Motion Detection Security Cameras

Record on Motion Detection, Continuously, or on Specific Types of Actions / Events

You can record your SCW cameras continuously, via motion, or even via VCA (video content analysis) events (like line crossing or intrusion detection).

You can create individual schedules for each camera, including hours for motion recording mode, hours for continuous recording mode, hours for event recording mode, or even hours when that camera is off completely.

You can Customize the Motion Detection Recording Areas

You can create inclusion areas (places where you care if there is motion) and define the rest as exclusion areas (places where you don't care if there is motion). So, for example, you could create a motion-based alert to notify you if someone was in your yard, but ignore them if they were on the sidewalk or in the street. You can also modify the sensitivity level so that more or less movement is required for the motion detection to trigger.

You can Customize the Specific Types of Actions / Events that Trigger Event Detection Recording

With this camera and an SCW Admiral or Imperial NVR, you can be alerted when your camera uses VCA (video content analysis) to detect people, objects, or vehicles that do specific things, such as:

Crossing over a line (aka tripwire) - Create up to four lines and determine what direction the line must be crossed. Ideal for door entry, parking lot entrances, and more.

Entering or Lingering in an area - Define up to four detection zones, set percentage of the zone, and time. Can be used as more customized motion detection or to alert for areas where there should be no loitering or parking.

Vandalism Detections: Defocus, Tampering, and Scene Change Detection - Set your system to alert you if a camera goes out of focus or detects tampering such as the image being blocked or if the scene changes dramatically, indicating the camera may have been physically moved.

Face Detection - Can detect and alert based on seeing a face. You can use the VCA search feature to show all faces captured during the day to easily pinpoint playback footage. Note: Face Detection detects a face but cannot log faces based on names or alerts based on certain faces. Labeling faces and alerting based on certain people is called “facial recognition.”

Audio Detection - Set a sudden rise, fall, change, or threshold volume. Can be used to detect loud noises, but also to monitor to make sure usually loud equipment is running and not stopped. Microphone required.

In addition you can search your video footage for these events* and run reports on the number of people, vehicles, or objects that enter and leave through an area.

*Each feature must be enabled and set up before it can be searched. Not all features can run at once. Not all cameras have all features.

Get an Email Alert when there's Motion or an Event

With this camera and an SCW Admiral or Imperial NVR, you can get email alerts of motion detection alerts or VCA events.

You can choose specific dates and times for these alerts to be active and other times for these alerts to be ignored.

Get Push Notifications on Our Mobile Apps

You can setup Push notifications for our SCW Go Application for Android and iPhone for motion or analytics events.

Push notifications are good supplemental notifications but should not be your primary method of security alerts. Many consumer-grade devices only have push notifications. This is a bad design for two reasons.

First, It is important to remember that Push notifications do not have a message received confirmation handshake the way that email does. This means that if a push notification is sent while your phone is out of reception or out of battery, there's no way to know that it wasn't received and there's no way to get it later.

Second, email notifications or FTP notifications provide a safe, independent location that stores a copy of motion detection images. This means that if your NVR is stolen, you have a copy of the last few images that triggered an alert.

Unlike Consumer Cameras, You Don't Miss Things when Recording on Motion

Many consumer-grade cameras use PIR motion sensors to trigger a camera to turn on when something gets close enough to the sensor. This saves battery life and costs less because they don't need as fast of a processor as video analytics-based motion detection. However, there's a major drawback to this design. There's a delay (0.5-3 seconds) that can cause the camera to not record what happened.

Contrast this with video analytics-based motion detection. Not only is there no recording delay but you can even record up to sixty seconds before the motion that triggered the event. With video analytics-based motion detection, the camera temporarily stores the video feed in a buffer for analysis. Then it watches the video for you to determine if motion or another video analytics event happened in the video. If motion or another trigger occurs, it stores the video on the NVR.

Don't miss out on important motion events. Go back in time, before the event, to understand why it happened.

P.S. the first image in this section above shows the back of the subject's head rather than the front because that consumer-grade PIR camera (Arlo) didn't turn on until the subject was leaving. In the second image, the video analytics camera captured the subject facing the camera because of the recording buffer.

With Our Motion Detection Cameras, You Can't Delete Footage - And That's a Good Thing!

Consumer-grade motion detection cameras are sometimes not usable in court. This is because the court system does not always accept camera footage from motion-based cameras that allow you to delete footage, which many consumer-grade cameras, especially wire-free cameras, allow you to do. The issue comes down to trust. If you only record on motion and can delete footage, then you have the possibility of deleting footage that presents yourself in a bad light.

Our cameras do not allow you to delete footage or manually disable recording (outside of a set schedule). When you export footage from our cameras, you won't be able to open it in a video editor either, to prevent the editing of footage. These safeguards are built in to protect you. They prevent your security camera system from presenting anything other than the full truth so that the courts will accept the footage.

These protections are incredibly important in a corporate environment where multiple HR or IT managers may have access to the device. It is very important that you don't allow semi-trusted individuals to be able to selectively delete footage that presents them in a bad light.

People Counting Statistics

Our NVRs can be set to track and record the number of people entering and leaving through an entrance (or cars or objects). You can view these stats on your NVR or download a CSV file to view it on your computer. People counting is a new feature in the industry and should be considered to be in the beta stage. It works reasonably well when mounted directly above a doorway, looking down. It is less accurate when mounted across a room and aimed at a doorway. People counting does not understand identity. It will not learn who you are. It will simply count someone entering, leaving, and then coming back again as two visits.

Discover the Use Cases, Best Practices, and Limitations of VCA: People Counting

Motion and Video Content Analytics (VCA) Smart Search

Save time reviewing footage by filtering and searching for events based upon video analytic criteria. Quickly review footage by filtering by motion detected in specific areas of the screen, by the face captured, by an intrusion into certain areas, or by line crossing. (Requires setting up these video analytic features in advance).

See how VCA Smart Search works