Cant get a decent night image on cars moving 25mph at 40 feet with my 4mp cam.

K

Kentg

Young grasshopper
Sep 29, 2015
59
2
I have poured thrugh every thread here I can find and I cant seem to resolve this. I can get a daytime image from a clip that is perfect and almost can make out bumperstickers and plates from an image of cars going by at almost 90 degrees 40ish feet away. I dont expect to get plates but the image is so I can actully make out faces in the car sometimes depending on glare.
However at night I am just not getting anywhere close. I can get some decent but no where near good images from clips of people walking on the sidewalk. BUT the nighttime blur of cars going by makes it impossible to tell anything about the car. I know I can only expect so much but I did expect more than this and I think at this point Im going backwards with it. Im using BI and my camera is one of the new EXIR DS-2CD2T42WD-I3 4mm lens. Using auto IR and down to 12fps 1/6 speed highst quality and noise off. I am not in front of it at the moment and if anyone has had luck gettting a good image at night please share your settings if you would.

When I get home I will try to attach an image of daytime and one from a random nightime clip of a car going by. Id be happy to just be able to tell a make and model of a car going by at night thru the neighborhood.
 
It has been a challenge for me too on the night time settings. I have 4mp turrets and I have cars going by about the same distance you are talking about. I presently have my exposure at 1/12 and 15fps. I can lower to 1/6 but it blurs more. I raise to 1/12 and it's a little better but I have a little more noise so I'm at a compromise at the moment since I haven't found a sweet spot where I'm really happy with it. I have dnr at 50. I can go higher and get less noise but I start to get ghosting. I could share my settings if I happen to hit a sweet spot but it's probably going to be different for each situation. I think a little more ambient light would help a lot but I'm having to rely mostly on IR. Wish I could be of more help, I'll post more if I happen upon some magical settings.
 
I would suggest the following:

1) add some more external lights either IR or visible light LED's
2) increase the exposure to at least 1/100. Faster / higher is better for fast moving objects.
3) increase the Gain and or brightness

The exposure really needs to be around 1/500 mark to stop motion blur, but you will end up with a very dark picture if the camera is set to that without good external lights.
 
Anything over 2MP, night performance suffers without adding more white light or external ir. If you have exterior lighting that is in the cameras area, I would switch to led light bulbs. I've had good success with them on installs.
 
Well the biggest mistake I have made it seems is to reduce the external lighting. I have two carriage lights on the garage (Home Depot type) and I pulled the sensitivity back thinking, incorrectly it seems, letting the cam IR do its job without the external lights. Going out right now to turn them back to max and always on if I can.
Here is a daytime pic of my best friend watching from the driveway and another good friend in the car. This was a snapshot from a clip. It was a cloudy day for starters and I don't really care if every color of the rainbow is perfect but Id love to be able to tell what kind of car this is at night at least instead of a blur.
Going to adjust a few settings to take up the suggestions here and report back.
 

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So far I am having a harder time getting a good nighttime image on my 4mp cameras than on my 3mp cameras. You need to have shutter speed at 1/30 at the very lowest, on some of my 3mp cameras I have them at 1/120 and those work great at night even with cars driving by the cameras. You just need good light to get that to work correctly.

The 3mp cameras have much less noise and seem to be better for my lighting conditions than the 4mp, but I assume the 4mp will get better with firmware updates so this may not hold true in the future. My 4mp camera cannot do 1/120 at night without being too grainy. Add that to the fact that you cannot use noise reduction over 50 without ghosting and it is just not doing as well as my 3mp cams so far.
 
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I reset my cam to default to start over and the only changes I put back is in video 15 fps constant bitrate and highest quality and exposure 1/50 gain 100 , Day/Night auto smart IR on, mode manual, distance 100. No idea if its close to good but I can see more of the area but the grain/noise is high in live stream.
 
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