Camera location

[freqflyer]

I have seen many security videos and they all seem to have the camera mounted on the building/house pointing outward. This works great if your house is a rectangle. I have an irregular shaped house. I was thinking of mounting a camera on a wooden fence pointing towards the house and burying the cable. I might even mount it in a bird feeder.

Is there something I'm missing here? I think it's a great idea but since I haven't seen it done before I wondering if there are unforeseen drawbacks.

 

[klasipca]

Whatever shape your house is if you are serious about security you can't solve it with a single cam. Sure you can mount it in a such a way, but it will have limited view if you are relying on a single camera.

 

[nayr]

your best shot at getting an identifiable face on video is getting them on the approach.. if someone steals something they tend to approach cautiously then run for the hills.. so coming in they will be slower, observant and looking around.. when they bounce they will keep there head down and get out of dodge.. you pretty much have one chance to get them on the retreat and if that fails, it fails.

Somene's at the door, can you see who it is? no but they have a nice ass!

You have to use psychology to your advantage..

 

[klasipca]

Just try to be a "burglar" in your own property and see what results you will get.

 

[freqflyer]

I understand the view of footage and I appreciate the nice ass comment. However, I guess I could have phrased it better. Let's a camera pointing down the side of the house but not attached to the house because you can get a better shot. I was asking more about problems associated with the installation. Like burying the cable. etc.

 

[nayr]

you get more information the farther you see, watching the front of your house age durring the day is not all that exciting.. like a window, no point in actually putting a window in frame.. 99.999% of the time there is nothing there.. and if there was, you'd still capture what you wanted if you kicked the FOV out a bit and didnt have the window in frame...

looking down a wall is often a huge waste of pixels, you will have better luck running it in a corridor mode, rotated 90 degrees sideways if you want to watch a walkway-approach that runs parallel to a building.

 

[freqflyer]

I shouldn't have said down. I should have said across.

Here's an example. Most people place a camera on the eve of their house. They have the angle set to film that whole side of the house. Here's my problem. My eves aren't 8 feet high. They are higher. So when the camera catches someone on the end of the house away from the camera the image is good. However, if it catches them close to the camera then all you see is the top of their head or a downward angled view of them. With my high eves, I think that may be a real problem. I have a wooden that is about 5 feet away from the eve of the house. I would like to mount the camera there at a height of 7-8 feet, still filming the entire side of the house. Would this not be a good choice.

Also, if someone does break in I would like to have their license plate number. We don't have front license plates here. So, I thought about placing a camera on the mailbox facing toward the house capturing the driveway.

Again, I think I handle placement well enough. I really want to know more about the particulars of the install. Do I need special cable to bury it? Should it be placed in conduit or anything. Other problems associate with it that I'm not thinking about.

Thanks for all of the input.

 

[nayr]

yeah you dont want them too high, a foot or so over head-height and your loosing the ability to see faces up close.. where your most likely to get them.. you can wall mount them instead of putting them under a soffit.. I put up a junction box on a corner with 2 bullets looking at each side.

Go out with your smartphone and take pix of where you want to put cameras.. get a feel for the view from that angle/position and how much zoom you need.

If your going to put a camera on a mailbox dedicated to plates why not point it at the street? you have to have settings fixed at night in such a way to capture plates that its entirely useless for anything other than plates.. its a black image with a glowing plate, thats it.

If you put it in conduit, no special cable.. and you should put it in conduit, PVC for underground/EMT for above ground.. its best to keep standard cable protected from UV lighting, its not got UV protection and the jackets around the copper will degrade and fall apart over time.

 

[freqflyer]

I don't want it pointed at the street because any car driving by would set off the recording. Also, my driveway is pull in back out so pointed towards the road wouldn't get the plate. Or it would get it if they turned one direction but not the other unless I use two cameras there.

As for night. It would be nice to capture plates then, but I have already read how difficult that is. I'm not worried about night time as much. We don't have night time burglaries here very often. This is WV. We are home at night and armed to the teeth. Apparently burglars don't like being shot, especially when it's with a big deer rifle that guarantees death. It almost always daytime when people are at work.

 

[nayr]

record 24/7 and screw motion based recordings, hdd's are cheap and plentiful.. you wont risk missing anything.

if you use outdoor motion detection to trigger recordings, its going to get alot more triggers than just cars passing by.. if you have it sensitive enough to reliably capture stuff.. I just use it to flag activity so I dont have to watch 12h of footage to see what happned lastnight.. but there have been times where motion didnt pick it up and I sat here at 1x speed for a few hours to catch what I was looking for (the sound of my neighbor's car being hit by eggs, or gunfire going off, sadly no audio at fast speed)