We had an issue come up recently with a client where we had to replace a camera due to damage. My question is, when you replace a damaged camera, how does your VMS handle this substitution?
We sold our client DW Spectrum and the way it handles camera replacements is the source of our issue. When replacing the damaged camera, we cannot associate the new camera with the existing video data for that particular location. The existing data is tied to the original camera MAC address and there is no way to associate the new camera's MAC address to the existing video data.
This is problematic when you have multiple layouts that include this camera location. We have to manually replace the camera in each layout. We also have to choose whether or not to leave the existing camera in the view, as it's the only way to access the legacy video. If we remove the dead camera from the layout, the client no longer has access to that data. Now, this is confusing to the client. They have two "cameras" for the same location. If we delete the old camera, we also lose it's associated video data.
What would make sense to us is to be able to associate the new camera in place of the old camera, so we wouldn't have to manually replace it in layouts, or have to decide how to access the legacy data.