Help me narrow down a shopping list

Jakc

Jakc

n3wb
Dec 15, 2021
23
6
Melbourne
Background:
  • Moved into 1st home
  • Australia
  • 2 cameras for Rear
    • Power and PoE available, not yet positioned cameras
    • Public laneway. Risk of graffiti and potential break-in to rear garage during nightime
    • Not much light
    • Want to ensure mounts are good, dont want cameras being stolen!
    • Will be cutting vegetation back
  • 1 Camera for Front
    • Some light from streets / will look to add movement sensors to porch lights
    • PoE connection availble under eave right next to front door
    • Would be useful for all day activity monitoring, although risks are still at night
    • Will look into adding an additional camera in future nearer corner of garage.
  • Plan on running Blue Iris on an 9thGen Intel NUC
    • From the Wiki I think I can avoid a dedicated NVR with only 3 cameras...
Issue:
Been going around in circles reading up on reviews, youtube videos and this forum and struggling to work out cameras should work for my setup.
Hoping this forum can steer me in the right direction and get me closer to getting the credit card out.
Have been playing around with the IPVM tool, but still could do with some advice if my choices are far off?
Ideally I would like my shopping list price to go down a bit.

Current ideas for Shopping List

Front, Camera 1:
Rear Camera 2 (on garage point out)
Rear Camera 3 (corner pointing along wall)
From what I understand, these are both rated Dahua cameras for low light conditions.

Floorplan:
floorplan1 - Copy (2).jpg

Front:
front1.jpg

Rear - garage facing out
rear_2.jpg

Rear - Corner of property
rear_3.jpg
 
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Those are a good start, but I would consider adding more cameras.

Keep in mind the colorvu camera still needs light - simple physics. If you don't have enough light, it will be blind and you cannot add infrared as the camera won't see it. Or if you can get it in color, then motion is a blur because the shutter has to be set too low in order to see.

I would consider staying in the Dahua OEM family and getting the 5442 series or the 4K/X.

Many here have not had good success with a NUC as they were not designed for 24/7 activity.
 
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Thanks for that. And good to know about NUC. I assumed that would be a perfect always on device, I know in the HTPC space a lot of folks use it.
Will do some more reading around preferred devices for Blue Iris.

Adding more cameras are on the roadmap, but budget will only allow around 3 adequate cameras for now (buying a lot of other network hardware and cabling).
I should point out that I think 'The Hook Up' YouTube channel has been a big influence, and I have seen some in this forum have some good debate over his recommendations.

I assumed with the streetlights out the front of my house, the ColorVu would be a good choice. Combine that with also later adding motion detector to porch light to provide more light when required?

Front of house right now with iPhone SE, no flash, same location as camera:
unnamed.jpg

Will do some googling around the model numbers you mention, thanks for that.
 
Keep in mind in the HTPC space that rarely would someone be running 24/7 and the video in that scenario will buffer - these cameras do not and is constant bandwidth and can overheat a system in time. If you have a NUC laying around and want to try it, then that is one thing. But if you are buyng, then you should buy a system that is capable/intended for 24/7 use.

That would be horrible for the ColorVu - it would be a backlit condition and the face will be all black. The light needs to be coming from behind the camera so that the face is lit up. The shutter would have to be slowed down tremendously to see anything and then the motion would be a blur.

Motion detection lighting and cameras are not a good mix - the camera shutter adjusts going from dark to light and gets temporarily blinded and then you miss the IDENTIFY capture shot of the perp. Every camera is different - some are quicker than others, but you don't want to take a chance that the light kicks on and the whole screen momentarily turns white until the shutter adjusts and then you miss the clean picture of the perp's face.

Either run with the lights on or cameras with infrared.

Take a look at this thread where people had even more light than you and were disappointed in the performance of Colorvu:

Initial review of the DS-2CD2347G2-L(U) ColorVu 2.0 IP camera.

Not sure this is correct or anything to do with the "C" other than that C: C= Colour or C means it's a colour ( Or Day & Night not monochrome) ?
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
 
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wittaj said:
staying in the Dahua OEM family and getting the 5442 series or the 4K/X.
Click to expand...

Now considering

Front:
IPC-T5442T-ZE 4MP Starlight IR Vari-focal Eyeball Network Camera
Saw good reviews
Varifocal lets me get the right FoV.
Bit expensive, but seems like a well reviewed product?

Rear Garage facing out:
IPC-T5442TM-AS 4MP Starlight+ WDR IR Eyeball AI Network Camera
Cheaper - more fear of vandals smashing/spraying cameras out back
Would likely add a floodlight sensor next to camera as well.

