During the final home game of the 2004 San Diego Padres’ baseball season, a physical fight erupted among fans in the left-field grandstand. Police officers broke up the brawl, but the ballpark’s security team was not able to provide authorities with video of the incident due to an outdated closed-circuit television (CCTV) system.

After a fan incident, Ken Kawachi, director of security and transportation for the San Diego Padres, had to upgrade the stadium’s surveillance system.

According to Ken Kawachi, director of security and transportation for the Padres, the system was not equipped with real-time recording, and the staff monitoring the game had limited ability to hone in on areas of the ballpark not covered by CCTV cameras.

“The equipment was purchased when groundbreaking for the new 42,000 seat ballpark began–four years before the stadium opened,” explains Kawachi. “The components sat unused throughout various construction delays. Meanwhile, major advances in the security industry rendered some of the technology obsolete.”

Newer surveillance systems were increasingly incorporating digital technology and the user’s network to allow for greater flexibility in how people could view and record video. By 2004, PETCO Park’s analog-only system was inadequate for the requirements of a modern ballpark.

While the Padres’ players headed into their off-season that fall, Kawachi’s team began looking at options to improve the surveillance system at the ballpark.

“We asked for recommendations from the team at Qualcomm Stadium, where the Padres played prior to the opening of the new ballpark. They recommended Electro Specialty Systems (ESS), the security system integrator that had installed a CCTV solution for San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium and for the NFL’s 2003 Super Bowl. We were already familiar with their work and decided to bring them on board in the beginning of 2005,” says Kawachi.

Analog and IP analog

ESS planned for the new video surveillance system to combine analog and IP technology using equipment from Bosch Security Systems. This hybrid system would incorporate some of the existing surveillance cameras, add color pan-tilt-zoom cameras in strategic locations and take advantage of the ballpark’s network for recording and viewing video.

The first step in the plan was adding and upgrading cameras. Now, more than 75 Bosch AutoDome analog cameras capture video of the ballpark exterior and restaurant, as well as the stadium seating and standing areas, clubhouse, suites and the Padres’ Team Store.

Next, ESS began to remove the existing analog VCR equipment, clean up the video cable and connect it to new digital recording devices. This stage of the project began prior to the start of the 2006 baseball season.

Mixing analog cameras with digital recording did not present a problem, since there were adequate IT closets throughout the stadium. ESS ran coaxial cable and pan-tilt-zoom control wires from the cameras to the IT closets, where the equipment needed to send video from the cameras to the security office was located.

“The IT closets contain the devices needed for the cash registers and other technology at each concession and apparel area. They are generally within 300 feet of those places, so they’re at regular intervals throughout the stadium,” Kawachi says.

An International Fiber Systems (IFS) fiber-optic transmitter in each IT closet converts the cameras’ electric signals to light. Each IT closet is connected to the main phone room, which houses a fiber hub. IFS fiber-optic receivers in the security office convert the light stream back to electric signal and send the analog video to a matrix switch. From there, the signals go to multiplexers and then to encoders.

Five Bosch VIP X1600 multichannel encoders convert the analog camera signals into digital format and stream directly to one Bosch iSCSI RAID 5 storage system, which can record up to six terabytes of audio and video. With the direct-to-iSCSI video recording, multiple cameras are sharing the RAID on a local recording network. Therefore, video needs to traverse the ballpark’s main network for live viewing and for playback of recorded footage only, not for recording.

This design ensures that no video is lost, even if there is a network outage. It also prevents video from interrupting the regular flow of data on the ballpark’s network.

Design avoids server need

With this design, ESS was able to eliminate the need for more traditional PC-based network video recorders with attached storage, which would have required adding two servers to the ballpark’s network. This meant savings in acquisition costs for the ballpark as well as savings in the time the staff would have spent administering the technology with operating system patches and antivirus updates.

The local recording network was set up using the two network ports on each encoder. An Ethernet cable connects the iSCSI to the first encoder. The first encoder is connected to the second encoder, the second to the third, and so on, with the fifth encoder connected to a network switch. Connecting the fifth encoder to the network switch gives security personnel at the ballpark the ability to use a Web browser to view live and recorded video.

“Ballpark employees review video 24 hours a day using a bank of 13 monitors in the stadium’s security command center. With the new surveillance system in place, the ballpark’s security team can identify, zoom in on and record events, such as fans trespassing on the playing field,” says Kawachi.

“On game days, personnel in the ballpark’s event-management center above center field use a secondary command center with its own monitors and camera-controlling joysticks for surveillance of the stadium’s interior,” he adds. “Stadium personnel, contract operations workers, a San Diego Police Department sergeant and a fire marshal, all based in the event-management center, take over responsibility for monitoring the interior of the park a half-hour before the gates are opened to the public. Anything viewed on the monitors in the event-management center is also recorded centrally in the primary security command center.

“With the digital recording system, we can provide all of the stadium’s decision makers with a clear view of the activity in the ballpark through the event command center monitors,” Kawachi concludes. “Key personnel can quickly review any security or life safety concerns on the monitors and communicate appropriate directions to their personnel patrolling the stadium. We’re a much more streamlined operation.”

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