Best Practice for Profile Scheduling in BI - Looking for Opinions on Recording Logic

[Ri22o]

I am going through and making adjustments to my camera settings and can't decide which logic makes the most sense when it comes to switching Day Profile to Night Profile.

Currently some of my more important cameras have two profiles.

Active:
Uses BI Motion and IVS ONVIF triggers. Records Cont Sub + Triggers. Triggers are used to switch to Main Stream. This profile is during the day so if I miss some motion further away and can't trigger Main Stream, it's not necessarily a big deal. I can be a bit more strict with motion zones and settings and dial in for up around my house.

Night:
Uses BI Motion and/or IVS ONVIF triggers. Records Continuous. Triggers are only used to give time marks for review, worst case I can scrub through Main Stream footage if I have a time window. This profile originally was to have motion settings that were a little more sensitive and zones that were larger because, you know, night time. The problem is I couldn't get away from headlight triggers, and most things happen at night anyways, so I made some motion adjustments and then made these cameras record Continuous when in this profile. I also don't miss being able to review anything since I don't need a trigger to leave Sub Stream.


The question:
Currently I have any cameras with these profiles set to switch at sunrise/sunset with the BI scheduler, but is this the best logic? Would I be better off having Night run from 9pm to 6am year round instead of unnecessarily recording Continuous from 5pm to 830am in the winter and just burning up HDD space? Or do I leave the schedule related to sunrise/sunset because the freaks come out when it's dark and dark changes?

 

[wittaj]

Personally I would keep it the way you have it.

So you get a few more hours/days of recording if you truncate the night time continuous. I don't know if it is worth it.

While having lots of days/months sounds great, the reality of it is unless it was something catastrophic (which you would have known about sooner anyway), most are not going to start scrubbing video for something that may have happened a few weeks or months ago.

By spending time to dial in the alerts and a frequent peek at what is going on, you would have noticed something around your property within days. I literally every morning in under 30 seconds can scrub what happened the night before and see if anything happened I need to look at further. This is for things off my property. I will know immediately with an alert of a person or car is on my property.

If a neighbor comes up to me and says "sometime around 2 weeks ago someone backed into my car, can you see if you caught it?" You will find that even with the best scrubbing this is a monumental task. Unless they can narrow down the day/time window, most of us are not going to scour it.

There are some other considerations or law reasons for businesses that may need longer, but for the average homeowner, the reality that we are going to scrub thru months of video is slim. I would rather have higher quality for a shorter duration than longer duration but lower quality. But that doesn't mean I run continuous mainstream either. I run substream until triggered and then mainstream. Anything of interest I export out.

But now with these cool 180 cams, I have those record continuous at night to basically do the same thing you are doing.