ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,

I have setup my system with 2 IP cameras, both working as Modect, and works perfectly. I'm trying to fine tune my system to record images as long the motion is happening. Right now the detection is made and the images are being captured, but for some reason (buffers?, any setting?), the capture is stopped with no errors in the logs before the motion has stopped.

Any clue? Thanks in advance,

PacoLM

You could turn on CREATE_ANALYSIS_IMAGES, that way you can SEE what is creating an alarm and what's not... then fiddle with the settings on your alarm zone!!!

Hi whatboy,

The alarms are created when needed (motion detected), the duration of the motion that creates the alarm does not coincide with the duration of the event itself.
For instance, my dog moves to the main door and an alarm is started, and the motion is stored for let's say 6 seconds, but the last images of the dog show that it was still moving, so seems like the events captured have a maximum duration (I've never saw an event lasting more than 7 seconds).
Could you tell me what settings should I try?.

Here are the settings of the main camera:
General:
- Maximum FPS: 7.5
- Alarm maximum FPS: 15
- Reference image blend %ge : 5
Buffers:
- Image buffer size: 40
- Warmup frames : 25
- Pre event image count : 25
- Post event image count: 50
- Stream replay image buffer : 500
- Alarm frame count: 2

I'm going to set the alarm maximum FPS at the same ratio as maximum FPS, just to try it.

Thanks in advance,

PacoLM

Again set the CREATE_ANALYSIS_IMAGES bit and you will see what causes an alarm to trigger... just try it... the FPS has nothing to do with alarms... the settings you need to fiddle are in the ZONE configuration...

whatboy wrote:Again set the CREATE_ANALYSIS_IMAGES bit and you will see what causes an alarm to trigger... just try it... the FPS has nothing to do with alarms... the settings you need to fiddle are in the ZONE configuration...

How does one get to this screen? I have the CREATE_ANALYSIS_IMAGES checked

On you main console clic on the number in the ZONE column, you get there.

I'm also hace a lot of short alarm events, 6 or 8 seconds most of them, the best first you should change, is the pre/post image count on the buffer tab, that determines how many frames are stored before and after an alarm is triggered.

Then you should test the diferret settings on the zones config, I currently was succesfully got a perfect mix of settings on that to avoid the short events.

if you want it to detect even the smallest motion(about the size of a person arm moving) select the preset "Best, High Sensitivity" then change

Min Alarmed Area : 1
Min Filtered Area : 1
Min Blob Area : 1
Min Blobs : 1

all the rest of defaults are good... this will give you the most reliable motion detection... just be sure to mask off any trees etc as this is sensitive enough to get rustling leaves :p

then be sure to set the buffer on your cameras for 30 seconds.. so if you had a 20fps camera you would set "post image buffer" to 600 this ensures that if someone walks behind a truck and then back into view it doesnt think its two seperate events... and pre-image buffer is good at 20 or 30

Hi Dreded,

I just changed the zones settings to your recommended settings in the post. I will give them a try, I hope it works better.
I have a doubt regarding buffer settings. My system (a Guruplug running Debian 5) only has 512Mbytes of RAM, I have tried to optimize the shared memory settings in order to increase the size, working wih 2 ip cams at 320x240 resolution, these are the actual settings:

kernel.shmall = 131072
kernel.shmmax = 536870912

Buffer settings:
Image buffer size=15
Warmup frames=15
Pre event image count=9
Post event image count=15

Both cams are working at 3fps and changing to 4 fps when alarmed.

I can not go up to this values, I got the known error "ERR [Can't shmget, probably not enough shared memory space free: Invalid argument]", or the cameras are shown in red, if I increase the values of the buffers.

Could anyone help me?

Thanks!,

PacoLM

changing the post buffer shouldn't give you any errors at all as it is just saving for longer and not putting additional stuff into memory... with a 5s buffer you will get lots of small events... try changing just the post buffer to 90 and see what happens