Review- EmpireTech IPC-T54IR-ZE-S3 4mp Varifocal Turret

I see the same "Breathing", or "Pulsing", on some of my 5442 (s3) cams. Never at night, and it seems to be worse on scenes that have large flat areas like the driveway surface, or lawn. So like water, lots of tiny changes of a relatively large, flat area. And changing bit rate definitely affects the rate of pulsing. I tried "AI Coding" and the default settings for that (ABR) and "2 sec" for "I frame interval", and the pulsing went away for the worst cam, but gave me a .50 instead of the generally recommended 1.0 key frame ratio. If I changed that to "1 sec", it gave me the 1.0 key frame ratio but pulsing returned (not as bad, but still there. So it seems like for scenes like that, a careful balance of bit rate and fps are needed to lessen or eliminate that pulsing. I've seen this with the older firmware, and the newest "animal" version of the 5442 s3 firmware. It's interesting that using AI coding and ABR (which floats the bit rate and for that cam averages only 3894) gave me the best result. EDIT: I raised the "Average bit rate" to 10240, which I didn't know you could, and it still looks good.
 
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105437 said:
No pulsing during the day from any of my 5442 S3s with these settings.
View attachment 197877
Click to expand...
Raising the bit rate, etc does help lower (if not eliminate) the pulsing in the Main Stream, but most of the pulsing I see is in the Substream that is displayed in the BI layouts. And I don't see how one could effectively raise the bit rate enough in Substream to get rid of the pulsing without making the Substream into a main stream... and bogging down the system.
 
rdxny said:
Raising the bit rate, etc does help lower (if not eliminate) the pulsing in the Main Stream, but most of the pulsing I see is in the Substream that is displayed in the BI layouts. And I don't see how one could effectively raise the bit rate enough in Substream to get rid of the pulsing without making the Substream into a main stream... and bogging down the system.
Click to expand...
I have 11 5442 S3s and viewing all cams in the browser using UI3, I see pulsing about every 5 seconds or so. When I click to view an individual camera, no pulsing since it's using the main stream via direct view.

Substream settings...
1720278073198.png
 
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105437 said:
I have 11 5442 S3s and viewing all cams in the browser using UI3, I see pulsing about every 5 seconds or so. When I click to view an individual camera, no pulsing since it's using the main stream via direct view.

Substream settings...
View attachment 197911
Click to expand...
I tried the same settings, except I raised the Substream to 1024, all else the same. Both the Main and Substream have been steady all day, with clouds/sun, and cloudy. We shall see... I'm optimistic.
 
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I must say, the animal detection update has been working wonderfully. It's detecting more animals and/or is more sensitive to them than my old 5231.
(Just last night; the 5231 did show a green box on a cat but did not trigger).

But I must dial in the video settings (shutter etc.). I followed the recommended settings from here but it bothers me the 5442 switches to night mode so quickly.
Like, it's about 22:00 here and both the 5231 and 2431 (4MP on a 1/3" sensor) are still in color mode, producting perfectly usable video (I tested this last night) but both 5442's have switched to black and white mode a while ago.

And the day/night settings are greyed out so I can't change that.
 
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I'm still seeing the opposite on my one fixed focal 5442-S3. It has gotten significantly better since I turned off accu-pick, which I don't know why was turned on. I started with sensitivity 10 and got an almost constant stream of false triggers from shadows, brushes, rocks, and blowing grass. I'm running sensitivity 8 now and catching about half the animals of the side-by-side 5442 S2 with dumb IVS. One exception is that the animal detection is performing very well with birds hopping or walking on the ground. A trend I'm noticing is that the animal detection works pretty well for objects closer to the camera, and fails miserably for animals further away that are clearly identifiable looking at the video. By further away I mean 60 feet from the 6 mm camera. If I were on a city lot that probably wouldn't be an issue. I'm still getting too many false triggers from the things I mentioned before. I need to try cranking the sensitivity down to 6, I'm just afraid that will lead to missing even more animals, but I do need to try it. I gave up on CPAI for the same reasons of missing too many animals and too many false triggers. I'm having a pretty much equal experience right now with the S3. We're in the middle of a serious heat wave and the animals are mostly hunkered down, so experimenting with settings is in slow mode.
 
