Newly-deployed system already paying dividends!

[Steve.L]

So after prepping since January of 2020 (and snoozing for a year and a half), I’ve finally got a system up-and-running. I’ve still got some tweaks to make and will be posting accordingly for help soon.
However, living on fairly quiet street, I am amazed at how soon I captured some valuable video after only having the system up for a few days. I am posting screenshots as I haven’t done any exporting yet, and I don’t have a video editor yet, and I haven’t posted any videos to youtube yet, and I haven’t, umm, yeah. Anyhoos…

Here’s the setup: I wake up Christmas morning, get myself together and get on out to take my dog for his morning walk. As usual, I survey up and down the street to assess the scene, and I’m annoyed to see a plastic bag of empty Modelo cans on the ground just next door and the 12-pack carton sitting next to it. Needless to say, I’m anxious as hell to get to my machine and review the footage! Alas, I turn the other way and…whoop! What the hell is this? More trash! Here on the other side is an empty 1-gallon DAP spackle pail, and a pile of other shit sitting there with it. What the hell?

Okay, so a house just sold right around the corner, and the yet-to-be seen new owners have hired some dirtbag “contractors” to do some “handy” work, evidently before they settle in. These guys are shady as all hell, they’re apparently homeless, because they’re sleeping in their cars, in the driveway, and all three vehicles have no license plates, but in lieu they have these tired, aged paper “tags” that new dealers apply to vehicles here in California. Sketchy as f***. Put 2 and 2 together: handymen, spackle? Uhhh, yeah.

Cut to the video clips: 3:30 in the morning, dirtbag is meandering in front of my house, turns left to my neighbor’s, sets down his spent beer containers, then strolls back to his shithole work van. While the spackle pail is out of my shot from the overview cams, we know who the culprit is.

 

[Steve.L]

So after talking with friends and neighbors, I hatch a plan: I’m collecting everything errrrrly the next morning (which was this morning) and taking all the shit back and dumping it in their driveway. Get this: all gloved up and going to grab the spackle pail, there’s a bunch of shit right next to it. Shit! The asshole took a shit right there on the opposite next-door neighbor’s yard before dumping the Modelo empties! So I don the heavy hazmat hardware and scoop up all this asshole’s excrement, put it on top of the spackle pail, and walk over there and throw it all up the driveway, right between their vehicles. Done. I wish I could’ve seen these jerks scratching their heads this morning. I presume they know we’re watching them now. All the neighbors are on guard and sharing input.
Thanks IPCT! For all the inspiration!

 

[bigredfish]

Great snapshots. What model camera are those?

 

[wittaj]

It is amazing how blind we are to what happens around us until we get some cameras installed!

 

[Steve.L]

Great snapshots. What model camera are those?

Thanks. Those are Andy's IPC-HDW2231R-ZS (Starlight Varifocals). Mostly defaults but after a couple days I did have to force Cam1 to color. The daytime shots are astonishing, as you know. I can freeze vehicles speeding by and count the lug nuts or read the phone numbers on the side panels, and so on, crystal clear. As bright as it looks in the driveway, the cameras are working their magic as it's not as bright as it looks. And so as I've learned, the nighttime captures can be blurry, especially moving vehicles, and this creeper above is a bit "ghosty." I don't know how much I can combat that, I tried shutter speed tweaks but it made other things worse, so I reset them. But I still prefer color...I would've never known that this guy was wearing a green hoodie, but when I called my neighbor, who has a clear bird's eye view of these guys at work, she confirmed that one of them has been wearing grey sweats and the green hoodie (She lives across the street where the snowman is on the lawn, to the right.)

It is amazing how blind we are to what happens around us until we get some cameras installed!

Yes!

 

[wittaj]

The thing that makes these cameras so good is that you can dial them in to your field of view to get the optimal picture. The consumer cams we see installers typically put in are plug-n-play cameras on default/auto settings that produces a nice bright static image, but the camera is then incapable of producing clean video at night.

But even with how great these cameras are, all cameras will suffer at night on default settings.

In my opinion, shutter (exposure) and gain are the two most important parameters and then base the others off of it. Shutter is more important than FPS. It is the shutter speed that prevents motion blur, not FPS. 15 FPS is more than enough for surveillance cameras as we are not producing Hollywood movies. Match iframes to FPS. 15FPS is all that is usually needed.

Many people do not realize there is manual shutter that lets you adjust shutter and gain and a shutter priority that only lets you adjust shutter speed but not gain. The higher the gain, the bigger the noise and see-through ghosting start to appear because the noise is amplified. Most people select shutter priority and run a faster shutter than they should because it is likely being done at 100 gain, so it is actually defeating their purpose of a faster shutter.

But first, run H264, smart codec off, CBR, and 8192 bitrate to start. This should make it more crisp.

I think you should also take off manual IR - your camera is low so you are getting a lot of IR bounce off the ground that is degrading the picture.

Go into shutter settings and change to manual shutter and start with custom shutter as ms and change to 0-8.3ms and gain 0-50 (night) and 0-30 (day)for starters. Auto could have a shutter speed of 100ms or more with a gain at 100 and shutter priority could result in gain up at 100 which will contribute to significant ghosting and that blinding white you will get from the infrared.

Now what you will notice immediately at night is that your image gets A LOT darker. That faster the shutter, the more light that is needed. But it is a balance. The nice bright night image results in Casper during motion LOL. What do we want, a nice static image or a clean image when there is motion introduced to the scene?

So if it is too dark, then start adding ms to the time. Go to 10ms, 12ms, etc. until you find what you feel is acceptable as an image. Then have someone walk around and see if you can get a clean shot. Try not to go above 16.67ms (but certainly not above 30ms) as that tends to be the point where blur starts to occur. Conversely, if it is still bright, then drop down in time to get a faster shutter.

You can also adjust brightness and contrast to improve the image.

You can also add some gain to brighten the image - but the higher the gain, the more ghosting you get. Some cameras can go to 70 or so before it is an issue and some can't go over 50.

But adjusting those two settings will have the biggest impact. The next one is noise reduction. Want to keep that as low as possible. Depending on the amount of light you have, you might be able to get down to 40 or so at night (again camera dependent) and 20-30 during the day, but take it as low as you can before it gets too noisy. Again this one is a balance as well. Too smooth and no noise can result in soft images and contribute to blur.

Do not use backlight features until you have exhausted every other parameter setting. And if you do have to use backlight, take it down as low as possible.

After every setting adjustment, have someone walk around outside and see if you can freeze-frame to get a clean image. If not, keep changing until you do. Clean motion pictures are what we are after, not a clean static image.

And sometimes we have to force a camera to color with slower shutter and live with the blur/ghost, which is ok if you have a clean B/W capture!

 

[Steve.L]

Thank you, those are good details. I will work on those settings the next couple nights and report back!
iframes matched: yes. And 264 w/Smart Codec off also...but I will have to verify the others, looking forward to more crispness.
I'm also about to pull the trigger on a Z12E, so I'll have a bunch of tweaking ahead of me

 

[bigredfish]

Agree you should try a faster shutter to get rid of the blur. It will as @wittaj mentions, get a bit darker. But better to have darker and lose the blur. 1/120 manual would be a good start and adjust from there