Suprfknman

I have had issues like this previously I learned fast from my mistakes. If you have the software set up for motion recording only it will still record everything and then overwrite it if there is no motion. This is how you get pre-motion recording you can set say 3 seconds prior to and 3 seconds after the motion event. You have 13 cameras all recording onto one 500gb hard drive. Is the o/s on the same hard drive this will bog everything down. Then at least once a day the recording drive will archive to your archiving drive so now not only does the single 500gb hard drive have to write in 13 cameras now it has to write out also at the same time. One sata 7200 rpm hard drive cannot do this. Go buy a raid card and a few 10k sata raptors. Raid 10 is best mirror and stripe for the recording array or if you dont care about redundancy just stripe 3 of them for your recording volume this will give you enough disk speed to record and archive at the same time. Set it to archive at least 2 times a day. Will

I tried a few different ones the arecont 4mm works well with it I have a few of these they came with my Stardot 5mp cameras. I also tried the 6mm arecont lens its a tighter view but you cant get it as crisp as you can with the 4mm lens. Now that 5mp and higher cameras are commonplace manufacturers need to step up their game on these lenses. I have a 7mp pocket camera that takes an amazing pic edge to edge crisp and it was only 200 dollars new like 3 years ago how hard can it really be to make a good lens. The capability of todays hi res cameras exceed the lens capability. A good lens will need to have a 2nd fine focus ring maybe something you adjust with a small torx so you can really get a super crisp focus or make cameras that take slr lenses like the avigilon pro line. You can get off brand slr lenses cheap these days and they are preety good. Will

Hi the lens is not the issue the picture is fine when I go direct to the cameras ip address the issue is definetly with the Milestone configuration Will

No its showing like 1200x800 Will

When I use the web viewer I can see the whole picture everything is fine. I have an arecont 6mm lens. I did issue a ticket with Milestone it just takes them a few days to respond usually. I believe part of the issue is the Milestone software using the mjpg stream and not the H.264 but I dont know how to tell the software which to use it selected it automatically upon initial config. Will

Hi all I just picked up one of the new Arecont 10mp AV10005 cameras. It does take a 10mp picture it is not a spectacular picture but not bad and it was only 700 dollars plus shipping. So I installed the latest device pack on my Milestone Xprotect Basis + 6.5c and got a SLC for the new camera. I can go to the cameras IP address and see a full size picture but in the Milestone client window all I am getting is the center 20% or so of the image. If I set the camera for 1080p in the cameras config page it opens up a little more in the Milestone client window. I went to the Milestone Administrator and to the settings panel for this camera it says it is configured for jpeg not H.264 which I believe I should be using. I contacted the retailer of the camera they dont what the issue can be and I emailed Milestone but it takes them a few days so if anyone knows a fix for this it would be appreciated. Thanks Will

I have an avigilon 6x5mp camera server and a server with milestone installed 9 cameras. I called arecont they said maybe in the fall they will release the 10mp camera. The arecont 5mp has different low light modes it can be set in the middle of speed and quality but I need license plate identification. The Stardots have a lot of user adjustments it took me a few weeks to get them adjusted. The Iqeyes are easy to set up. I saw 5mpdn Iqeyes on ebay new for around 1200 each you can get a 4 channel milestone software license for a few hundred bucks and an i7 pc with a few extra hard drives and away you go. I buy used sata arrays on ebay and fill them full of 1.5tb drives striped raid 10. Its too much overhead for raid 5 running the cameras I have. If you dont need alot of storage space best buy sells 10k sata raptor hard drives they work really well like twice as fast as a 7200rpm drive you need the speed if you want to read out with heavy writing going on. Will

I dont have any pictures to post but I use a variety of 5mp cameras. I have a little overkill but I need facial and license plate identification. There is always someone up to no good in my area. The iqeye's work very well at night in color mode, I have large streetlights and floodlights, they do switch to b/w occasionally and its also pretty clear. I have stardot 5mpdn cameras I have them set to day only they work well in color mode with streetlights. The stardots have a little more focus shift than other cameras in night mode. I did try focusing one of the stardots in night mode it was pretty good but I could never get a crisp focus for both modes at the same time. I have the arecont 5mp they are ok during the day but night mode is grainy and lots of motion blur. I have the avigilon 5mp's they are amazing during the day nothing else compares. Night mode they are ok I leave them in day mode also. Avigilon does make some b/w only cameras they are a little pricey but if low light is what you have to deal with and you need the high res I believe this is the way to go. I have seen plenty of demos of day/night cameras in night mode with tons of ir illumination and they look pretty good but providing a lots of ir light is easier said than done unless you are just trying to cover a small area I have a large storefront and 2 large lots. If I had to choose only one camera for night mode only it would be the iqeye. Daytime would be the avigilon. If the 2 companies got together they would make one heck of a camera. A friend of mine had good luck with the arecont 3.1color/1.3bw cameras at night but I need higher res. Will

