How often do you review footage?

[CanCuba]

I'd imagine most people, general public not on this board, check their footage after something happens.

We've taken to checking out footage daily. Reviewing from 11pm to 6am is interesting and has helped us establish certain patterns. For example, this morning at 3:12am, two youths walked by, one dressed all in black. Nothing suspicious other than one being dressed head to toe in black clothing. But six minutes later, at 3:18am, the same two walked by which means they circled the block. This, of course, is unusual since they spent minutes of their life arriving at the same destination.

Then the one in black went to the property across the street and rummaged around in a nylon sack which the neighbour had tucked behind some boards. Obviously nothing of value in the sack so they continued on.

15 minutes after their 2nd appearance, the one who was dressed in somewhat brighter clothing reappeared, having again circled at least one block. All this footage gets backed up to an external 2TB drive dedicated for this. It also gets logged in my spreadsheet for future reference.

We also review the face captures from the two cameras running face detection. Seeing how people look at the property and noticing some of the same faces again leads to video and face pics being backed up.

Reviewing the 13 cameras up to 3 at a time, we sit on a corner lot so all the cameras from one street will be reviewed together, for example, using the IVS triggers (both tripwire and intrusion) takes maybe 15 minutes a day. A bit more if I have to back up clips which always involves more than one camera.

Our situation is a bit different than most of the users on this board as we have much more foot traffic. Vehicular traffic doesn't really concern us too much at this point but when I move to BI, it won't be really much effort to start logging license plates.

So what kind of time does everyone put in a day or week into reviewing footage when there's been no incidents or requests from neighbours to do so? I'm curious to get a bit more input.

 

[bgbmboo]

Due to some things going on in my neighborhood, I check the footage every morning while drinking my first cup of coffee. I'd say 5 - 10 minutes assuming there is no activity I need to back up. Sometimes I will check in the evenings if something on the road looks off and I'm curious as to the cause.

I agree, it is very interesting and you start to notice patterns. In my case, vehicle traffic. I never knew so many people were out and about between 1-3am.

 

[Parley]

Yep, check my footage after something happens, or if a neighbor wants me to check out something.

 

[wittaj]

When I was running NVRs (back before they had AI), I found them to be too clunky and not very user friendly and got to the point that I was reactive instead of proactive.

Like literally I would go months on end not even looking at the NVR videos because the interface was too clunky and would take forever to pull up any motion from the night before. And ended up turning off the alerts because there were so many false triggers. I would only look at it if I could tell someone messed with something on my property or a neighbor asked me if my cameras caught anything.

Now that I have gone to BI, and coupled with camera AI and BI AI, in addition to being able to configure it such that I get notifications whenever someone gets too close to my house, I can literally in less than 30 seconds every morning do a quick review to see if there was any suspicious activity or people walking down the sidewalk at 2am that I need to investigate further. I could never do it that fast with an NVR.

Of course everyone's situation is different. Those on main streets or streets used as cut-thru will see more traffic than someone in a dead-end subdivision.

In my situation, our subdivision is a 40ish home subdivision with only one in and out. So middle of the night won't have much traffic.

My LPR and associated utility created by members here gives me an email everyday showing me plates that went by and how often, so I can quickly look at the low numbered passes.

So in less than 30 seconds I can see if anyone walked by that isn't a neighbor and check the LPR utility for any cars that came by that are not neighbors.

So I can be proactive and call my neighbor and be like hey someone door checked you last night.

Along with that is how long to save video.

While having months of video sounds great, the reality of it is unless it was something catastrophic (which you would have known about sooner anyway), most are not going to start scrubbing video for something that may have happened a few weeks ago.

So I have found that by spending time to dial in the alerts and a frequent peek at what is going on, you would have noticed something around your property within days.

The reality of it is If a neighbor comes up to me and says "sometime around 2 weeks ago someone backed into my car, can you see if you caught it?" You will find that even with the best scrubbing this is a monumental task. Unless they can narrow down the day/time window, most of us are not going to scour it.

 

[bigredfish]

Yep, scan IVS alerts from 11pm-6am every morning over coffee. With SmartPSS its takes 5-10 minutes to scan 12 cameras on 4 different NVR's. As I get alerts as well as email, I usually know what if anything happened before I even fire up SmartPSS

I rarely use the NVR interface unless for setting changes..

 

[Rob2020]

Daily, takes about 5 minutes to check the footage from 10:00 P.M. - 6:00 A.M.

Saw someone hiding in the front yard once at 2:00 A.M. as a car passed. I am guessing he had warrants for arrest and was making sure it was not a cop car.

Door checkers.

Teenagers up to mischief.

Random people walking by at 2:00 - 3:00 A.M.

 

[CanCuba]

My scanning would be faster but most of my cameras don't have SMD+ which would allow me to only review the foot traffic that I'm really interested in.

@wittaj I can't imagine trying to review footage without even rudimentary AI. I had to do it once and it turned out my elderly neighbour was wrong about what they asked me to review. It was four days of footage and it took hours at 16x playback!

 

[Timokreon]

I check twice daily. With the newer Dahua NVR it only takes a few minutes to see if anything of interest happened.
Now that I have the 437 ANPR, I check that daily as well to see what cars have passed etc... I haven't set up the whole blacklist and whitelist settings yet, but I can still search for plates if need be.

I usually just check to see if any humans have come onto/near my property.

 

[looney2ns]

Yep, look things over daily.
Takes 5 minutes.

 

[Ssayer]

Every morning. Too easy.

 

[CanCuba]

Here is why I check my footage daily. Just one of the susual suspects out for a jog at 12:30am dressed head to toe in black with a face mask on. Must be training for the UFC.