ZoneMinder Forums

Hello everyone,

I'm new to the forum, but have had a ZM 1.25 virtual instance running for 6 months or so (Ubuntu 12.04 on an ESXi 5.1 server). I have a couple of IP cameras, Foscam FI8905's installed. One at the front of the house and one at the back. I'm very pleased with how easy everything was to setup and start getting running.

Now I would like to do some tweaking of the configuration to get things working optimally. By that I mean, the cameras easily pick up the leaves on bushes moving in the wind or the shadows moving across the ground, and I'll get mainly short 5-8 sec events. However, it seems to be missing a lot of events too. For example a car will pull into the drive way and that will register, but it doesn't show them getting out of the car and coming to the door. Or it has missed complete events like when on vacation the neighbor took the trash to the road. It didn't show that at all, but I did see in events previous where the garbage cans were in the previous location and then in another event they were at the street.

So, I've been reading up trying to figure out how to properly configure the system so that I can see whole events, not just pieces of events (like the car in the driveway, but not who actually came to the door) and actually get all events, not just some of them (like the garbage being moved to the street).

I'm not sure if this is a hardware issue as in the VM is not fast enough or not enough memory to record, not sure. I can easily increase the memory to the VM and the Host hardware is not stressed at all.

As for the camera configs, I've attached some screen shots showing some of the changes to get it working better: If anyone has any suggestions for getting the system tweaked a little more so I can get event monitoring and recording working better I would appreciate it. If you need additional info, just let me know and I'll try to get what you need.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.
Brian

As a start change Pre Event Image Count to 2 seconds worth of frames. Change the Post Event Image Count to 10 seconds worth of frames.
To help any further we'll need to see your zone settings. Good luck

Unless you are seeing errors in your event log, I'm sure you vm is running fine.

What you need to do is adjust your motion settings as the default settings typically don't work as well as your system could perform. Every scene is different from another and will require different settings, which is why one really cannot pre-program a default that works well in all cases. One must often make compromises to get the best average performance with varying weather conditions.

Start by reading about how to set up zones here:
http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.ph ... ning_Zones

These settings may not seem intuitive. Read them again, and think about how each setting can affect each of your camera's views. Experiment and find what works best. Feel free to ask questions about the settings.

bb99 wrote:As a start change Pre Event Image Count to 2 seconds worth of frames. Change the Post Event Image Count to 10 seconds worth of frames.
To help any further we'll need to see your zone settings. Good luck

Thanks bb99. As I'm getting about 12 fps, so I adjusted the pre event to 24 and the post even to 120. I'm now seeing events that are longer and it seems to have captured more of the event, like when the car pulls into the drive way, I now see who it is that gets out of the car and comes to the door. I'll let these run for a while and see what, if any, other tweaks I can do.

Thanks,
Brian

knnniggett wrote:Unless you are seeing errors in your event log, I'm sure you vm is running fine.

What you need to do is adjust your motion settings as the default settings typically don't work as well as your system could perform. Every scene is different from another and will require different settings, which is why one really cannot pre-program a default that works well in all cases. One must often make compromises to get the best average performance with varying weather conditions.

Start by reading about how to set up zones here:
http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.ph ... ning_Zones

These settings may not seem intuitive. Read them again, and think about how each setting can affect each of your camera's views. Experiment and find what works best. Feel free to ask questions about the settings.

Thanks knnniggett. Yes, I've been over the online documentation multiple times. I've adjusted the zones, I only have one zone on each camera, but have excluded areas I don't need to monitor. It's been the online documentation that has got me as far as I have.