I'm back! Adding new camera best practices for placement?

[Shige]

Hi all,

It's been a long time and I'm back! After our minivan was stolen from our driveway, I ordered 3 Dahua cameras from Andy and purchased BI all based from info in the forums.

I only installed 2 and now 18 months later, I'm thinking about installing the 3rd plus adding a few more.

I'm simultaneously building a new PC to run BI but I don't know how to place my cameras for best coverage.

Are there writeups about best practices for placing cameras? This will help me understand how many more I should order and what kind of PC will be needed to run it.

Thanks you!

 

[sebastiantombs]

Look in the WiKi, in the blue bar at the top of every page, and read the Cliff Notes in there on a real computer. General rule of thumb is that a camera should be mounted at seven feet high or so, maximum height. This allows a much better chance for facial recognition. Set the camera up on a temporary mount and test it by walking by it, wearing a baseball cap or a hoodie and see if you can recognize yourself. A test setup can be a bucket full of sand or stones with a 2x4 in it to mount the camera to. It will really eliminate guess work and finding out that your idea of placement isn't going to be optimal.

 

[Snapper30]

Also determine what you want the camera to do in each location - overwatch, monitor packages, facial ID etc. A varifocal camera and the test rig helped me a lot.