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garycrist

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So sorry for the dupes, I am still blonde with a lot of grey? In the color shots, to
the right of the pole, above the green box at the horizon one can make out a high tension tower
about 3/4 mile or little over 1KM.
 

wittaj

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What would be of benefit is to know the shutter speed and gain of these pictures. These all look like default/auto settings. Any camera can look great at night on a still image if you make the shutter slow enough.

Even better would be video clips of someone walking around.

Clean captures of motion at night time is what we are strive to attain.
 

garycrist

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They are still box stock! I've turned off the led lights. Now I have messed with the BW and it is real slow.
@wittaj do you want me to go look or set them at some setting? I'm game for dang near anything.
 

wittaj

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I have the 4K/X so I know how capable it is with very little light and I was shocked how little is needed.

This is kinda where we start at in dialing in our cameras at night:

In my opinion, shutter (exposure) and gain are the two most important 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.

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.

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.
 

sebastiantombs

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Rule of thumb is to set a manual shutter speed at night to 1/60 or 1/100 to avoid motion blur. After that it's a balancing act of exposure compensation, gain, brightness, contrast, saturation, a partridge in a pear tree and some patience.
 

garycrist

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Tonight I am watching the tremendous amount of space junk flying overhead.
Most notable was a train of "Starlink" satellites One cam is pointing straight up.

I guess watching the sky from a warm bed on a cold winter one must change drinks.
From hot chocolate to hot toddies, I guess, sign me up.stars.jpg
 
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