Matching camera, recording and monitor resolution.

Still learning how to work with resolution settings to get the best video quality and I feel like I am missing something.

Question: If setting your recording resolution and setting your IP camera resolution to match your monitor resolution is one of the steps needed to end up with your best video playback image. Could this match up be done if the system that you have setup has both 1.3MP cameras and 2MP cameras? If these two cameras have different aspect ratios (1.3MP = 1280X1024 (4:3 ratio) and 2MP = 1920X1080 (16:9), it seems to me like the monitor resolution is not going to match one of these two cameras.

If setting your recording resolution and setting your IP camera resolution to match your monitor resolution is one of the steps needed to end up with your best video playback image.

This isn't a step. You don't match the resolution of your camera with the resolution of your monitor. The resolution of your monitor has absolutely no bearing on the quality of your recorded video.

You can have several different resolutions on the same recorder without any issue. Each channel is configured separately. Meaning if channel 1 has a 720p camera connected to it, then you configure the channel to record in 720p. If channel 2 has a 1080p camera on it, then you configure the channel for 1080p.

The different aspect ratios will display as such and that may bother you, but everything can and should be recording exactly at the resolution you designate during setup. This makes anything to do with aspect ratios negligible.

Do not confuse any of this with the "display resolution" that you set on your recorder. Your display resolution should be set to match the resolution of your monitor. This isn't about image quality, this is about making the devices compatible with one another. For the most part your recorder will automatically negotiate this for you anyway so it's normally not even something you need to acknowledge.

Expanding further:

Generally, the cam image is scaled for your screen by whatever you're viewing with - browser, NVR software, whatever. If the cam resolution is higher than your display's resolution, you can zoom in to see the full resolution, do screencaps of the full resolution, etc.

For instance, with a 3MP cam viewed on a browser with a 1080p monitor, you'll see the full image scaled to fit the screen and the browser window. Most viewers have a button to let you see the image at full resolution, which makes it bigger than the screen and gives you scroll bars to be able to see the off-screen bits.

The recordings should always be full resolution if that's what you've got set, as Don says.

Thanks for the quick reply. It sounds like I have been looking at this all wrong. I will take notes and play around with it a little bit. Hopefully it will sink in.

I am a little confused about what you mean when you say "if channel 1 has a 720P camera to configure channel 1 to 720P". I just logged into a 1.3MP camera and my resolution options are 1.3MP (1280X960) -- 720P (1280X720) -- D1 (704X480). Should I always go with the highest resolution the camera offers and configure the channel that it is connected to with the same resolution?

Sorry if this is a stupid question, I am really struggling with figuring this out.

Thanks

One of the reasons I am asking about this is a few weeks ago I installed a camera system for a local plumbing store near my home. Using dahua equipment. After connecting the cameras to the NVR I noticed that while in the eight or nine channel live view, with the images being small. These small images showed jagged lines for what should be straight lines. What I mean by this is the pipe in the pipe rack looked jagged, The lines on the garage door looked jagged. I was thinking that maybe with the camera being 2MP that it would be trying to put 2 million pixels in this small area or maybe my resolution settings needed help. When looking at the image at full screen or playback the image looks fine.

I am a little confused about what you mean when you say "if channel 1 has a 720P camera to configure channel 1 to 720P". I just logged into a 1.3MP camera and my resolution options are 1.3MP (1280X960) -- 720P (1280X720) -- D1 (704X480). Should I always go with the highest resolution the camera offers and configure the channel that it is connected to with the same resolution?

Sorry if this is a stupid question, I am really struggling with figuring this out.

Thanks

You can record at whatever resolutions you have available to choose from on that list. It makes sense to record everything at the highest resolution the camera is capable of but some people have situations that call for something else.

More or less, just set resolution as high as the hardware and installation will allow you to. Just pay attention to what the available range of frames rates is at those resolutions.

One of the reasons I am asking about this is a few weeks ago I installed a camera system for a local plumbing store near my home. Using dahua equipment. After connecting the cameras to the NVR I noticed that while in the eight or nine channel live view, with the images being small. These small images showed jagged lines for what should be straight lines. What I mean by this is the pipe in the pipe rack looked jagged, The lines on the garage door looked jagged. I was thinking that maybe with the camera being 2MP that it would be trying to put 2 million pixels in this small area or maybe my resolution settings needed help. When looking at the image at full screen or playback the image looks fine.

The edges look jagged because the image is being compressed. It doesn't effect the way the cameras are recording at all as you've already seen. There's nothing you can do about that other than to get a significantly larger and higher quality monitor. It's nothing but aesthetics and doesn't have anything to do with performance.

Don

I thank you so much for taking the time to explain this to me. I have learned more about how this works in the past two days than I have learned in the past two years. And it is not because I haven't tryed. I can't tell you how many tutorials I have watched and how many articals I have read to try to get a good understanding of how this should work.

I do have on more rookey question. As long as I have my display resolution on the NVR match my monitor resolution and my camera resolution match my recording resolution, should I expect to see a big difference in the video quality while veiwing playback that is displayed on a 16:9 1920X1080 resolution monitor vs a 4:3 1280X1024 resolution monitor?

The reason I ask this is that I have picked up several used 4:3 monitors over the last year from friends and relatives that have switched to the wide screen monitors, hoping to use them for cctv installs in the future.

Thanks again for your help.