triggers and motion detection

[bipedalist]

Hi all,

I have a new setup of Blue Iris. I have 1 Amcrest in a remote location that I'm concerned about. My settings are at the default for camera setup with regards to motion detection and triggers.

This camera is in a showroom with north-facing windows. Day to day, Blue Iris is triggering and recording movement in the showroom. At night, it seems to capture cars moving past in the parking lot and the occasional person walking past the camera on the weekends. We captured video of one guy who stole the showroom keys during working hours.

My problem is that a car ran into the showroom exterior wall on a Saturday at 5 PM during off-hours. This part of the showroom is squarely within the triggering box in the properties for the camera. Nothing was recorded though. It would have had a lot of motion squarely in the camera's view, things falling off the wall, and so forth. The timeline for the day doesn't start until 6 PM when the police are walking around checking things out.

Blue Iris has not responded to my email query about this.

My question would be what is the best property set up for a camera in a high-security location? In the accident above, the party responsible showed up to take responsibility, but if they had not done so, there would be no camera evidence of the event.

There's a lot going on in the software that I don't have time to parse and dial down. Are there resources that speak to this in the manual or can anyone give me a handle on how to set up a camera so you are very likely to capture significant events? I assume there's a trade-off between the amount of video data captured, disk space and security needs.

I'm thinking at the moment what needs to happen is a schedule so the camera is capturing everything during off-hours, and deleting archives regularly. I've got 266 GB free on the HD so disk space doesn't seem like a factor.

Thanks for any tips here.

[spammenotinoz]

The best setup is to "ALWAYS" record and only set alerts based on motion, however if you only want motion then to be safe you will get many false alerts.
Also get a CAM with an inbult SD card with constant recording, at max frame rates and maximum quality. H.265+ takes stuff all space.
Then I send a second feed, still high-quality but not 30fps to BI.

I am NOT an expert, but here is what I have found, if you don't want to constant record. I often have to adjust depending on the cameras installed and placement....

- In your night profile, DON'T select "Reset Detector based on object size". Car head-lights, flashlight, or major scene change (eg: debris moving will often cause motion not to trigger. But I do use in the day, to prevent light-changes triggering during the day)
- lower the object size and contrast and perform many tests, to ensure an object like a car coming directly towards the camera's are enough to trigger. (eg: object 250 and contrast 30)
- Pre-record "set to a decent amount like 5 seconds"
- Video - don't use "limit decoding unless required", only use then when you really know what you are doing. Even with aligned iframes, you will have motion delays.
- Make time, use with caution (can really help reduce false alerts, I wouldn't go more than 0.5, but 0.2 is preferred.

Also interested to hear from others. (PS: You will get false alerts with the above setup)

it's a pain, but test\test and re-test. Lighting conditions can be funny, especially sunset, so if you have a period where a light (eg: sun shines into the cam, you will not only damage the cam over time but have a recording blindspot)

[logeox]

To start, their is not much on the camera you want to set up. I went with defaults. Take the time to learn and understand the BI software. I know it sucks but there are plenty of videos on youtube that show all the features. Most still apply to BI5. I would go with the suggestion earlier. I do the same with my outside camera facing the road. Record 24-7 video in 1 hour chunks and only report motion and audio if you have it on the camera for alerts. I also use Sentry which is working quit well. It verify s all motion for people activity before notifying me. Works well for me. Bi still captures all the motion activated clips but im only notified on people activity. dial in your settings and you will get what you need. It is possible that if the camera is facing windows and the actions happened outside the windows the reflection might be part of the issue. Really no fixing that.

[HeneryH]

I fully concur with the statement to record always. You can still set alerts to add tags into the recorded stream to make life easier or get email/sms alerts.

For motion detection, I use zone crossing which seems to be more effective for me.

[spammenotinoz]

I also use Sentry which is working quit well. It verify s all motion for people activity before notifying me. Works well for me.

Sentry is on my to-do-list, not for the notifications (as BI's are bee's knees). For the daily summary I send a sub-feed to ContaCam ($10 donationware), it provides a great daily summary in animated GIF's, so compliments BI quite well.
I am sure Sentry is a lot better, but it was $~72 AAUD per year, so I didn't even bother with the trial for residential purposes, perhaps a birthday \ Christmas gift from the family.

[logeox]

I also use Sentry which is working quit well. It verify s all motion for people activity before notifying me. Works well for me.

Sentry is on my to-do-list, not for the notifications (as BI's are bee's knees). For the daily summary I send a sub-feed to ContaCam ($10 donationware), it provides a great daily summary in animated GIF's, so compliments BI quite well.
I am sure Sentry is a lot better, but it was $~72 AAUD per year, so I didn't even bother with the trial for residential purposes, perhaps a birthday \ Christmas gift from the family.

BI still handles the notifications..... Sentry just flags the ones that get notified is all. They also send a daily report which has a recap photo with all the people it flagged in the frame at the same time with a box around each. also reports on how many times each photo was recorded in that days period. Ill check the other out. Never heard of it.

[MikeBwca]

...

[bipedalist]

Thanks for the help here. This gives me some things to try out.

As for disk space, is it advisable to use a network share for recordings?

[spammenotinoz]

Thanks for the help here. This gives me some things to try out.

As for disk space, is it advisable to use a network share for recordings?

No, too many unknowns, unless you really know your infrastructure.

If you have high-quality cameras and like to shoot Hollywood frame rates, then you want to write locally, then export \ archive to Network Drive.
I personally write locally and then archive immediately to the cloud. But not write direct to network drives. Sure a high-end user may, but they won't be asking the question and will know where their bottlenecks are and may have multiple network interfaces with a decent performing NAS.

Even with many cameras and "direct record" spinning disk 7200rpm via a SATA IIII interface is fine.
If you use a Network Drive, USB attached drive and\or even a low-performance SSD, then you risk dropping frames and a poor experience.
SSD's are great, but many will die prematurely with all the writes, and many perform poorly with sustained writes.
But their MTBF is generally a lot higher than spinning disk, so if you can afford to consider a DECENT SSD.