Rear corner:
IPC-B5442E-SE 4MP IR Fixed-focal Bullet AI Network Camera - 2.8 mm (might research if a larger lens makes sense once I cut bushes back)

Please let me know what you think. A lot of reviews I look at are dated, and hope I have the recent models.

Thanks again
 
Yeah, the 5442 came out several years ago but is still the king of the cameras. The 4K/X is a great improvement, but is only available in 2.8 and 3.6mm for the moment, so the 5442 series provides the almost full range of optical lengths available in both turret and bullet style.

For the rear corner property I would go with a varifocal - the 2.8mm will be too wide and will get a lot of the bushes. I would rather go for a narrow field of view that doesn't have half or more of the view being the bushes.
 
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The 5442 series is still pretty much the best bang for the buck in a surveillance camera, Your model numbers are correct and if you contact Andy here on IPCT he'll make sure you get what you're really looking for.

Start with the varifocal. Use it to determine what fixed focal length you can use at the other locations. Test both day and night by having someone play "bad guy" to see if you can actually identify who it is, by a solid video capture not from knowing in advance who it is. This will also let you experiment with the camera in various conditions to become familiar with how to "tune" them for final installation.
 
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Ok, getting pretty close then.

wittaj said:
For the rear corner property I would go with a varifocal
Click to expand...

Will do. Thanks, sounds like good advice. This one seems like the right choice?

  1. Rear Corner: IPCT-HFW5231RE-IZS 4 MP IR Varifocal Bullet Network Camera Could not find a sub $200 5442 bullet?
  2. Front: IPC-T5442T-ZE 4MP Starlight IR Vari-focal Eyeball Network Camera
  3. Rear Facing out: IPC-T5442TM-AS 4MP Starlight+ WDR IR Eyeball AI Network Camera
Trying to work out mounts for the above. Is the a good LookUp guide to cross compare the models in this table of mounts to the ones listed by EmpireTech? Where I saw some similarity in model numbers, the shape looked different.

In regards to numbers above and looking at Cliff Notes, I think I need:
  1. ???
  2. DH-PFA130-E - mounted under eave
  3. DH-PFA130-E - mounted under timeber beam on rear garage
But not that confident at all here!

Rear Corner again:
12.png
Thats a shared wall (neighbours garage really), so need to not be too intrusive a mount.
Will be having someone else do the fitting, same guy who has been doing cabling.
 
Thanks.
I was a bit fixated on getting a bullet for the corner, but not entirely sure if its neccessary. I assume it might have better range, but reading up, sounds like I would be fine with a dome, such as the one you mention above.
 
They have that in a bullet as well.

Minor wording - that is a turret. A dome is a dome with a circular plastic dome 360 around the lens. Those are problematic outside.
 
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T5442 out the front.
Will be doing more config once other two cameras are up later in week and have blueIris installed.

However, any tips for improving night visibility? That shot is with a garage exterior light on.
 

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That actually looks pretty decent and looks like you set the shutter to not give a bright static image, but be able to actually capture a clean still with motion.

But nonetheless, here are my tips:

In my opinion, shutter (exposure) and gain are the two most important parameters and then base the others off of it. Shutter is more important than FPS. It is the shutter speed that prevents motion blur, not FPS. 15 FPS is more than enough for surveillance cameras as we are not producing Hollywood movies. Match iframes to FPS. 15FPS is all that is usually needed.

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.

But first, run H264, smart codec off, CBR, and 8192 bitrate to start. This should make it more crisp.

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 0-4ms exposure and 0-30 gain (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 static image results in Casper blur and ghost during motion LOL. What do we want, a nice static image or a clean image when there is motion introduced to the scene?

In the daytime, if it is still too bright, then drop the 4ms down to 3ms then 2ms, etc. You have to play with it for your field of view.

Then at night, 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 16.67ms (but certainly not 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.

After every setting adjustment, have someone walk around outside and see if you can freeze-frame to get a clean image. If not, keep changing until you do. Clean motion pictures are what we are after, not a clean static image.
 
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Thank you so much for a detailed reply and also this whole thread where you shaped what I purchased. Will hop on the computer tomorrow evening and run through your approach to configure on the camera end. I will report back with new stills.
 
I'd move the view on the camera to the left, slightly, to get the wall of the house out of the frame. The house will reflect IR and make the scene more bright in the camera view which, in turn, will make the rest of the scene look darker.
 
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