Dahua SunriseSunset App / Camera Day/Night Profiles Question - Help tuning a plate camera

[elesjuan]

Hey all. I've got a Loryta Z12E IPC-B52IR-Z12E S2 camera I'm using for ALPR with BlueIris and the Dahua SunriseSunset service and have a couple issues preventing me from achieving optimal performance. First and foremost, the camera seems to be switching to the "night" profile before the Dahua SunriseSunset service changes the focus to the night focus making the images unusable for a period of time. The camera is set to "working mode" of "Day/Night Switch" and the Dahua SunriseSunset service is set to my GPS cords with a sunrise/sunset offset of -1 hours. Unfortunately, today, the sun set at 16:57 and the camera was already in "night" mode, so the focus was trash at 17:07 when I observed a suspicious vehicle roll through my neighborhood and the camera captured an ultra usable image. My general observation camera showed a 2005ish Chevy truck, while the plate reader cam gave me this useless gem:



The second issue I'm experiencing is motion blur after sunset, at a CRAZY high shutter speed. Example, today at 20:35, my plate camera captured this image:


Often I only seem to capture this, despite the focus being bang on for the entire frame:


The later in the evening you get, with the less light, suddenly the image quality is almost perfect capturing plates. Settings I'm playing with:

Distance to Target: Approx 161 ft
Zoom: 0.906822
Shutter: 1/4000
Gain: 0-55
Iris: 90
Exposure Comp: 50
3d NR: On
3d NR level: 100
2d NR level: 48

My Daytime settings that capture PERFECT plates in almost any conditions where the camera doesn't switch into night mode:
Zoom: 0.906822
Shutter: 1/4000
Gain: 50
Iris: 25
Exposure Comp: 50
3d NR level: 50
2d NR Level: 50

Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated to tune the finishing touches of my setup! Thanks!

 

[wittaj]

The Dahua utility doesn't work for the new GUI.

But the day/night seems to be working for the camera, unlike the previous version that thus required the utility to be created.

The problems you are experiencing are all related to your settings.

Now in terms of your settings, 1/4000 is probably too fast. Most here run 1/2000

NR at 100 is way too high. They should be in the 30s, 40s tops.

Iris shouldn't be more than 60

What are your settings for brightness/contrast/gamma, etc. as those all impact focus and image quality as well.

The camera has a manual focus setting that you should simply stop a car in the middle of the frame at night and get the clean focus.

For many of us, the focus is different for the daytime and night time due to the infrared.

Make those changes and see what happens and if still problematic then post screenshots of all your settings.

 

[elesjuan]

Hey Thanks for the reply. I've corrected some of teh settings based on your suggestion and the night images are slightly better, at least the ghosting is gone. I was attempting to use the Dahua utility to change day/night focus specifically because the camera doesn't seem to have anywhere I can find to manually set separate day and night focus values. When the camera switches to night mode, focus is blown because the camera is still using the day focus value, and the camera switches itself to night mode before the utility has a chance to set night focus value. Maybe I'm doing something wrong here, but I've spent a pretty good amount of time on google without much success, sadly.

Picture settings for night:


Most of my values were based on the example The Hookup channel on youtube gave, then just messing with things in an attempt to get a better picture. I ended up with 1/4000 shutter at night as sometimes headlights were blowing out the exposure on the images.. the rest was just bumbling around heh. Thanks again for your feedback.