atropine

One of my cameras has them, I think it's called 'dark noise' it's where slightly defective pixels overheat. You see more, and they become more noticable the longer the shutter speed, because the longer the shutter speed the hotter the CCD gets. AGC and Noise reduction can also effect how noticeable and how many pixels you see. If you cover the dome with something dark, and then keep manually turning the sens up, right up to 32X you'll probably see a lot more 'stuck pixels' with each reduction in shutter speed. If your camera is like mine, the pixels only show when it starts to get dark.

I had a camera behind reasonably dark curtains looking through the glass of the window. At night all I could see was the reflection of the curtain. You'll need a lens shroud of some nature. If you have the the lens so close it's almost in contact with with the window glass it would be easy enough to exclude the light between lens and window.

Hi CCTV guys, I"M having a problem with my camera and my motion activation software detecting motion when there's not really any motion there. I've uploaded a video to youtube of an example. The truck turning around at the beginning is so you can establish frame rate and shutter speed. During no motion The software still sees motion ranging from 13% - 22% of the scene, with an average constant motion of around 18%. I know youtube loses video quality, but to my eye, I can see colour noise in the grass, but that's about all. In the picture I"ve uploaded the green squares are where the software is detecting motion (17% motion), but in the video you can see there's not any motion. I've changed cables, and the false motion is still there. The strange thing is that I never did have this problem and I was really impressed with how well the software did at not detecting false movement, such as at night with AGC UP I could set the motion activation to 99% (triggers on 1% motion) and not have false alerts. Now I can't use motion activation at all. Just interested if anyone might know what the problem is, and what the software is seeing that I can't see. Only thing of interest I noticed is a slight green line going down the right side of the screen, and I wondered if that noise could be causing the problem. I don't think the green used to be there. Video link here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=8oNlVQnaR7w PS. It is raining a little and you might be able to see that, but that has nothing to do with the false motion detecting, this problem is constant weather it's raining or not.

Hi, I use a few single port video cards with this software, I've never used a multiport, because the only one I have is some cheap ebay thing with hardware video encoding that wont' work with any other software. I never found out what my problem was. I delete the config file, removed the drivers to my card, uninstalled the software and removed the capture card. Then did the opposite. Things began to work again. Your problem is interesting though. I hope you can work out what's going on there, and if the problem lays with the software. I did try the software recommended in this thread, and it's motion activation is so much more sophisticated than this programme. But then again it lacks quite a lost of the features of active webcam also. But the basic problem I had was that it kept crashing my computer, which I've never had any software do with my BT878 chipset cards. So I never really got to trial it.

I've used a dirt cheap 10metre S-VHS cable, gave perfect results over that length. I was going to do a test by hooking up more 10m cables together until signal degradation became obvious, but shop sold out, so never did. Only thing of note, was that Dirt cheap 10m S-VHS cable gave stunning picture quality, dirt cheap 10m composite (non coaxial) video cable gives noticeably lower resolution and colour noise as expected from composite video, but also noticeable degradation over that 10 metre length. Given that observation, I had wondered weather you could use a dual run of coaxial cable with Luminance on one, and chroma on the other, which might give equal or better range than composite on Coaxial cable. If that worked then it could also be done with a network cable and dual balun on each end.

Oh yeah, good point, maybe his camera just isn't focused properly to begin with. Better not go buying that new lens just yet!~

I had that problem with my day/night camera too. It sounds like the 2-8mm lens is an IR lens, while the 6-15mm lens isn't. Normal (good quality) lenses have special lens coatings which make all the colours of the rainbow focus at one point, even though they are at different wave lengths and normally wouldnt. This makes the picture much sharper. This process can be done for Infra Red lighting also, so that all the visible light colours plus infra red light all focus on the same plane (the CCD). You can try manually focussing the lens when it moves into night mode, but that also means refocusing for colour mode. Your pictures will never be as sharp in night mode however, due to there always being a mixture of visible and infra red lighting. The lens can not simultaneously focus both. I think it would be best to just buy an IR lens.

Hi, I'm using a 1/4 inch superhad day/night camera. For my dark street I really do need a larger format camera, but for now this will have to do with an IR illuminator. I have the illuminator mounted at the front of the base of my dome. Last night was the first time I've tried the setup with the illuminator, and it wasn't very successful, as It's set to activate on motion and I has around 400 false recordings due to moths flying in front of lens and being illuminated by the IR light. I hadn't' even heard of this problem before, but if you've experienced it, what did you do to overcome it? I'm thinking of mounting the IR light maybe 2 feet away from the camera to the right of it, and hope that's enough to keep the moths from being detected, but then I wounder if that will introduce shadows due to the camera and illuminator not being aligned together.

