Color4K-X - one man's journey towards clarity

[sebastiantombs]

Just a casual observation but I think you're spinning your wheel right now with all that snow on the ground. It's changing the lighting characteristics significantly for the entire FOV which can make adjustments very misleading.

Love your front lawn though!

 

[wittaj]

This camera, more than any, can be run so much faster than any other camera I have used.

My 5442 camera (that many still consider the go to King) can only be ran at 1/60 shutter at night before it starts to degrade. The 4K/X camera can go 4-5 times faster easier for the same field of view.

With that said, snow is a great light reflector and will allow you to run faster shutters. Wait until that melts and everything is dark and you may need to slow the shutter a bit and add some gain.

 

[NightLife]

@sebastiantombs and @wittaj , I completely understand the snow element now that you remind me. I used to see that in game cams as well. Snow melts though, and suddenly you're staring at the event horizon of a black hole ha.


On the bright side though, this snow will be here till mid May, so these settings may stand for now, and then in late spring I'll have to establish a new raw-rock baseline.

 

[Wildcat_1]

Again, @Wildcat_1 is the real expert on all of this. I'm just a "duffer" at best.

Hahah thanks @sebastiantombs. If anyone needs any assistance just tag me or DM me and I’ll jump in and help.

 

[NightLife]

Maybe I should tag someone in here haha


What does the collective brilliance think? Shutter speed still too slow? I believe I had both DNR & WDR off. The encoding is set to general.


Some captures seemed ok, while most had my pals from some alternate universe creeping on my 6. I had the shutter speed at 0~0.08, so I knocked it down after seeing this to 0~0.001. Haven't tested those speeds yet though, but there seemed to be plenty of light.

 

[Flintstone61]

Makes me think of the movie Predator, with Jessie the Body and Ahhnold....

 

[CCTVCam]

The general concensus is run at least the equivalent of 1/60th if movement is involved.

Avoid excess gain. There's some guidlines in the other thread but generally the advise is don't go over 50 although different models of camera react differently to gain.

As for that shot, macro blocking is quite often a compression or loss of signal / interference issue. Are your bit rates, bandwidth, cables, etc ok?

PS if burying a body dressed as Santa, turn the cameras off. Nice work obscuring your accomplices, but there's still too much evidence there, and don't forget to dig deep as the snow melts.

 

[bigredfish]

Try leaving your exposure at 0-1 for now or 0-.2 that’s plenty. Set your bitrate to 10240 and DNR to 35. 0-50 Gain H.264 and CBR

Those are safe reliable values and you won’t see much improvement beyond them in daytime.

If you still see the macro blocking or “tearing” it’s likely some component isn’t keeping up with the bandwidth or bitrate as mentioned by @CCTVCam above.

 

[garycrist]

I have a question as I learn, because every thing is not moving even Santa, would the
distortion have anything to do with Iframe rates?

 

[bigredfish]

Mebbe…? I don’t know what the Synology gear is introducing into the equation either…

FPS should equal Iframe. 15/15 or whatever value

 

[NightLife]

Well, it had been a while since I checked the "Playback" while logged into the Dahua Web UI, so I just tried that and all the videos are perfect - zero tearing etc. And that's with the settings last found in the prior screen captures here.


So either Synology isn't keeping up, or some other hardware could be suspect. If I have just demonstrated that I can watch the edge recording from the Color4K-X, through the cable, the switch and then through the Netgate firewall device to my Macbook over LAN then can I dismiss a transmission issue?

I have repeated checked the NAS resource usage while watching lives streams, while recording etc and those resources never seem taxed.

*One thing I did enable some time ago on the Synology NAS is "Smart Time Lapse", which appears to try and record everything while then using a 240 compression to squeeze each 24 hrs down into 6 minutes. Each 24 hrs becomes approximately 7 GB once compressed. I should consider disabling this for a while to see if that helps. Perhaps I haven't caught the resources straining at the right time. I know when I see animals in frame for instance, and I know it's recording, I can hear the NAS grinding away recording which to my ears always reminds me of an older PC trying hard, and about to overheat etc. Dang it. EDIT: Correction - I just saw a 24hr Time Lapse is about to conclude in 2 minutes, and it's at 9.10 GB. (9.13 now that it's completed).

*This is something I don't yet have an appreciation for - the resources being used in chorus. I have the camera writing an edge recording of events, the NAS recording constantly in high quality for the Time Lapse, then IVS events also recorded on the NAS, as well as the Live Stream(s). Maybe something in that mix is taxing the entire operation.

TL;DR - Camera, with setting mentioned well above, is recording perfectly...it's the NAS I suspect which cannot keep up. I suspect the Smart Time Lapse may be an issue.

 

[sebastiantombs]

There have been multiple reports of problems when recording to NAS due to the constant stream(s) of video and the buffering in the NAS not being able to keep up with it. I was just on a Zoom call with BI the other day and was told that isn't a problem. I guess it still is.

