Temporary footage

AlphaBlueIris

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Hi, first time here and I love Blue Iris, I came from Sighthound product.
I would like two zones, Zone A that is "mask" to only my house and the driveway while Zone B encompass the entire camera view. I would like to use Zone A only for when someone is in my property and Zone B to save a temporary footage for a few days and then remove it. Is it possible to accomplish it?

Thanks
 

wittaj

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You would have to make a clone of the camera (simple to do in BI and uses very little CPU) and have the clone save Zone B motion. You would then create in clips and archiving a folder that would be for these types of events and tell it to delete every X days.

But storage is cheap and I think that is kinda crazy to do what you are proposing. Especially if you are recording 24/7 (highly recommended) and using the substream option, then it is recorded anyway and now you are doubling up on the storage.
 

AlphaBlueIris

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What you have suggested is very smart, it makes sense. Now time to learn how to clone, it sounded easy but when I use Clone master, it does not clone anything. I need to do more researching.

Unfortunately I have a VM and the Disk space is limited on those, plus, I have 6 cameras.
 

wittaj

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All you do is "add camera" and then tell it to copy whatever camera it is you want to clone. Then make sure one of the cameras has Clone master checked and the other one doesn't. It will show as * next to the name to let you know it is indeed a clone. You can then go to BI Camera Status and confirm it isn't pulling two video streams.
 

AlphaBlueIris

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@wittaj, I took on your suggestion and I implemented it. I have two questions if you do not mind. Would recording continually would affect HD lifespan? Do you normally record these off a NAS or local HD and if is the NAS, is it affecting your performance?
When I record continuously, can I "Bookmark" a trigger or an alarm on timeline so I can go directly there if needed?

Thanks
 

wittaj

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The surveillance HDD are made for constant writing, but it is a waste of resources to be moving them around on the same drive. Most here just put it to a local HDD. NAS can be problematic trying to throw that much data. Some people claims it slows there system and others claim no issue. YMMV.

However, if something happened more than two weeks ago and you didn't notice it until now or a neighbor is like "hey about 3 weeks ago someone got into my car", you will probably give up pretty quickly trying to find it - it can be a pain to scrub when you cannot define a date and time window.

You can flag a trigger, but then it is never deleted until you manually do it. Some people flag everything and then their drive fills up and stops recording.
 
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