That is interesting. ok I won't guinea pig with my new (2nd hand) ptz dome. i might see what damage I can do to an old black and white CCD 1/3 inch camera , though it does have a infra red filter, and I can't see how I can easily remove it to replicate a day/night camera in night mode.

Can anyone comment on the effectiveness of Green lasers in destroying a CCTV CCD in night mode (infra red filter removed) or just disabling it? When lasers are discussed as a security issue by the media, interfering with CCTV's is often one of the 'laser pointers are evil' reasons given for why their availability should be restricted. But I don't know that this is actually even true. My current camera doesn't have any problem with headlights or other small points of lights overriding the exposure, I'd like to think green lasers wouldn't cause it a problem either. I have a green laser, but as I only just bought my dome camera I don't want to shine lasers at it, without knowing for certain that it cant' be harm'd by them.

That's a good idea about bouncing the light, Neighbours house is in the perfect position for that, unfortunately they don't have a glossy white or cream house, but yellow. I"ll check how that goes though. Yeah I'm looking about for a new camera. Would rather just add B&W camera and run them at the same time with the B&W just set to record at night. I figure you then get the sensitivity and detail with the B&W, but the colour might be useful still if you needed to get the colour of a car, which may illuminate itself due to reflected light from the head lights.

yeah it's 1 real camera and 3 fakes, so anyone watching the lens cant' tell where it's pointed. It's the equivalent of tinting a dome to mask where it's pointed, but you don't lose any light sensitivity with the clear dome/fake lens approach. I've got video of one of those cameras moving, and they look pretty cool.

Now that i've tested 1/4" and 1/2" day/night cameras, I think 1/4 inch are pretty useless in dark situations without infra red lighting. 1/2 inch PTZ cameras wont' ever be a dome camera but as long as the obvious movement of the camera is not a detriment in any way I think it's so much preferable. I was able to use my 1/2" day/night camera on moonless nights at no more than 4x 'sens up' , giving good exposure in a dark street. Now that i'm using a 1/4 inch day/night. i'm forced to use 6x Sens up, AGC on HIGH, and still the picture isn't as light as the 1/2", and this is with a moon out, I think 1/2 moon. Just stay away from 1/4inch CCD for day/night cameras would be my advice to you, unless you're going to be using infra red illuminators that can cover all of you surveillance area. Just remember 1/3inch CCD's absorb twice the light of a 1/4 inch CCD and 1/2inch CCD's absorb 4x the light of a 1/4inch. I think domes are crap for external night time situations, unless there's some form of good illumination.

Hey, WV-CS85* owners, I've only got this camera recently, and i've noticed a flaw with presets, and that is that AGC and 'sens up' values are always off in the preset value. As i'm currently using this camera as a day/night camera with 'automatic home' and 'automatic roaming' this is big, and annoying issue considering they are 1/4inch CCD cameras so without 'sens up' and AGC they are useless as night mode cameras. Just interested to know if other owners experience the same problem or weather my dome might be slightly faulty? Just to reiterate, whenever you choose a preset position, even if the preset position was set while in night mode with sens up and AGC on, the camera will never activate AGC or sens up, when moving to the preset position, you must press a PZT movement key, for the camera to activate sens up and AGC.

You can get get 4 cameras running on 1 network cable, as there are 4 twisted pairs and each camera only needs 2. You could set up the network cable running between the cameras in a 'daisychain like' configuration, terminating the cable at the first camera, with 75ohm balun for that camera coming form 2 wires, and a network socket for the pass through of the 6 remaining wires. You continue the cable run from the first camera doing the same for the remaining cameras. Then 'daisy chain' up a cable for power. If cameras are 24V, you could have 3 cameras plus power on the cable. If you were using motorised devices then I think you need a separate thicker gauge wire, as even my little panasonic dome uses 15w, so 4 cameras is 60w, that's 24V-ac at 2.5amps which would not give you much distance at all (I think).

