I’ve been looking for a good low light medium zoom Auto Tracking PTZ to use within Blue Iris. Naturally, most people on this forum recommend Dahua PTZ cams so I recently purchased the EmpireTech PTZ5A4M-25X. This is a fantastic PTZ overall but I’m having a really difficult time getting it to perform as I would expect. The hardware is amazing but the software seems to be the challenge. My goal is to use my Color4K-T180 as a spotter and have the PTZ move to a preset where it should begin auto-tracking with the subject in view. I’ve gotten this to work to a certain extent but it’s not been very reliable. I’m having 2 issues:
1. I can’t figure out the best way to setup the spotter to have it move the PTZ to the proper preset. The spotter often forces the PTZ to move while it’s actively Auto-tracking which causes it to stop tracking. I currently have a few alert actions set up to move to 1 of 8 presets when a person is detected in one 8 zones on the spotter. This is all done within blue iris. I have the alert set to trigger when “New zones/sources only (additive). I’ve also tried “exclusive”. It also seems to be moving sporadically instead of moving the expected zone. (it might be a bit behind?) Is there a way to prevent the alert from forcing the PTZ to move while it’s actively tracking?
2. When the PTZ5A4M starts tracking it often loses tracking pretty quickly. It loses people as they walk behind cars or if they walk by a mailbox it will often focus on the mailbox and lose the person. I tried increasing the Tracking Target Ratio and it only helped a little. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that I can’t get the spotter to move the PTZ to the proper spot reliably. A 3 second dwell time before giving up on the target seems to be too short.
As far as I can tell the PTZ5A4M doesn’t have an adjustable dwell time so it gives up on tracking fairly quickly. I was also expecting much more customization with regards to Person tracking sensitivity but there are barely any options/settings for this.
I’ve read through the thread below several times but I fail to see how setting up IVS rules on the T180 will prevent the issue of the PTZ moving to a preset in the middle of tracking forcing tracking to stop.
I can’t believe I’m saying this but I had better luck with my Reolink Trackmix and I’m actually considering reluctantly going back to it in spite of its significantly inferior zoom and night time image quality.
1. I can’t figure out the best way to setup the spotter to have it move the PTZ to the proper preset. The spotter often forces the PTZ to move while it’s actively Auto-tracking which causes it to stop tracking. I currently have a few alert actions set up to move to 1 of 8 presets when a person is detected in one 8 zones on the spotter. This is all done within blue iris. I have the alert set to trigger when “New zones/sources only (additive). I’ve also tried “exclusive”. It also seems to be moving sporadically instead of moving the expected zone. (it might be a bit behind?) Is there a way to prevent the alert from forcing the PTZ to move while it’s actively tracking?
2. When the PTZ5A4M starts tracking it often loses tracking pretty quickly. It loses people as they walk behind cars or if they walk by a mailbox it will often focus on the mailbox and lose the person. I tried increasing the Tracking Target Ratio and it only helped a little. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that I can’t get the spotter to move the PTZ to the proper spot reliably. A 3 second dwell time before giving up on the target seems to be too short.
As far as I can tell the PTZ5A4M doesn’t have an adjustable dwell time so it gives up on tracking fairly quickly. I was also expecting much more customization with regards to Person tracking sensitivity but there are barely any options/settings for this.
I’ve read through the thread below several times but I fail to see how setting up IVS rules on the T180 will prevent the issue of the PTZ moving to a preset in the middle of tracking forcing tracking to stop.
I can’t believe I’m saying this but I had better luck with my Reolink Trackmix and I’m actually considering reluctantly going back to it in spite of its significantly inferior zoom and night time image quality.
