Light is certainly a much needed friend to these types of cameras! Auto/default settings rarely produce the best results, especially at night.
Since you have floodlights, you want to dial it in to those being on or you will suffer from blindness in the camera settings - either as it goes from B/W to color OR the settings are set up to allow too much light and faces are washed out when the light comes on.
The cameras need time to identify the object and then run it through the algorithm to decide if it needs to trigger. Poor camera settings, took dark of a setting, or a field of view trying to do too much can result in IVS missing.
It is best to not update for the sake of updating. If you know it will be fixing something that YOU are having a problem with, then ok. Many of my cameras from Andy are still running several old firmware even though a newer is available. The 49225 PTZ is one such beast where updating it will remove autotracking from the PTZ - and that is the whole reason people purchase that PTZ.
Now if you bought from Andy, it is a known vendor and the risk is minimal and if there is an issue, you can rollback. But outside of that, updating just for kicks can result in bricking cameras or losing features.
In my opinion, shutter and gain are the two most important and then base the others off of it.
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 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. HLC at 50, unless for LPR, will certainly degrade the image with motion.