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Quick shoutout for this camera and Andy's site which sold it to me.

Attached is a snapshot from last nights festivities when some tweaker looking dude came up my alley, and decided to punish me for seeing him with this camera. He tries to burn it (as shown) and later goes at the lens for about 20 seconds with an exacto knife.

I haven't pulled down the camera for a close look but after windex-ing the smoke stains off it she seems as good as new.

They definitely didn't cut corners on this thing in terms of the enclosure.

Being the only house in my alley with a light both helps with security and gets me targeted by the crazies it seems.

1720562855507.png

Edit Just to complete the camera review, I got a fine look at the guy before he took out the weapons:

1720563232306.png
 
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Thomas Kenny said:
Quick shoutout for this camera and Andy's site which sold it to me.

Attached is a snapshot from last nights festivities when some tweaker looking dude came up my alley, and decided to punish me for seeing him with this camera. He tries to burn it (as shown) and later goes at the lens for about 20 seconds with an exacto knife.

I haven't pulled down the camera for a close look but after windex-ing the smoke stains off it she seems as good as new.

They definitely didn't cut corners on this thing in terms of the enclosure.

Being the only house in my alley with a light both helps with security and gets me targeted by the crazies it seems.

View attachment 198114

Edit Just to complete the camera review, I got a fine look at the guy before he took out the weapons:

View attachment 198116
Click to expand...

That is crazy. Thanks for sharing how a vandal tried to destroy the camera and it kept going.

Are/did you notify police?
 
wittaj said:
That is crazy. Thanks for sharing how a vandal tried to destroy the camera and it kept going.

Are/did you notify police?
Click to expand...

I probably should shouldn't I? I forwarded some stills for the wife to share on the community facebook group so at least the neighbors are kept in the loop. Im halfway between thinking this guy is a simple meth-lunatic and then looking at his all-black clothes and thinking maybe he is capable of more than he did here....
 
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99% of meth heads are theives
 
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FYI FWIW that I tried various combination on a camera that had been up for a long time and the "pulsing" seems to be timed with the I-Frame Interval ... i.e. if I changed that, the pulsing rate changed. It's a fairly "busy" scene with lots of foliage and the encode settings are H.264H, AI Coding, 15 FPS, VBR, and Quality 6 (I also see it at Quality 1) with a Max Bit Rate of 16,384.

I just rebooted the camera ... and it "seems"(!) like the "pulsing" is less pronounced ... albeit it's still there.
 
I would think there would be a difference between CBR and VBR as well. But higher bitrate seems to improve it
 
My pulsing mostly disappeared with: H.264H, General, 15 FPS, CBR, 10,249 Bit Rate, I frame of 15 and highest resolution for the main stream, and same for sub with bit rate of 1024 with "d1" resolution.
 
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alekk said:
FYI FWIW that I tried various combination on a camera that had been up for a long time and the "pulsing" seems to be timed with the I-Frame Interval ... i.e. if I changed that, the pulsing rate changed. It's a fairly "busy" scene with lots of foliage and the encode settings are H.264H, AI Coding, 15 FPS, VBR, and Quality 6 (I also see it at Quality 1) with a Max Bit Rate of 16,384.

I just rebooted the camera ... and it "seems"(!) like the "pulsing" is less pronounced ... albeit it's still there.
Click to expand...

Personally, CBR works out a lot better for me than VBR especially with busy scenes.
 
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rdxny said:
My pulsing mostly disappeared with: H.264H, General, 15 FPS, CBR, 10,249 Bit Rate, I frame of 15 and highest resolution for the main stream, and same for sub with bit rate of 1024 with "d1" resolution.
Click to expand...

Exactly what Ive been running for years, except I run 30fps/30 iframe and I bump up to 16.384 on the 4K cameras.
I've not found any benefit, and all downside to VBR
 
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