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General question

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 11:52 pm
by pchan
I have a 4 camera's connected to a hardware digiquad which is then connected to a single BT848 capture card. Up to now, I have defined 1 large zone which encompasses all 4 quadrants. However, i'm finding that this is creating an astronomical amounts of false positives due to various factors (tree shade, busy street, etc).

I am contemplating how to better use ZM to reduce my false positives and thought of trying to create 1 monitor for each of the 4 quadrants. Each monitor would only have 1 zone which contains 1 of the 4 quads.

1) Would having 4 monitors take up 4x the resources even though I'm only capturing via 1 input (video0/channel1)? I'm hoping not since the image is captured into shared memory and it wouldn't make sense to capture the same picture 4 times.

2) Would this require 4 zmc processes since there would be 4 monitors even though I'm only using 1 capture card (video0/channel1)?

3) Am I correct in assuming that there would be 4 zma processes, 1 for each monitor?

If anyone else has any ideas, PLEASE let me know. I'm growing tired of filtering out 200+ events each day. Hmmm, I just thought maybe I could define 4 zones within 1 monitor and try to adjust the sensitivty of each zone?

PS. some may be thinking i'm nuts for doing it this way instead of 4 capture cards, but
a) I'm a amateur and this was my first project so I didn't know how else to do it.
b) I was able to get a 8port full color quad (essentially 2 digiquads) for $130us which is considerably cheaper than a 4port capture card.
c) My 8port quad has 3 outputs so I have one connected to a wireless video transmitter and now I can just flip the channel on my TV to watch everything (ie. see who's knocking at my door).

Re: General question

Posted: Thu Apr 08, 2004 12:06 am
by pchan
I think the advantage if I defined 4 different monitors would be that I could tell from the front page which has set off an alarm. With a single monitor, I still wouldn't know which one of my 4 cameras set off the event without screening the events.