What's your "Go to" night settings to start with?

[Travis798]

Do ya'll have a Go-to start point for your camera settings when setting them up for night time? I've learned a lot on these forums, but I still can't comprehend camera settings. I have some 5442 camera's, an HFW5241E-Z12E mounted about 100' away from my barn and zoomed in to just catch the doors, and now a 4k/x actually on the barn. They all give great pictures during the day, but at night it's a mess. I've dropped FPS down to 15 on all of them, messed with shutter speed a little although I don't really know what to do with it. I tried 1/60 on the 5442-AS-LED on my driveway, and 1/250 on the 4K/X. With the night quality they might as well be wifi cameras. Half of the pictures on the Nextdoor consumer grade thread look better than what I could get. I know I need more light, and I'm not expecting miracles in a low light environment, but I see some of the pics here and I'm left in awe. I figure ya'll that know how to properly set up the cameras have a starting point to where you narrow down from there. Like if you installed a camera for someone and you weren't going to be there at night to adjust it, I'm guessing you have some place you'd set it to see how it does other than just default?

I think a lot of my issue is that especially this time of year, I'm just not really awake long enough after dark to mess with them much. I can go back and view the night feeds the next day, but I'm never really expecting a crystal clear picture of a cat walking around or one of the possums, even though they usually look better than me when I do make it out in the dark to test them.

 

[wittaj]

The settings are unique to each field of view and available light.

Surveillance cameras rarely do good on default auto settings like exposure/shutter at night. Any camera can be forced in color and look great for a static image, but motion is a blur.

In my opinion, shutter (exposure) and gain are the two most important parameters and then base the others off of it. Shutter is more important than FPS. It is the shutter speed that prevents motion blur, not FPS. 15 FPS is more than enough for surveillance cameras as we are not producing Hollywood movies. Match iframes to FPS. 15FPS is all that is usually needed.

Many people do not realize there is manual shutter that lets you adjust shutter and gain and a shutter priority that only lets you adjust shutter speed but not gain. The higher the gain, the bigger the noise and see-through ghosting start to appear because the noise is amplified. Most people select shutter priority and run a faster shutter than they should because it is likely being done at 100 gain, so it is actually defeating their purpose of a faster shutter.

But first, run H264, smart codec off, CBR, and 8192 bitrate to start, along with 15 FPS and 15 i-frame.

Go into shutter settings and change to manual shutter and start with custom shutter as ms and change to 0-8.3ms and gain 0-50 (night) and 0-4ms exposure and 0-30 gain (day)for starters. Auto could have a shutter speed of 100ms or more with a gain at 100 and shutter priority could result in gain up at 100 which will contribute to significant ghosting and that blinding white you will get from the infrared.

Now what you will notice immediately at night is that your image gets A LOT darker. That faster the shutter, the more light that is needed. But it is a balance. The nice bright night static image results in Casper blur and ghost during motion LOL. What do we want, a nice static image or a clean image when there is motion introduced to the scene?

In the daytime, if it is still too bright, then drop the 4ms down to 3ms then 2ms, etc. You have to play with it for your field of view.

Then at night, if it is too dark, then start adding ms to the time. Go to 10ms, 12ms, etc. until you find what you feel is acceptable as an image. Then have someone walk around and see if you can get a clean shot. Try not to go above 16.67ms (but certainly not above 30ms) as that tends to be the point where blur starts to occur. Conversely, if it is still bright, then drop down in time to get a faster shutter.

You can also adjust brightness and contrast to improve the image.

You can also add some gain to brighten the image - but the higher the gain, the more ghosting you get. Some cameras can go to 70 or so before it is an issue and some can't go over 50.

But adjusting those two settings will have the biggest impact. The next one is noise reduction. Want to keep that as low as possible. Depending on the amount of light you have, you might be able to get down to 40 or so at night (again camera dependent) and 20-30 during the day, but take it as low as you can before it gets too noisy. Again this one is a balance as well. Too smooth and no noise can result in soft images and contribute to blur.

Do not use backlight features until you have exhausted every other parameter setting. And if you do have to use backlight, take it down as low as possible.

After every setting adjustment, have someone walk around outside and see if you can freeze-frame to get a clean image. If not, keep changing until you do. Clean motion pictures are what we are after, not a clean static image.

 

[Travis798]

Thanks. I've seen that post before but couldn't find it. I tried the settings changes and they are a lot better, but if I want to keep tweaking, do I lower the shutter number, like 0-7.5 or go the other way, like 0-10? Or would I lower the gain first? I guess I might just need more light, as the image is good if I walk right up to the camera, say within 3-4 feet of it. That camera is about 7' high. For some reason Blue Iris dropped that camera after my changes when I went outside, but picked it back up after. I was able to go to my NVR and watch myself running around there, as it recorded it. I'm hoping some day to gain enough faith in Blue Iris to completely ditch the NVR, but little things like this keep me using both.

Also, should these changes be made under the general profile? Or does the camera auto switch so I can change the night profile only?

Edit I'm going to bed. I tried changing shutter to 0-7.5 and my untrained eye doesn't know if it really helped, but when I got very close my face was washed out by the white light on the camera. Plus Blue Iris is now showing live video for the camera, but if I go to play back that camera just has a black screen. It's weird, as the alert pushed to my phone, I see the thumbnail, and I get audio, but no video. On the PC, I see a black bar where the alert started, and then it moves to the preview image, but no video at all. Just black. I'm going to change everything back to auto and call it a day, and mess with the Blue Iris part in the morning.

 

[wittaj]

The day/night profile of Dahua cams do not work as we would expect unless it is a newer came that has an option for day/night. Otherwise, it simply switches from color to B/W but will use the general profile, which may or may not be the needed parameters for day and night.

if you want true daytime and nighttime settings that may be drastically different due to light and your camera does not have the day/night option in the schedule, then you need to either use the utility someone here created to switch it from day and night based on sunrise/sunset or go into the camera schedule periodically and adjust the time based on changing sunrise/sunset.

The smaller the shutter number, the better the ability to freeze frame and get a clean capture with motion. But the faster the shutter, the more light that is needed and the closer something needs to be to the camera.

So it ends up becoming a balance act of the parameters to capture the best image.

Regarding BI, if you changed the coding from like H265 to H264, you need to manually stop the recording of the BVR file and restart it. That could explain the issue you have right now for playback. I reboot of the computer will take care of that.