over a brownstone stoop, and a light bracket screwed into a railing, a planter or a thin panel will rattle loose and blur the picture in every gust. The lasting repair is to move the camera onto a solid structure, such as a parapet, a column or the building's wall, with a heavier bracket fixed through to something that does not flex, and to keep the camera arm as short as possible. Most building managers will want to approve where a new fixing goes, so we bring them a photo and the proposed spot before we drill. If the camera is a pan-tilt-zoom model, we also check that it is not hunting back and forth in the wind, which wears out its motors.
When the power came back after a transformer fire nearby, our recorder's timeline had a gap hours longer than the outage. Why didn't it start recording right away?
Several things can hold a recorder back after the power returns. Large recorders run a disk check before they start recording, which can take a long time on big drives after a hard shutdown. The switch that powers the cameras may have come back later than the recorder, or not at all on some ports. The recorder's clock may have reset, so it recorded for hours with the wrong date and those hours sit somewhere else on the timeline. And if the building restored power in stages, the rack may have been without power for longer than your apartment or store was. We read the recorder's own log, which shows when it powered on, when each camera connected and when recording resumed, and from that we can tell you whether any video exists and fix whatever caused the delay, often with a properly sized battery backup and a clock set to update itself.
Stores and the Fulton Street corridor
Our camera behind the storefront glass shows only its own glowing reflection at night. Is the camera bad?
Almost certainly not. When it gets dark, the camera turns on its infrared lights, and those lights bounce straight back off the window into the lens, so the picture becomes a white haze with a ghost of the street behind it. In the daytime there is nothing to reflect, which is why the camera looks fine until evening. The fix is to put the lens flat against the glass with a rubber or foam shroud that blocks the reflection, to turn the camera's infrared off and let the street and storefront lights do the work, or to replace the camera with one built to see in low light without infrared. We test the result after dark, because that is the only time the problem shows.
Our new recorder offers face recognition. If we switch it on in our store, what does New York City require?
If your store uses software to identify people from their faces, the city's biometric identifier law requires a clear and conspicuous sign near every customer entrance saying that biometric identifier information is collected, and it bars selling or sharing that information. The law, in effect since July 9, 2021, covers retail stores, food and drink establishments and places of entertainment, and Troutman Pepper's summary puts damages at $500 to $5,000 per violation. Plain recording that is not analyzed to identify anyone falls outside the sign requirement. We can switch the feature on or off and set it up as you ask, but whether and how to use it is a legal decision for your business, and we suggest checking with your lawyer first.
A detective asked for a shoplifting clip, but the file we exported won't play on the precinct's computer. What went wrong?
Most recorders export in their own file format by default, and that format only plays in the recorder maker's player. If the player was not exported alongside the clip, the file looks broken on any other computer. The fix is to export again with the player included, and to save a second copy in a common video format if the recorder offers one, keeping the original untouched. Check that the recorder's clock was right on the day and write down any difference, because detectives need to match your video to other cameras on the block. On a repair visit we set the export options correctly, show the manager how to do it in a few clicks, and make sure the clock updates itself from then on.
Our stockroom is also where staff change into uniforms. Can the camera in there stay?
Not as it is. New York Labor Law section 203-c bars an employer from making a video recording of an employee in a restroom, a locker room or a room the employer has designated for changing clothes, unless a court has authorized it, and footage made in breach of that rule cannot be used for any purpose. If the stockroom doubles as a changing area, the camera has to come out or the changing has to move to a separate space without a camera. We can move the camera to cover the stockroom door from outside, aim it at the shelving in a room that is no longer used for changing, or take it down, and we will not repair or aim a camera to cover a changing area.
Offices, venues and bigger systems
We replaced two old cameras with 4K models, and now playback stutters on every camera on the recorder. Did the new ones break it?
They did not break it, but they may have pushed it past what it can handle. Every recorder has a limit on how much video it can take in, record and play back at once. Two 4K cameras send several times as much data as the cameras they replaced, and an older recorder that was comfortable with its original cameras can start dropping frames on all of them, especially during playback. A camera may also be sending video in a compression format the recorder does not handle well. The fix is to set the new cameras to a resolution, frame rate and compression the recorder supports, which costs nothing in parts, or, if you want the full 4K picture, to replace the recorder with one rated for it. We check the recorder's limits and tell you which makes sense before anything is bought.
We plugged in one more camera, and three others on the same switch started rebooting. Why would one camera do that?
Because the switch ran out of power to share. A network switch that powers cameras over their data cables has a total power budget, and each camera draws part of it, more at night when its infrared turns on and much more if it is a pan-tilt-zoom model or has a heater. Add one hungry camera and the switch can no longer feed everything, so it cuts power to some ports, the cameras on them restart, and the cycle repeats. The fix is to check the switch's budget against what the cameras draw, move the new camera to a switch with spare power, or replace the switch with one that has a larger budget. We measure the draw on site, so you are not guessing.
Our IT auditor says the camera recorder can be reached from the open internet. Can that be closed without losing phone viewing?
Yes. Older systems were often set up by opening ports on the router so the phone app could reach the recorder directly, which also lets anyone on the internet try to log in. Most current recorders and apps can instead connect out to the manufacturer's relay service or through a company VPN, so the ports can be closed and viewing still works. We update the recorder's firmware where the maker has released fixes, change any default or shared passwords, set up named accounts, and tell your IT team exactly which ports to close. If the recorder is too old to receive updates, we say so and price a replacement, because a recorder that cannot be patched should not sit on a company network.
Our venue's cameras record the crowd, but in the dark room every face is unreadable. Can low light like that be fixed?
Often, yes. Cameras in theaters, bars and event spaces are usually fighting very low light, moving people and bright stage or screen lighting all at once. The camera turns up its sensitivity, the picture gets grainy and smeared, and faces disappear. A repair starts with settings: a faster shutter to freeze movement, the right balance between sensitivity and noise, and turning off infrared that would show up on stage or reflect off surfaces. Where that is not enough, moving the camera to where people are lit, such as the entrance, the bar or the ticket area, works better than trying to see faces in the dark middle of the room. A camera built for low light is the last step, priced before it is fitted.