I find with my panasonic dome you get a quite useable picture up to 22x optical 5x digital (110X). The panasonic DSP appears to use real time digital iinterpolation to get higher resolution then you would expect at such digital magnification. The full 10x digital (220x zoom) is pretty worthless. 300x zoom (30x optical) 10x digital zoom, is very common now with domes. That sort of zoom has been around for many years with video cameras but they use a smaller CCD, so was more affordable to produce due to cheaper optics.

Thanks for that. Thanks to ZMXtech for his software too.

HI, When you use a 'sens up' value more than 2x, the panasonics no longer do auto focus, you have to manual focus, but panasonic hardware controllers also have a 'auto focus' button that you press which focus's automatically on whatever you're looking at, and then disengages back to manual focus. Would you know what the code is for 'auto focus'.

yeah BLC is on. I had noticed in videos I'd seen of cameras in night mode they'd tend to have a compressed dynamic range. like everything from black to white compressed into shades of grey, without there being pure white or saturated black. I think you've convinced me there's something not quite right with this.

I've been trailing a camera down in the garden that's located further away from the street than this camera but it's to the furthermost right of my property and aimed at the street where the driveway is, so it has a good angle with a telephoto lens to read numberplates. It's a colour camera, witch AGC turned off, for maximum resolution. The negative is that I can only read the rear number plates as i'm relying on the vehicle to provide the illumination. Luckily I live in a cul-de-sac so there's one 1 way in and out. It's an old 1/2 inch panasonic. Maybe it's working ok , but just old technology. It is not a wide dynamic range camera. I've tried it with AGC turned off, but the image is not bright enough. The reason I blame long wave length infra red light is because I"ve noticed anything that is hot looks ridiculously bright and large with the camera. Weather it be a person smoking a cigarette, lighting a match or the lights of a car. I have a old low resolution black and white box camera with infra red filter, and it doesn't have the problems with hot objects blowing out as this camera does in night mode.

Yeah it can be switched, but I don't monitor with it, it's just records on motion. Colour mode (superhad) is not sensitive enough in my location at night. Night mode is sensitive enough but gets destroyed by head/tail/stop lights of cars. So I think the best option is to forget about the night mode, and buy a Good quality B&W camera for night use.

Yeah I think I might try and find a high resolution high sensitivity 1 inch B&W CCD camera and use it along side the 1/2 inch day/night camera in Colour mode. The B&W camera recording at night only. I think you then get the best of both. Good night performance for scenes not containing bright incandescent lights with B&W camera, and the colour camera for dealing with bright incandescent lights that blow out the picture of a day/night camera in B&W mode. I think the basic problem with day/night cameras is that they remove the infra red filter completley in night mode. High quality Black and white cameras still have an infra red filter, it's just allowing more of the spectrum in than the a colour camera.

I used to love the sound of day/night cameras until I actually got one. I use it for security of home but also keeping an eye out on scum casing the street in cars or just doing stupid stuff in cars. And that's the problem i've found with infra red mode and Cars. Because their stop lights/ head lights put out so much heat it completely destroys the picture. If you're trying to gather evidence relating to moving cars at night I think you'd do better with a colour camera. I posted this video to demonstrate. The first part of this video shows my day/night camera while it was still in colour mode 4x sens up (slow shutter) and HIGH AGC. It's a dark street so you can't see much detail of the car but you can see it's basic shape. Soon after the camera moves into infra red night mode and higher sensitivity so less AGC and higher shutter speed, and you can see how ridiculous the pictures are of my neighbour driving up the street and her parking her car in the diveway. It looks like some supernova star exploding or at least a high beam of headlights shinning into the camera, but it's actually just her brake lights as she slowly drives up her driveway. But it can be seen the brake lights completely obliterate the picture, and any evidence that you wanted to record. I would like to get a good ex-view camera and see how that goes instead. The problem with heat from car lights completely destroying the picture is something I can't live with, especially when the target often is the car. Video of example of colour mode at night and infra red mode at night. I think the colour mode is preferable as far as evidence gathering. http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=4pUWzv0on_o

So has anyone got their Panasonic domes to work with Pelco-P? I think i've got mine wired up properly and power going to my rs485 adapter, but I have no communication. does anyone know of any software or has any software that does the Panasonic protocol? This thread states VidiGuard does Panasonic protocol, but it only does Pelco-D, Pelco-P and CTNCOM. Maybe Panasonic objected to the use or something. I've posted a picture of the setup menu that comes up when you switch the camera on but I don't think that show any glaring fault with the setup.

thanks for that reply. I shall get out the multi meter and check my card as well.