I am fairly certain that I have one of the camera settings wrong which is causing some fairly serious motion blur in night mode. My guess is the exposure time is set incorrect for night viewing (currently at 1/25 I think). What should this be set to for best results and not get a lot of motion blur while still getting the lighting I need?
Here is a sample image of what it looks like at night.
That does not look like blur. It's ghosting, which is a way to say some of the delta frames are being mishandled (dropped, wrong order, and so on). An exposure of 1/25 sec. is plenty for walking speed. What software are you using to show this? If that only happens at night, that makes it more interesting.
P.S. Lowering the exposure rate would only blur. With Ir lamps 1/25th is fine. Ideally, you want the exposure rate to be as fast as possible (1/1000th in daylight -- just like a still camera in daylight).
-- Doing an exposure rate faster than the FPS does mean that you can get an odd sort of feel from the stream since you have thirty 1/1000th slices of time over 30 frames (if 30 FPS), so "missing time", but you can freeze any single frame and have no blur.
Thanks for the responses everyone. I am using Blue Iris to get these shots. What I am taking from this information is that I might need to test in a couple of different settings for both the shutter speed and frame rates at night and adjust to the best picture possible?
And yes, this only happens at night. In the daytime, I get what I think is a fairly clean looking image. This is a daytime example that is cropped but not resized. Should it be better than this at 3 MP?
I tried changing all sorts of things over the weekend in an attempt to get this behavior to clear up without complete success. I noticed while troubleshooting this problem that my IR lights are not coming on anymore. They used to come on when I had the schedule set in the camera to change to night settings. I then remembered that I recently changed out the lightbulb in the fixture on the wall due to a burnt up CFL. I replaced it with an LED bulb and now I must be putting off just a bit more light than the previous CFL since the IR doesn't come on.
In the end, I moved the camera to point just on the edge of the porch light to avoid it causing trouble for aperture and IR, but without much success. It seems as though this camera wants to stay in day mode with the porch light on so I plan to let it do its thing I think.
I will post back if the changes to digital noise reduction make any difference.
I had pretty much the exact same problem. I ended up just putting a really low watt light bulb in the fixture directly by it. If I go set my digital noise to 100 during the night I will get that exact same problem in your photo.
