ZoneMinder Forums

I've been hoping to use 9 Cameras at 640x480 5fps but having taken a photo of one of the areas to be covered and resized it to 640x480 it comes our at 856Kb.

9 Cameras x 5 FPS x 856Kb = 38520Kb or 37.63Mb per second

37.62Mb x 60 Seconds x 60 Minutes = 135,432Mb Per Hour or 132.26Gb per hour.

Is this right? I think I'm going to have to scale back my plans a bit.

Working the other way around I'd ideally like to use a maximum of 500gb per 7 Days storage. I'd still like some of the Cameras to be 640 by 480 but that's not going to happen it seems.

What's realistic to achieve 500gb per week in this scenario? 1 of the cameras will be covering the room which contains the server on Modetect but the others are all eternal and will no doubt be prone to tree movement etc.

Thanks,

Mark.

856kb?!
i think something is wrong

vaineh wrote:856kb?!
i think something is wrong

Yes, there was.

I didn't actually do the resizing myself as I was at work & didn't have a photo or the necessary software to resize it. I called home and got my wife to do it & tell me the file size. Unfortunately she saved the file as a .pspimage and not a .jpg image.

Having done it again as a .jpg I get a more modest 154kb per image, but even at that size.....

9 Cameras x 5 FPS x 154Kb = 6930kb or 6.77Mb per second

6.77Mb x 60 Seconds x 60 Minutes = 24,372Mb or 23.80Gb per hour.

That's still only 21 hours of recording at this resolution and rate so far as I can tell. Are my calculations correct in principle?

Thanks,

Mark.

looks right in principle, but i dont get where you're getting the image from and resizing it???

zm should do all that for you and add in a level of compression to make the filesize smaller, at a cost to the quality of the image...

vaineh wrote:looks right in principle, but i dont get where you're getting the image from and resizing it???

zm should do all that for you and add in a level of compression to make the filesize smaller, at a cost to the quality of the image...

No, you misunderstand me. knowing that I ideally wanted a 640x480 resolution image from my webcams I needed to know how the approximate file size of the images. I took a photo with our regular digital camera, resized it to 640x480 to get a rough idea of the file size of each recorded frame.

All my current efforts setting zm up have been using multiple old VHS VCRs on composite out instead of cameras while I work out my zm configuration correctly. I have yet to buy any CCTV cameras and I am trying to work out which to buy.

There's little point in buying higher resolution cameras if I'm not going to be able to use the resolution so I was working out some calculations to see whether my 9 640x480 Cameras @ 5fps is realistically achievable.

Mark.

This is the reason for motion detection. I had 4 cams at 320x240 for a test, and after a week I had just used a couple of gigs.

Lee Sharp wrote:This is the reason for motion detection. I had 4 cams at 320x240 for a test, and after a week I had just used a couple of gigs.

I'm still reading & learning about zm and it was my plan to use motion detection as well as real time. I thought I could run 2 monitors to some of the cameras, The 1st at 640x480 on 24/7 at 5fps and the 2nd at 320x240 on Modect as a sort of alarm to give me a hint where to look for any suspicious activity. It may turn out that just modect on it's own is just fine. It may well be that modect on it's own at 640x480 is perfectly adequate, that would be great.

Thanks,

Mark.

Mark Ward wrote:No, you misunderstand me. knowing that I ideally wanted a 640x480 resolution image from my webcams I needed to know how the approximate file size of the images. I took a photo with our regular digital camera, resized it to 640x480 to get a rough idea of the file size of each recorded frame.

im no expert but i would have thought that thered be a bit of a difference between an image taken using a digital camera and the image taken using whataver cctv camera you're going to use.