odd recording -people out of nowhere

[DKtucson 0]

Hello,

here's the situation:

PC based DVR running H264Webcam (TimHillOne).8 camera system 30fps each channel. What will occur is that lets say you are looking at a street scene. The recording will start with a person in the middle of the frame, rather than catch them from the point at which they entered...to the non picky observer--hey we caught the guy on frame. To the OCD customer, "where did he come from? from what direction did they enter the property? what else is the system missing?"--those are the nagging questions.

Any ideas of what may be a setting I'm missing to cover these "jerky voids"?

[Kawboy12R 0]

Maybe increase your motion detection sensitivity but definitely set it to record more pre - trigger frames. Sometimes it'll want pre - event time in seconds. The terminology used isn't consistent between brands or makers.

[DKtucson 0]

thanks Kawboy..I think I recall a pre-record doo-dah field in the setup screens

[Kawboy12R 0]

The reason they're appearing out of nowhere is that you're recording only when they trigger your motion detection for the first time. If it's set to be fairly insensitive then they'll appear as if out of nowhere right up close. You might want to only record those events but know what happens before then as well. That's when you want to increase the pre-event recording amount. If you want to detect them farther away then make your motion detection more sensitive, but that can increase false positives quite a bit as well. Also, make sure that you have a significant amount of post-event recording time as well. You don't want to record someone approaching but then have recording stop because they've stopped walking to do something that you'll want recorded as well. If you have the storage, record EVERYTHING but set motion event flags so you can jump to real events but miss nothing before or after the event. That burns through HD space quickly but gives you the best coverage, especially of things at a distance that might not trigger an event at all but might be of interest anyway.

[DKtucson 0]

Thanks again.. yeah the eating up of the hd is a bit of concern..here's that situation: the gal who I built the system for leaves town for the summer and the dvr pc is left running--a while back she came home to a $3000 water bill so she wanted cameras. With her being gone she wants a bottomless pit of recordings. The 8 cams average 5gb a day--thats 200 days for a 1TB drive so it covers her absence..but if the files grow we don't want to come up short.. the alternative is to slap a bigger drive in

[Kawboy12R 0]

That sucks. $3000 worth of lousy in fact. Probably more than just a leaky toilet...

[DKtucson 0]

she hired an engineer to argue that a toilet at full bore flow couldn't consume that much water--if it was a "slab leak" or a main on her side of the meter it would have washed out her yard. No neighbors with pools that got a refill from her tap--best guess is a faulty meter--but a few months after the cams were in it caught a drive-by shooting so shes glad they were up

[SunnyKim 2]

When PC card manufactures supply their product, they target mass audience, knowing that their system would not be run by high end PC. So if processing power of a PC becomes short, their software are designed to drop frames for recording. You may need to upgrade the PC. Or You may reduce the size of recording video. Or you may drop number of frames per second - say 30 frame per second to 15 frames per second.

[DKtucson 0]

@sunnykim--The card is an 8 chip card from china with generic WDM drivers--the software is from another vendor so my guess would be if hardware couldn't keep up the software would kick out an error and not oblige the hardware by dropping frames.. but I could be wrong...

[SunnyKim 2]

I see. WDM should be used but smart softwares can read the type & model of CPU, then automatically set the encoding parameter, say, size, frames, bit rates. Product from Korea is quite reliable and supportive through my experiences.