At our recent open day at the CEME we met many drainage contractors and there was one obvious theme; you all do CCTV surveys in different ways. Some do it live, creating reports on site, others record the information and create the report back at the office.
Both have their benefits and there is no right or wrong method. Doing it live on site makes sense, in so much as you are doing it once but then there’s using a laptop in what is a less than an ideal environment. And the additional time spent on site (stopping and bringing the camera back slowly to get to the defect) and do you really, really trust your guys to be getting it right? You’ll probably end up checking it back at the office anyway.
Or you can just record the footage straight to memory stick and do the report back at the office. So less time spent on site and more time reporting in the office (or even at home).
So although there is a Standard you can work to (MSCC5) and training that gets you to work to a standard (NADC-CDS), there is no standard methodology for creating a CCTV survey report. It seems to be what works best for you.
One Viewline user does a mixture of both. The guys on site put in all the Header information, do the site plan and then just record and attach the video footage to each section. When they get back to the office they hand the project over on a memory stick and somebody else adds the observations, creates the report and makes the remedial recommendations.
That seemed like a good way of doing things to us. Your operatives are getting all the relevant information, quickly, on site. Then you can add the observations, create the report and make the recommendations back at the office. More efficient and adding an additional quality check. Seemed to make a lot of sense.