 

[NightLife]

There is something else I could try before disabling the Time Lapse - in the Synology APP there is a Buffering setting of 1, 2, or 3 seconds. 1 is the recommended setting, but perhaps I could bump that up to 2 or 3. I had in the past, briefly, but that was prior to honing in on much more optimal camera settings.

*And I just noticed my Synology settings have reverted on their own, after not doing so for some time. As noted by @wittaj I will now have to try inputting the correct settings again, but this time using IE in W10 (through Parallels on this MacBook Pro) which is said to lock these settings in. Right now it's unclear why they, again, became transient.

The suspect settings appear to be confined to the bitrates, while my lower Frame rates of 20 & 10 were preserved. But the 8192 was 12288, and the 1024 was 6144.



And the Synology Live View advanced setting for buffering -

 

[NightLife]

It should be noted that even though the bitrate settings for the 3 streams reverted back to lower setting on the Synology APP, in the camera themselves, NONE of the settings were altered. Again, this points to a Synology issue, as though it can't keep up at times, freaks out and dumps my bitrates for lower rates..

On the Synology Surveillance app it does, quietly, make reference to the fact that it 'may' make changes automatically but blames any changes on the 'limitations of the camera'. *Cough/BS

 

[NightLife]

I can log into my camera via IE 11, on W10 but not the Synology NAS. So back to chrome for now. I popped the bitrates back up, and I disabled the Synology smart time lapse. It's still got the fast shutter speed of 0~0.001, and I have the 2D DNR @ 20, and 3D @ 30, while the WDR is at only 2. I don't know if birds are more apt showing tearing if somethings off, or not, but these jays seem fairly smooth with no evidence of tearing. I'll monitor. *And my gain is at "0".

View attachment Birds on E lawn no tearing dec 8 settings.mp4

 

[NightLife]

Question - I tried searching, and can't seem to find it right now, but I recall there being a few posts months ago where someone asked why when looking at the camera info, and knowing he had set his bitrate to constant, did he see the bitrate, and even FPS fluctuating. I'm always experiencing the same. I don't understand why, if I have locked in my FPS to 20, and have set a constant bitrate of 12288 why when I click on show camera info in my feed do I see those 2 fluctuating. The bitrate does so wildly, while the FPS has a delta of about 1 or 2.


Is this normal, or am I overlooking a setting somewhere?

Recording from a moment ago:

View attachment Screen Recording 2021-12-09 at 14.15.57.mov

 

[Mike A.]

Yes, normal to see some bitrate/FPS fluctuation with CBR no matter what you use to check it. I'm not sure what you're calling wildly or how to put a specific percentage for a normal deviation on it. For ball park purposes call it maybe up to ~5% as relatively normal from what I've seen. Maybe higher in some cases but usually more toward the lower end of that or less. VBR obviously will show a much wider range depending on scene and what's happening at the time.

 

[wittaj]

With a lot of white in that image, that will drop it a little and motion ups it a little.

FPS 1 or 2 is normal.

If both get too extreme, then look at a potential power issue and the camera not getting enough power.

 

[NightLife]

I made one change since posting, and enabled something on the Synology NAS side which essentially says 'allow a custom I Frame Interval', and so I check that, and made it 80. Then I changed even the sub streams to 20 FPS, so all streams could adhere to the higher Interval.

Now I see the average bitrate is closer to my intended 12288, but it does dip down into the 9000's at points, which 'may' point to something else. Thanks for the replies guys. @wittaj if it could be the camera not getting enough power, is there a means to test that sort of thing. I ran 150' CAT7 (overkill, I realize now), and the switch which provides PoE is overkill in terms of wattage. It would be nice to somehow pressure test the switch/cable/camera to ensure everything really is optimal. Some recordings are perfect, while others still see tearing. While the edge recordings seem much better, and any tearing is generally seen on the NAS recordings. It's hit and miss sometimes, and can drive a user batty.

From a few minutes ago, revealing 40%+ deviations in bitrate at times:

View attachment Screen Recording 2021-12-09 at 14.47.32.mov

 

[wittaj]

I am sure a power tester exists, but without one, I just try different things LOL.

I was having an issue where one of my cameras was showing totally fine in BI. The FPS and bitrate remained constant, yet about 8 months later the same camera in OpenALPR would occasionally tear or flash white and I noticed that the FPS was jumping all over the place ( but the camera feed was still totally fine in BI).

I hadn't changed anything and one program was showing it spot on and another was having issues with it and had been fine for 8 months. I have Windows set to not update and OpenALPR hadn't updated, so I concluded it was either camera, cable, or power. Power was the easiest to test as I simply unplugged it from the POE switch and plugged it into a POE injector. Did that and it worked fine in both programs. Switched back to the POE switch and the issue started again. So the POE switch was either pooping out or couldn't keep up but had worked fine for 8 months prior.