excessive hardrive usage on a geo gv-800

[jeromephone 6]

I have a gv-800 16 cam system that seems to be eating up way too much harddrive space 70 gig in less than 24 hrs I have the resolution at 240X480 6 frames max smart recording motion recording no audio. It is a busy location but during the evening the traffic slows way down. I have erased old files run db repair etc. Max file size is one minute. also running geo mpeg4 for compression.

 

customer is willing to go with bigger storage but I already have about 700gig with two 250 hd and a usb 250 gig external drive

[scottj 0]

Set your recording quality to Medium versus High is you have not done so as of yet. And the resolution you are set to sounds like 640x480, not 240x480 (thats would look strange). You should still be using about 50GB per day depending on the amount of camera movement being detected in the facility. Check your MD setiongs and make sure that you are not recording just changes in lighting etc. We typically start at about 5 (ona a scale of 1 to 10), then adjust if the camer is not detecting the zone we wish to cover. It really depends on the camera too on how you adjust this.

 

If you have the ability to mask off some of the areas (cars passing by etc.) from some of the cameras, that will help too.

 

Scottj

[Jasper 0]

I don’t know your situation, but I know from my own testing that huge video files will be created if you have a camera(s) that are pixelating, in low light for example.

 

Scott, Is there a noticeable drop in quality when reducing the recording quality high to medium?

[scottj 0]

Non at all to my eyes, maybe if you took the video and ran it through an AVID machine you might see a slight difference, but most people don't have an AVID system available to them for personal use.

 

Scott.

[jeromephone 6]

i have make some of the adjustments to the cameras as were suggested and will report back on how this helped with the space problem. What I discovered was that the traffic flow through this area is such that a persone walking in the door, checking in and sitting down will trip about 8 cameras. In the future I need to look at traffic flows when estimating hd space.

[TJCCTV 0]

I've had great experience with the GV-800s. The response about the camera pixelating is right on target.

 

First go through the history and see what camera(s) are using up huge amounts of space. Then try going to the screen where you check/set the masking on where it does and doesn't detect motion. Top left of that screen you will see a little yellow "running man" image that shows the times the camera is tripping to record.

 

Adjust the light / contrast back and forth and you will likely be able to see if the camera is pixelating. It may need replaced.

 

You may find that there is something inframe that is constantly moving, as in a display, flickering florescent lights, anything that it is picking up as movement that you can have moved, repaired, or masked so the camera will ignore it when determining motion.

 

Hope this helps.

TJWiz

[iseeu 0]

As you stated you have Smart recording active this will run the recording rate of the card. Disable Smart recording!

[Guest]

For analog DVR system with H264 storage I usually have a thump rule when calculating storage:

 

1 Week recording 16 Channels 4 CIF 12,5FPS Motion Detection in a retail store with 8 000 customers thruout the week. Opening hours 8 - 22 (14 Hours) 6 days a week. = 500GB

After a week or so we go back to customer for training and a fine tuning of the system, the tuning is that we will look over the recording log and look for video being recorded uneccessary like light reflex, outdoor motion, trees moving in the wind etc. This is not so much for saving space on the HDD, but more to save time for the customer when he wants to look for things on the playback so that he dosent need to sit watching a tree moving etc.

 

When you say that 8 cameras is recording when somebody is entering, I would suggest to disable motion detection in some of the cameras that are triggered by motion far away, if you have other cameras recording the same in a better quality why botther to have 6 more recordings of same, also see if you can adjust camera angels to get better view quality of the prime areas of that camera.

 

Due that today the HDD is pretty cheap we use 1TB anyway.

 

Also in the DVR software we are using we can adjust the size of an object before it triggers recording, in other words a person walking towards the camera will not trigger recording before it is within the limit we set.

 

 

 

JD