For NVR software I have 2 servers both on windows 7 pro x64. All my cameras are 5mp on both systems and I record to multiple striped mirrored drives (raid10) and archive/backup to drives set in a raid5 config. On one I run a 9 camera Milestone basis plus I upgraded to the latest edition. Milestone says it wont work in win7 but I tested it out for a while with no issues and its been running fine for 2 months. The second runs avigilon 6 cameras. Avigilon says windows 7 is supported. I have had a few quirks with it here and there nothing that prevented recording though. Also I was exporting images once I usually make a folder on the desktop and export there but I accidentally exported directly to the desktop and when it filled up windows explorer crashed. The avigilon recording server background process still ran the viewing client did not but the cameras were still recording. I had to reboot in safe mode and clean up the desktop and reboot a few times then all was good. On a single processor system XP is faster but I dont believe it can properly utilize a multi-core processor. Windows 7 can use my quad core processor efficiently and 7 can multitask so I believe the gap is narrowed with the proper hardware. Opening one program does not freeze everything. Disk transfer rates are faster than xp with the same disk hardware. XP would also benefit from weekly rebooting or it would slow down and get quirky, which I have not had to do with 7. XP is 8 years old when it originally came out it had issues microsoft issued service packs which pretty much straightened things out so if you have a program you have been running on XP for several years and it works fine then I see no reason to change to anything else if it isnt broken dont fix it. Will

Hi does anyone know of any image enhancement software that actually works. With analog cctv there really isnt much of an image to work with but with multi megapixel images I would think good software could possibly do some enhancing. I have cheap photoshop style programs I can crop, change exposure and contrast, move focus around and other basic stuff but I consider these parlour tricks not actual image enhancement. I downloaded a few enhancement programs demos and played with them for a day they didnt do anything that I couldnt do with my simple programs they just made it seem fancier. The only benefit I could see with these programs is they broke video clips down into individual frames but with megapixel cameras I can export in image format so thats nothing special. There has to be something that professional forensic enhancement companies or law enforcement use. Thanks, Will

I will check the log. It does allow me to set multiple archive times I have it set to archive every 2 hours I do use the mjpeg I have some of the cams set to motion only 7fps and some set to 20 frames per minute with 7fps speedup on motion. I havent changed the setup it worked fine for a long time. Will

Hi my name is Will I own my own business and have several years of electronics experience. I set up and install my own surveillance equipment. I run Milestone xprotect basis+ 9 camera I am currently recording 8 cameras in the 3 mp range. I have 3 arrays 1 2gb fc raid 14 disks totalling 1.6tb for therecording array and 2 larger arrays for archiving. My system has been running fine for several months the megapixel video is amazing compared to my old analog cameras. I had wanted to post some pics at one time to the mp pix thread but it wouldnt let me because I have not had enough posts. Back to the issue on its own the system decided to start archiving on the 1.6tb recording array and no longer archiving on the arrays I had set up to archive on. In the archiving setup screen it shows the archiving paths correctly and I have tested both arrays my moving large files back and forth. I wiped all the recorded video and formatted all 3 arrays this afternoon, reset all paths to where I wanted to archive and started recording again. The system archived one camera to one of the arrays but the others archived to the recording array instead. Can anyone give me any idea why the system is doing this and a solution? Any help is appreciated. Thanks, Will

my local avigilon dealer had offered to drop off a demo camera for me to try out for a day or two Will

I have the manufacturer specified day/night ir lenses and I still get a focus shift when the camera goes into night mode. I have arecont and stardot 5mp cameras. The only camera I dont have this issue with is my 3mp iqeye which stays clear in color and does not switch over to night mode. There is plenty of ambient light from street lights and flood lights. Will

I have the arecont 5mp's and stardot 5mp netcams. The areconts on the highest res setting will do 12-15 ips. The stardots you are lucky if you get 4 or 5 ips at 50% quality but the picture on the stardot is amazing compared to the arecont. I had tried to post a pic on the megapixel pictures thread one day but it wouldnt let me because I havent posted enough. I run a server with dual opteron quads & 16gb memory with milestone software it runs pretty smooth. I used to get a little bog down when the system went to archive, mostly because I had sata 7200 drives they had trouble with heavy read and record at the same time, but I switched over to a 16 disk 10k fiber raid for the recording array and I have a separate array for archive storage Will