rapidly alternating between day and night profile at sundown? 5442 series

[1.21 jiggawatts!]

i have followed the advice i've seen in some threads of manual exposure settings on the daytime profile instead of the automatic settings on my 5442 series cams. i have shutter set at 0-4 and gain 0-30. the problem is that when i use this setting, at around the time when when the sun goes down, all the cams start alternating between the day and night profile about every second. they do this for a while. i am also using custom exposure settings for the night profile. at most 0-16.67 shutter and 0-60 gain.

how do i keep the day and night profiles from bouncing back and forth at sundown?


i'm guessing the day and night switch doesn't use light dependent resistors (photo resistor) anymore. ROHS thing with the cadmium?

 

[wittaj]

Are you sure it is day and night and not just going from color to B/W and because the day/night is set to auto instead of forcing color for day profile and B/W for night profile?

If you don't have those set on auto, then can you speed the shutter up?

Or bite the bullet and set up the monthly schedule to force it day and night if yours is indeed swapping actual profiles instead of just switching color to B/W.

 

[1.21 jiggawatts!]

Are you sure it is day and night and not just going from color to B/W and because the day/night is set to auto instead of forcing color for day profile and B/W for night profile?

If you don't have those set on auto, then can you speed the shutter up?

Or bite the bullet and set up the monthly schedule to force it day and night if yours is indeed swapping actual profiles instead of just switching color to B/W.

it's actually changing profiles. if i refresh the webpage at the correct time, i can see that it has gone into night.

 

[steve1225]

If You use automatic day/night switching then difference in Your day and night settings (shutter & gain) are simply too big.

shutter is 4x longer, gain 2x bigger = 8x more light..
when camera see that day profile settings are not enough, it switched to night profile where it see too much light, so it switch back to day profile...
of course this is badly written firmware, but we can't change this...

solutions are 2:
- don't use automatic day/night switching, but only customized profiles with timetable switch (per month you select hours at which day/night profiles are switched),

- lower difference between settings in day & night mode (increase exposure time or gain in day profile - if there will be a lot of light at day, camera will not use that long exposure and/or high gain - they are simply maxes)..

 

[1.21 jiggawatts!]

So basically, make sure the daytime exposure and shutter settings are not smaller than the night settings unless using a schedule.

I'm gonna do a test. I made the exposure and gain the same for day and night. The only differences between the profiles now are image settings such as gamma, brightness and sharpness and 3d 2d NR settings.

 

[steve1225]

So basically, make sure the daytime exposure and shutter settings are not smaller than the night settings unless using a schedule.

I'm gonna do a test. I made the exposure and gain the same for day and night. The only differences between the profiles now are image settings such as gamma, brightness and sharpness and 3d 2d NR settings.

you can do a difference - but not that big...

ps. I don't like timetable changed manual profiles - they work bad in spring and autumn months. When the sunrise/sunset time is completely different on the 1st and last of a given month. This mechanism does not take into account different weather (clouds vs sun) in each day...

Automatic profile changes I use mostly on ANPR cams or cams where I must setup different backlight/gamma/image options for day & night...
Minus - when this mechanism is used, camera firmware overwrites Day&night settings for Night profile - You can't setup forced Color for night - it must be Automatic - so it switches to BW at some point...

On many cams I use simply one profile with max shutter/gain settings setup for night conditions. At day camera always are using shorter exposure & lower gain..

 

[1.21 jiggawatts!]

if dahua doesn't want to use LDR/photo resistor because of cadmium sulfide affecting ROHS, they should use a photo transistor or photo diode. depending on what the image sensor sees causes weird issues like these. having a choice in the firmware to either use the ccd or photo diode would add the most flexibility.

 

[bigredfish]

I use custom/schedule profiles and change them about 3 times per year on my home system. If it happens to switch 10 minutes too early or late so be it. I still get a useable image.

 

[wittaj]

I use custom/schedule profiles and change them about 3 times per year on my home system. If it happens to switch 10 minutes too early or late so be it. I still get a useable image.

That is the ONE nice thing about the new GUI LOL - we can set up profiles by month and have more profiles we can use. Granted it isn't the same as the day/night program bp2008 wrote that many of use for the older GUI, but at least with the month you can pick the middle of the month and be a little generous on the times so that you don't have to jump in periodically.

 

[bigredfish]

Yep

 

[jrbeddow]

That is the ONE nice thing about the new GUI LOL - we can set up profiles by month and have more profiles we can use. Granted it isn't the same as the day/night program bp2008 wrote that many of use for the older GUI, but at least with the month you can pick the middle of the month and be a little generous on the times so that you don't have to jump in periodically.

I am using all older 5442 cameras (pre-newGUI), and do all of my Day/Night profile changes though the BI schedule/PTZ command method that directly alters the camera profile through API commands. To be clear, does the newer S3 (with the new GUI) camera firmware completely block this method? I thought that someone had figured out the new API commands to be able to continue doing these Day/Night switches as before, or did I mis-interpret that?

 

[wittaj]

I am using all older 5442 cameras (pre-newGUI), and do all of my Day/Night profile changes though the BI schedule/PTZ command method that directly alters the camera profile through API commands. To be clear, does the newer S3 (with the new GUI) camera firmware completely block this method? I thought that someone had figured out the new API commands to be able to continue doing these Day/Night switches as before, or did I mis-interpret that?

With the new GUI, it works for some of the cams and not for some of the other cams.

However, with few exceptions, the day/night option in the new GUI does work they way we expect it to, so I use that now except for the LPR cams.

So if your settings are correct, the day/night should work without needing the APIs.