What could be the role of old-school motion-detector lights in the security camera world?

[ipmania]

Many years ago I put up some traditional security lights driven by the detection of movement of (I'm guessing) infra-red generating objects. Classic Heath-Zenith 180-degree motion detector lights from a big box store.

They actually work surprisingly well. Anyone walking through the alley behind our house will trigger them. 2 conventional light bulbs (originally 60W incandescent, now 100W-equivalent LED) would light up the driveway for a minute or 2.

I'm wondering if they would be useful in conjunction with a newly installed IP camera.

For example, at night, IP cameras seem to go into a night mode where they are black and white and use the IR of an on-camera IR LED or perhaps some off-camera IR illuminators to see (record) better. It's certainly amazing that images result at all but they are in black and white. And humans seem to look like zombies or ghostly.

But I'm wondering if, with the detection of motion and the associated triggering of additional light from conventional incandescent or full-spectrum LED bulbs, could the cameras use that light to get back into colour mode.

I'm also wondering what's better for identification: 1) the black and white footage from IR-assisted night mode recording, or 2) colour footage from a camera in daylight mode with light from full-spectrum light triggered by a motion detector?

In my own specific case, I would already have the full-spectrum lights triggered because they exist already (that is, I wouldn't go mounting new ones now). Could they adversely affect the recording of security footage? I wouldn't want to take them down because then I'd be stumbling around in the dark if I wandered outside at night.

 

[wittaj]

Color is obviously preferred over B&W if one has enough light.

Motion activated lights are bad for surveillance cameras.. What happens is then the camera is momentarily blinded and you lose the ideal capture when the lights kick on and the camera adjusts from basically no light to a lot of light.

Either keep the lights on all night or not at all to ensure the best chance of capture.

Here is usually what happens when a motion activated floodlight comes on - it just about completely blinds the camera right at the moment of optimal opportunity to get the picture. There are 3 deer in this picture and two of them are lost in the blinded white while the camera's exposure adjusts to the rapid change in available light:

Some cameras can take 20 seconds to adjust and the perp would be long gone:

20 Seconds for OEM IPC-HFW4431R-Z to adjust for light?

I finally have my bee hive comb-building time-lapse setup running. The first couple days' footage was uninspiring, and then I remembered that I never actually focused the camera after I moved the rig from my house to the bee shed. :facepalm:. The camera is now properly focused. But then I also...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[jrbeddow]

For what it's worth, I do recognize that it does take 3-4 seconds for my 5442 cameras to adjust to motion activated lights (for ones that are set to switch from B/W to color, even less time for ones that are "locked" into to staying in B/W mode). They may be momentarily blinded, but that is very brief. I'm not convinced (yet?) that I will miss out on a critical moment of footage because of this. Anyone else care to share their experiences with these sudden lighting changes and how it may be negatively impacting their camera installation?

 

[wittaj]

For what it's worth, I do recognize that it does take 3-4 seconds for my 5442 cameras to adjust to motion activated lights (for ones that are set to switch from B/W to color, even less time for ones that are "locked" into to staying in B/W mode). They may be momentarily blinded, but that is very brief. I'm not convinced (yet?) that I will miss out on a critical moment of footage because of this. Anyone else care to share their experiences with these sudden lighting changes and how it may be negatively impacting their camera installation?

See my post above yours LOL.

This camera takes about 3 seconds to adjust and stays in B/W. It completely missed the other 2 deer as they were out of the frame before it adjusted.

I can also walk/jog thru that area and be completely missed by the camera due to the blinding white.

Light normally stays on, but I did this as a test one night to demonstrate the effects of motion activated flood lights.

Certainly there are things one can do to mitigate it (having the light more sensitive to kick on well before the perp is in camera view, optimizing location distance between light and camera, tightening up parameter settings, etc.), and some cameras perform better than others when presented with additional light, but one shouldn't expect it to be the magic solution to obtain color images.

A consistent light source is the best solution.

There are enough videos here and on NextDoor that perps do not even flinch with motion activated lights.

They are more deterred from the place being lit up all night and will skip it to go somewhere else.

Watch this video someone posted and how the floodlight comes on and they don't even flinch. But then the audio comes on and they don't know which way to run LOL.

https://ipcamtalk.com/attachments/whatsapp-video-2020-07-28-at-7-23-08-pm-mp4.73970/

 

[ipmania]

That video of the 2 perps and the 911 was great! Was the camera locked into B&W mode? It didn't take too long for the camera to adjust. And (to my eyes) there wasn't really any period of significant overexposure when the motion-detector light came on. Perhaps the area was already lit fairly well.

As an aside and separate from the lighting question, was the system for the Porsche owner a sophisticated one? Was it an outdoor loudspeaker with a pre-recorded message triggered automatically? Or did the owner see the perps on a monitor and trigger the recording personally?

Back to my motion-detector lights. The old unit is quite sensitive. The light comes on when anyone is still in the alley and there is a fence on my property that a perp would have to scale first. And so a short period of overexposure, say 3 seconds, would be ok.

 

[wittaj]

Yeah, that video had enough light and not a bright enough floodlight to experience the white out issue. Distance away from the floodlight and the camera helps too.

It was an automated message - it sounded like it was live, right! Simply a loudspeaker connected to the system.