Video historian adds charting support

Longwatch, developer of the Video Historian for Video MES applications, has announced support of the Wonderware ActiveFactory trend chart object. This enables users to link plant video directly with Wonderware’s graphical data trend charts automatically.

The Video Historian application collects video from multiple cameras throughout the plant and enables the user to retrieve video based on time, manufacturing or security context, such as process alarms, workflow steps, batch phases and intruder alarms.

Using the thin-client, web-based Longwatch Viewer user interface, the Video Historian creates a split-screen display showing real-time or archived video from one or more cameras on the bottom half of the screen. The top half of the screen can show plant information in a number of formats.

By integrating the Wonderware ActiveFactory trend chart object, the Video Historian simultaneously shows trend graphs of user-selected variables with archived video. The video panel and trend chart can be synchronised with the click of a button on the viewer display. When the user clicks and drags the chart object’s time cursor (normally used only for displaying the process variable’s engineering units value and status at a selected point in time), the Video Historian also moves the video forward or backward accordingly.

Longwatch has integrated functionality to the trend chart object, including integration of the Tag Picker so that new trend items can be added easily to the chart, and enhancement to the time cursor to enable video scrolling.