(Odometer: 31,321 miles)

VANCOUVER, B.C.–Security surveillance is one of electronics’ fastest-growing markets today, but one not without its challenges.

While Moore’s Law has enabled the proliferation of billions of affordable, unobtrusive cameras, bandwidth and storage remain problems within the network. Even though most systems are low resolution, keeping a camera churning all day long and storing that information requires enormous storage–or the sacrifice of resolution and frame rate, which can compromise the surveillance’s objectives.

Enter Avigilon, headquartered here and named last year by Deloitte and Touche as the fastest-growing software company in North America.

Avigilon brings a holistic approach to surveillance networks, from cameras to encoders to software to recorders and accessories in an attempt to mitigate a lot of these existing issues as well as a big issue it brings to the table: super-high resolution cameras.

Avigilon’s highest resolution surveillance camera captures images at a whopping 29 megapixels. Why so much resolution, you ask? Rick Ramsay in the first of two video segments here and below explains it’s basically about efficiency. Higher resolution can capture a bigger field of vision and allow better resolution on close-ups (a license plate in a huge parking lot, for example).

But what about the challenge of storing all that data? Again it comes down to a holistic view of the problem: Choose the right camera for the right application and mix in some software–the company’s High-Definition Stream Management product–that can lower the resolution for storing older video if need be and saving on storage.

“So you can keep the highest quality evidence for the first few weeks and trim down the older stuff,” Ramsay said.

Here’s Ramsay talking about the company’s approach to surveillance networks:

And here Ramsay talks about working with legacy systems and managing the video strain on networks and storage devices: