In The Trenches Video Series
Motion Detection & Security Camera Systems How Motion Detection Cameras Work
In this episode we break down, how motion detection works, what settings you can change, how it compares to video analytics, notifications, and so much more.
Our speakers today is: Michael Bell
Where was that particular item? Okay, let me box that off, and it's really easy to find the footage for that particular event because something was added or removed. It's usually pretty simple to find that way as well.
Ben Larue:
Nice. Bruce stole my sandwich again. Come on Bruce. Bruce, if you're listening, sorry. Hey everyone, thanks so much for joining us again for another session of In the Trenches Roundtable. Today's session is going to be another feature focus, today specifically we're we're going to be diving into motion detection, motion recording, all things motion. So we're excited about this one especially because it comes up all the time, it's like one of the first- I bet you if you Googled most asked questions about security cameras, motion would be on top of that list, so I'm excited. We've got another awesome panel of experts here with us today. We've got, of course our technology manager and director James Campbell.
James Campbell:
Hey you everybody.
Ben Larue:
Awesome. We've got our support manager, Michael Bell.
Michael Bell:
Hello.
Ben Larue:
Beautiful. And last but certainly not least, we have our CEO Matthew Nederlanden.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Hey everybody.
Ben Larue:
Great. And I'm Ben, your host here for these In The Trenches Roundtable. Again, super excited. So I think first we should probably start with what is motion detection and do all of our cameras actually offer it?
James Campbell:
Yeah, I guess I'll grab that. So motion detection as it implies, is a technology that detects motion within a camera. So it is supported on all of our cameras, so any camera that you get is going to have this basic motion detection function. And to dive a little deeper into it, the way this sort of works is we've got the camera is looking, not necessarily for a specific thing, it's not looking for a person when it's using motion detection, it's not looking for vehicles or anything specific like that. So any extreme pixel changes or any pixel changes is how it actually works, will set it off. So to go into a little bit more detail is, imagine that you're in outside and you get a whole bunch of trees waving in the wind, that's going to detect motion for that camera. So it's a very basic function and it is supported on all of our cameras.
Ben Larue:
Does the camera only send its video feed to the recording device if motion is detected or how does that even work in the first place?
Michael Bell:
I can tell you. That's based on the recording schedule that's preset within the recorder. So I would say a good 99% of our customers, they record either full-time or motion. It's kind of split between the two on those two, but you do have to set that schedule and of course set the settings for the motion to pick up what you're looking to pick up.
James Campbell:
Just to add on to that, out of the box, all of our NVRs are set to record constantly, and the motion is set up but it's generally set up on 100% coverage and 100% sensitivity. So I think that probably brings us into talking about what we can do to actually change the motion potentially.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Well, what are those terms? Motion sensitivity, what does that even mean?
James Campbell:
So sensitivity is going to either reduce or increase the amount of detections you're going to get in a simple term. The grid on the other hand, you can see here, the grid is based on the detection area. So basically anywhere there's a grid within this box, in this live view image we're seeing, it's going to detect motion. So there's plenty of situations where you want to tweak that motion grid, imagine you have across the street and you don't want to see when people are going in and out of your neighbor's building, you want to keep it centered on your own building. So you would adjust it there and exclude your neighbor's area from motion detection grid, therefore no longer getting motion recording based on that. So those are your two real setting changes you can do for motion.
Ben Larue:
Hold the phone though, am I hearing that motion detection is really based off of pixels changing? Why do they even call it motion detection then?
James Campbell:
Good question.
Matthew Nederlanden:
If you think about it, a tree waving in the wind is in fact motion, it is something moving, and an advanced analytic that determines if somebody is crossing a line or entering and staying in an area, like some of our VCA things, they're very helpful at figuring out when something meets that criteria, but they're not necessarily going to accomplish every goal that you're going to have. So let me tell a funny story. As part of our new platform Surveil, we have this analytic that tells if there's people, but we had, it wasn't a person, it wasn't a vehicle and it was definitely a thing that came onto the property, but it was a bear. So that's not a person, it shouldn't be recognized as a person within the analytics, it's definitely not a vehicle, but I still need to know about it, they could have damaged the property. So you want to still have this sort of other category and that's really where motion is super valuable. Something's moving, we're not necessarily saying what it is, but it's a way of filtering and finding the footage that doesn't fit into other places.
James Campbell:
On the flip side though, yeah sometimes it's going to show you the bear and then sometimes it's going to show you, for example, if you have it in a indoor environment where usually motion detection does pretty good because there's a little less noise, there's not bugs going in front of it, which you deal with at night with motion detection. But usually you don't have that indoors, but for example, it detects as motion for indoor environments is turning on and off the lights, that completely changes the pixels on the camera from these are pretty dark right now to very bright and then that sets off a detection. Cameras are getting a little smarter as time goes on like the ones that have some of the- The VCA function can actually exclude that, they know when- Okay, now too much of it's actually changing, we know it's something like the light changing, but the basic one that most people use and it actually rely on doesn't have that function.
Michael Bell:
And there's a lot of times where somebody is not going to notice what is moving in that image. So it could be a fan on the ceiling that just ever so slightly reflects, you might have removed the fan out of the way, but yet there might be a lamp that's reflecting off the fan and that reflection of the light is going to the wall. So it's like it's seeing something blowing or moving or that it thinks it's moving, so things like that, and also maybe an LED on a piece of electronic that just flashes every now and then, that's going to be picked up as motion.
Ben Larue:
Wow.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Anything that's sort of creating pixel change.
Michael Bell:
Correct.
Matthew Nederlanden:
So one of the most common things outside that creates a lot of motions is cloud coverage, cloud going in front of the sun and then so it's going lighter and then it's going darker again, that's going to create motion event because something is changing, and visually the camera doesn't know the difference, it sees something is changed about the image.
Michael Bell:
Shadows on the ground is a perfect example of that. So you might have removed a tree out of your motion detection but when the sun hits a certain time of the day that tree is going to have a shadow on the ground and the wind blows that shadow moves.
James Campbell:
So just I think even just to wrap that up a little bit, light is pixel changes, light is motion to motion detection. So you wouldn't normally think about, for example, let's say a computer's monitor turns on as being motion, but if that's going to light up the room, it's going to detect us motion. So any kind of light changes are motion to motion detection, not ideal for most people, but that's a reality of that technology.
Ben Larue:
So can you set up alerts based on motion detection, would you even want to? Sounds like you'd get a lot of alerts.
Michael Bell:
Yes, I do see a use case for it, most of the time it's going to be on an indoor camera whenever it might be a more secure area or more of an area that you need to be made aware of something is in there. Outdoor, I would absolutely say no. I mean, in the wintertime we have to worry about things like snow setting off motion detection in the summertime we have to worry about bugs setting off motion detection, and springtime, rain, fall, leaves, there's always going to be something outside that can set off motion. Now, don't get me wrong, I do say motion is great for your recording but use your VCA options if they're available on your particular camera for sending you a notification. The intrusion detection is one of my favorites and we have another video that you can watch on that but you have a lot more control over what you get notified of.
Matthew Nederlanden:
I think an important distinction here is to talk about why do we have a security camera system to begin with? And we have two needs that we need to accomplish from having a security camera system, we need to be alerted when something is worrisome, potentially a bad issue and VCA is going to fit that role a lot better than motion. But we also need to not miss anything and when we're recording make sure that we're recording any time it's even possible.
So consider it a system of escalations, if you wanted to make sure that you never miss anything whatsoever, 24/7 is your best option, but if you want to have a little bit longer data retention, make that hard drive space last a little longer, you can filter out the stuff where there's no light changes, there's no movement, et cetera, and limit that down to maybe save half of your recording space. That'll save a lot, and it'll lower your cost and a hard drive cost of getting a security security system substantially, but you don't want to miss anything. So motion is there as a fail safe, a make sure that I never miss when something is of concern, and VCA is really what you want to use to give you... Video content analysis is really what you want to use when you want a good alert that yo know is is meeting a criteria.
Michael Bell:
And just to build off of what Matt was saying about how you're recording, you can still record 24/7 and have your motion events be seen by the camera and it'll put a little marker in your 24/7 recording, that motion happened here. So it'll show blue is your 24/7 recording, and then red as when a motion event happened, and then you can even add a tag for this VCA event, which I believe that one's purple. James might correct me on that one but I believe it is purple. So you can see that VCA event happened at this time on the timeline. So if you are a person who does need to record 24/7, awesome, the camera and the NVR are going to help you find where an event happened because of the other settings that you have already set.
James Campbell:
I think going back even a little bit further when we're talking about motion, you and me talked about the snow, everything like that and that's all true for sure. So one of the things you have to evaluate when it comes to if you're are considering doing any kind of notifications is the scene that the camera's looking at. Maybe you could get away with a motion detection camera if it's in a tight area and you know that it's... Yeah, you're probably going to get some false notifications but if you can control a varifocal camera, it's probably going to be a better pick for those because you can set specifically, "I want to see the doorway, not necessarily everything else that's in between it." So you can have a greater area to look at or a smaller area to look at so you can just see that doorway instead of the light over here and the light-
It definitely can help in that regard too, and that's why the indoor ones generally are a lot better with notifications because if you have it in a secure room like a closet or something that nobody should be in, the light's not turning on and off all the time, it's going to only detect when something actually is happening in there that you may want to know about. So just to go back and talk about what you're seeing, it matters. And a general surveillance camera, a big wide one, that you're going to put on the side of the buildings, not usually the best case for motion and detection alerts.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Think about on the flip side, something like a server room or where you expect to always have the lights on, always have the server running, something like a data center, fantastic application of something like motion detection for an alert. Nobody should be in here, if there is some sort of motion that's happening, I need to know about it quickly, and I've got a really stable environment with assistant lighting and limited access, et cetera. This actually could work really well for getting an alert based on motion.
But on the flip side, the vast majority of time, especially with the way that we typically advise of putting cameras near your entry points, and outside and watching access for how concurrent somebody intrude into the building, not going to be tremendously effective from an alerting perspective. You probably want to have some sort of additional analytic on top of that that's giving you the alerting function that you need. But from the perspective of a business owner, you can't miss anything, you have to be able to record any time that there's activity. You need to be able to record that, have it, so if you requested it, or if the police are involved or HR is involved, you can absolutely say, "Whoops. I guess the analytic didn't detect that that happened today.
James Campbell:
I think that brings up one of the best questions. When was doing pre-sales all the time, one of the first questions I get, "Is motion actually sensitive enough?" And I'd have to pretend I'm not chuckling on the other line and be like, "Of course, yeah, 100%. Trust me, it's going to be very sensitive, it's going to detect anything and everything if you keep that sensitivity very high." But most people assume it's going to miss things because it's not lik the... As we're mentioned, this is a digital enhancement, there's nothing physical within that camera that's doing any kind of motion detection. So there's no passive infrared, a PIR sensor within there, that if you cross it the wrong way, it's not going to set off.
A lot of people see their motion lights on their house and they think, "That one works maybe 50% of the time. I sometimes have to go like this in front of the screen or in front of it to make it turn on the light while I'm walking my dog." And they think that's probably going to be very similar, but in reality it's totally different and it is very sensitive. I would say 99.9% of the people we talk about with motion detection, they want to lower down the sensitivity. So just as a clarification there.
Michael Bell:
And it is one of those things that once you set it, don't forget about it, check your recorded footage in a couple of days just to make sure that you are picking up or maybe you're not picking up what you're looking for. So edit your sensitivity, edit your grid, it's very worth it.
Ben Larue:
That's awesome.
James Campbell:
And you can do that in steps, like he's saying, don't go from 100, which is the max sensitivity down to 10 in one big drop because then you may potentially be missing some things. So imagine somebody's just walking straight to the camera, and they're a hundred feet away, and they're walking and a hundred sensitivity... And every camera's going to have based on the lens, and resolution and everything like that, so it's a very broad thing. Don't quote me please, but somebody detects it at 80 feet away.
Matthew Nederlanden:
You're on video.
Ben Larue:
That's what the point of this is, is to quote you.
James Campbell:
I'll edit it. But if somebody's 80 feet away and it's detecting it at a hundred sensitivity, it may only detect them once you set it to 10, at 20 feet away. So that brings up one of the key things I don't think we talked about yet, is the pre and post record setting for motion.
Ben Larue:
But before we jump into that real quick, James, let's talk about the distance because you just said sensitivity plays with distance and we've got some cameras that can see really far. Walk me through that, if I got a camera that sees a thousand feet away, can I get motion detection a thousand feet away?
James Campbell:
It's a good question, because everything's relative to the camera. So why does it detect a hornet flying next to the camera, bug that big? That's not a big item, but when it gets in front of that camera and it's taking up 80% of the view, that's a huge object to that camera. And that's the same thing you got to think about as a person, how big is that person within that view? Is he 10 pixels wide, is he 50 pixels wide? And the bigger it is, the more likely it is to detect motion. So the further away somebody is, the more difficult it is going to be for it to detect it's actually motion, that's going to become noise because it's such a small object within the scene. So it's going to depend on are you having a 4K camera, that's probably going to be able to detect better than a 10 megapixel camera if they're at the same lens.
But then if you have a lens that's zooming in, gets into a very big deeper conversation about being able to see things from distance, at that point you really need to look at the lens over the resolution. So if you are trying to see somebody 400 feet away, you need to grab one of our PTZs, or our archer camera or the sharp shooter camera, put it on your building and zoom in. And otherwise it's not going to detect even that a hundred percent sensitivity at that kind of distance away.
Ben Larue:
Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I feel like we get asked that a lot, so that's good, thanks for clearing that up.
Michael Bell:
Play with the settings, make it work for you.
James Campbell:
But can I go back to the pre and post record?
Ben Larue:
Please, tell me all about this.
James Campbell:
All right. The way motion recording actually works is it detects and then the NVR is actually constantly recording. So it goes back on the constant recorded footage and says, "Okay, we don't need this, this and this." And it scrubs it away. So it has the ability to actually go back in time before the motion initially detected and grab up to 60 seconds of footage before it. So that way if that person's walking towards you and did something 80 feet away that you didn't quite catch, the motion detection pre-record is actually going to grab that last 60 seconds of footage if you set it in 60 seconds. So number one, obviously as we're-
Matthew Nederlanden:
Let me interject you and pause here because I think there's somewhat of a distinction difference between the cameras you might see that are consumer based, so they usually have a PIR sensor. PIR sensor, passive infrared, it doesn't turn the camera on until it detects motion. So it's got this little, almost like an alarm motion detector inside the camera and then it starts recording when it detects motion, that's the way that Ring or any of those consumer cameras work. So what motion detection does in this paradigm for a consumer grade product is it turns the camera on when it finds motion. This is not what a business class product is, what a business class product does. It records all the time and then it determines the motion filter to function kind of like a garbage collector. What video can I go delete to maximize your storage so that you only have to retain the data that matters to you.
And this has huge benefits. So first off, you can get, like what James is talking about, pre-recording. So you can say, "Motion occurs at one minute and 30 seconds in and I want it set give me 10 seconds before that." It keeps from one minute 20 seconds in. It can do that without a problem because it isn't turning on when it detects motion. This is way different than this sort of consumer grade product, which doesn't even fire up the camera usually because that's battery powered, you want to save the battery, it doesn't even turn the camera on until it finds that motion. This is a business class product so it does something very different.
James Campbell:
That's a great distinction. The PIR sensor is again, what we're talking about with probably your motion lights are set up by, and that's the one that sometimes you have to go, "Hey, I'm here." And that's why there's a lot of that skepticism when we talk about motion detection, because there is the assumption that it's based on that, in that the cameras are going to turn on, like he's saying if the cameras are constantly streaming, they're constantly live with our professional grade stuff and the recording is constantly until it realizes it no longer needs it.
Michael Bell:
And just to add real quick, the post recording and pre-recording is set at 10 seconds by default on motion. So I believe that, like James said, you can go up to 60 seconds. So one minute on the prerecord and I believe it's up to five minutes on the post record.
James Campbell:
Yeah. So that's customizable and that's on a per camera basis too. So you may have specific cameras where you go, "This one's a really important camera, I really want to make sure that I'm getting the maximum." And actually even just to go back even a little bit further, every camera has its own record schedule period. So you can set one camera to motion and then one camera outside. So if you really are, "I need this camera 24 7, I really can't take that risk of missing anything." You can turn it on constantly, still use that motion detection like Michael said earlier, and then have another camera that's just set on motion only. So that is on a per camera basis, as well as the pre and post record. So if you have a camera that you need to adjust the pre or post record, you can do it just for that one camera you don't have to do on all of them.
Michael Bell:
Yeah, and just to add into that as well, the schedule will allow you to set a hour by hour schedule and day by day. So we have a lot of schools that they'll set a full-time recording during school hours and then motion only after and before school hours. So that way they're saving a ton of hard drive space for the downtime and over the weekends, but just in case somebody is in there it's going to pick it up because motion's going to pick up that movement of somebody actually being in the school, but yet during the school day, usually for safety, it's recording that entire time.
Ben Larue:
Gotcha, makes sense. Talk to me about resetting. Does it have to reset, if there's motion going on for an hour? Does it take that whole hour clip or?
Michael Bell:
Yeah, if something's moving in front of it's going to record. We have people all the time who call in saying, "Hey, I don't see anything happening." But when we look at the footage, it's a solid red line and it's showing a tree blowing in the wind because it had a stormy day, and that tree unfortunately was not removed out of the grid. So that tree just going... It's solid red line, it's hard to find anything in something like that.
Ben Larue:
Right.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Let's talk about that again, going to where are people getting this idea of it needs to reset. They're getting it again from this consumer grade camera. So let's talk about, I'm sitting on my porch, and I own a consumer grade camera, and it's on my front door, and I'm out there and I'm just sipping a cup of coffee. What's going to happen to that camera? Well, that camera has got a battery, say rated for a year, like your a UV products. And if I sit out there in front of that camera and I drink a coffee for an hour, it's not going to be rated for a year anymore. It's suddenly just burned through an hour worth of recordings. When it says it's rated for an hour, it's expecting like, hey, three times a day somebody's going to come in and out, the mailman's going to come at some point, so I'm going to have four recordings at 30 seconds each.
So these consumer grade products usually have this sort of refractory period where they can't record again. And this is the design so that you don't record yourself sitting having that cup of coffee, and run at a battery and have to change your battery all the time. So it doesn't record a new clip for a huge time, and this is how you end up with something like a year worth of battery. It's a complicated product that has to record something and that's one of the most battery intensive things you can do, and it's basically got a little laptop battery, lithium ion and battery in it. So in order to maximize that battery life, you have to create this time period where you should stop and say, "Hey, I just recorded don't record again for X time period."
Usually within the UI of these battery powered cameras, you can set that, you can set it bigger or smaller, but a business class product doesn't have that need at all because it's already powered. So if it has 24 hours of straight motion, let's say you're recording a river, well, it's going to have both motion the whole time, it's always moving, and it'll just stay on the whole time, and it'll have an hour long or it's 24 hours of pure motion and that's what you got. And that's one of the advantages of this sort of business class product is it doesn't have those limitations that we're used to within consumer grade products.
Ben Larue:
Gotcha, makes sense.
James Campbell:
And actually even, there is, when you're asking about a reset time or something like that, that does actually even in the professional cameras kind of go into effect a little bit because you're talking about the post record. So imagine somebody's in front of the camera and then they go away from the camera for the post record, as we said earlier, 10 seconds by default they go away for 11 seconds, that clip is now stopped, that is now a complete clip, that's all you're going to get. If you're only recording on motion, that's all you'll see. If he goes back into there and five seconds later, that's going to be a brand new clip. So it's going to create multiple clips for that one clip, one incident I should say, so you'll have multiple clips for that.
Now, if they're constantly on that camera and it's constantly detecting motion, let's say that person's in front of this camera for five minutes, then you're going to get one five minute clip out of that. Of course you can clip in segments if you want to, but if you are pulling a full clip and they keep going in out of the camera, in the camera, out of the camera, in the camera, you may end up getting multiple clips out of that. So sometimes increasing the post record can help in that situation to take it from a different perspective.
Ben Larue:
Nice. Helps clean things up a little bit, I think. I had one more question. Earlier we talked about being able to filter through recording with using the motion down at the bottom of the scroll bar. Is there a way, if I know that motion took place in this camera, but in a certain area of the camera view, I didn't want to see the other area. Can I search for stuff like that? You mentioned a little bit about the grid blocking, I don't know if that has to come into play, but I was just curious.
James Campbell:
Yeah, one of my favorite little underrated features is the smart event playback. So this is available on a couple different UIs, I usually do it on ViewStation mostly, but basically what that is, is it knows where the motion being detected based on probably a file or something like that, but you draw the grid after the fact. So if you didn't set up the grid, which most people honestly don't, you can still go back and draw a certain area, adjust the sensitivity and then do a search based on that. So if you had an incident and you're really not sure when it happened, you just know it's in this certain area, "Hey, when did somebody grab this box?" And you can go back and you can draw it around the box and then do a search and it's going to further narrow down what you actually have to review in order to actually see, "Okay, yep, at three o'clock somebody moved the box." So that is a feature that's standard on NVRs as well.
Ben Larue:
Nice. And you'd have to have motion recording set up to bail you in the future?
James Campbell:
I do believe you have to have it on, I'm not sure. For example, if you do exclude part of the grid, I think it still is technically putting it in and a file to detect there but actually let me go back a little bit. So if you are recording only on motion still, and you want to go back and see when something was in that area where there wasn't detecting motion, that clip may be completely gone. So it's not going to be able to bring back footage from the dead like that, but if there is already something in that area and it was already recorded, it can detect based on that, if that makes sense.
Ben Larue:
Definitely does.
Michael Bell:
Yeah. And on the smart search, I find it best when something has been added or removed from that camera's image to where was that particular item, let me box that off. And it's really easy to find the footage for that particular event because something was added or removed, it's usually pretty simple to find that way as well.
Ben Larue:
Nice. Bruce stole my sandwich again. Come on Bruce, geez. Bruce, if you're listening, sorry. Come on, stop stealing the sandwiches. Awesome, I think that's super helpful. I think motions, it's great if used in the right ways and especially used in conjunction with other features that the cameras offer.
James Campbell:
Yeah. Actually mentioned that we do have that full video on intrusion detection, but all of our cameras by standard, I think maybe besides the fish eyes, which are a different story, which I also have a video on, but all of them standard support intrusion detection, some of our eight megapixel ones and you can ask us and we'll give you which ones support what, but also can support it based on detecting a person or a vehicle within the intrusion detection area as well, and most of our cameras support line crossing, which is another analytics. So these are generally better for getting notifications with because there's a lot more grounds to specify what's there, and sensitivity options and different-
Ben Larue:
More control.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Michael Bell:
Are you going to have links to all the videos below?
James Campbell:
We will, yeah.
Michael Bell:
Awesome.
Ben Larue:
You heard it here first folks, links all descriptions in the video below.
James Campbell:
And we conclude, the way I would frame motion detection, it's awesome, and I think a lot of people when they rely only on motion detection get a little disappointed and then we can introduce those analytics of course, but it's because it's amazing at being able to save hard drive space. So saving that money, getting half the hard drives that you necessarily might need if you're using constant recording.
It makes it a little easier to find through footage, of course you're going to have some noise with motion detection, it's not all going to be clips, but it's definitely a lot better than having to sit there and look at 24/7. And then I think my favorite example we heard about was Michael when he's talking about the schools, that's the same thing for businesses. A lot of businesses know nine to five they're going to have people in and out, they don't really need to- They prefer recording constantly during that time, but then after hours nobody should really be there so they can just save that hard drive space or on weekends if they're not open. So that's the way I kind of frame motion detection.
Michael Bell:
I think some of our office cameras even here in the office are set up that way as well, maybe the radius is. It's just a great way to conserve you, you may not realize how much hard drive space you're saving until you actually do it.
Matthew Nederlanden:
I think one of the big distinctions that you may need to make any time you're dealing with any sort of computer vision or video analytics or with motion detection, is the most core piece, it's the most basic building block of any of those things is that you need to pick the right tool for the right job. So for example, there's a huge scuttlebutt in the US with people reacting to facial recognition. Facial recognition, fantastic at figuring out does my employee who just used the key card match the face of the person with that key card? Did somebody steal their key card? Great solution for that, it's not a very good solution for figuring out which one of 6.8 billion people on the planet committed this crime because a lot of us look alike. So having the ability to choose, when you have all these video analytic options such as intrusion or motion detection, line crossing, you need to pick the one that's the right tool for the right application.
Motion detection is the perfect tool for making sure you get your maximum from your hard drive space, it's not a super great tool getting you an alert. It's not a super great tool for figuring out does this matter to me from a security perspective, do I need to call the police? It's not the tool for that, it's a great tool for saving you hard drive space so that you can increase the amount of data retention for the dollar that you spent on your hard drives. And using it that way, you're going to have really good results with it, relying on it to send you an alert every time that somebody moves or anything moves is going to not give you a great result, it's not the right tool for that job.
James Campbell:
I think even to add on just a little bit more, is some people who maybe haven't experienced motion detection might go, "Well, I don't mind getting a couple of notifications that aren't quite what I care about." But the truth is, you're going to get hundreds of notifications throughout a course of a day if you're on a general surveillance camera outside. And eventually you may be able to stick up with that depending on how many cameras you have, how much time you want to spend on looking at those notifications, but for most people, eventually that all becomes noise. So even though you're getting notifications you're no longer responding to it, it's kind of like...
Michael Bell:
The boy who cried wolf.
James Campbell:
Boy who cried wolf, yeah, basically. So eventually you just stop looking at those notifications and that's why just for anybody who's kind of wondering, "Oh, why is it such a bad idea to get all these notifications?" You really want to make sure the information you're getting to you is important and it's not the wind change, cloud went over the sun and you got a notification, you don't care about that. So you want to make sure that you're getting proper information at all times.
Matthew Nederlanden:
And we ran a test one time here where we turned on notifications for the system that we have in this property, and again, we have two buildings, we've got a residential renter, we've got some Airbnbs on campus, we've got 10 commercial tenants that are directly underneath me, and we had at the time, pre-Covid, everybody was in the office, we had something like 25 employees here. And we had within a month's time period something like 200,000 notifications just letting a rip roar, go in as crazy as it wanted to. And then a lot of that's because when you have a business people are here all the time, and they're moving, and they're making events and this is what James means by sometimes it feels like it's crying wolf. I don't need to know about all of those things like, "All right Ben's at his desk. Okay."
So having a different tool such as intrusion detections for your sensitive areas, or line crossing or having these notifications run only during the hours when you're closed, those sort of things, they do a lot at increasing your sanity in trying to figure out the system. You still need to record 24/7, I need to know during Ben's performance review, is he here, is he doing work? But I don't need to be notified all the time. So the idea of the notification and the recording, we should split those concepts a little bit.
Michael Bell:
And just to add on to that, there are times where the support team will speak with customers and they will say, "I definitely want this." And we're more than happy to set it up for them, but we will give them our honest opinion on, "You're going to call me next week and turn this off, because it is going to just be so many." Also one other thing that people need to look at, if you set up your notifications to come to you through your email, depending on how many notifications you're being your system is sending, you might max out your total email sending for the day. So that's something else to also look at.
James Campbell:
Yeah, most email providers have a daily limit, you can only send out X amount, I don't know exactly the number, and then you'll also have a monthly limit too, so you can only send out- And people with those noisy alerts are definitely going to hit those, and we've had customers hit them, and all of a sudden it just stops and they go, "Oh, something in the system's wrong." And Gmail, they're thinking you're spamming people.
Michael Bell:
But honestly, if somebody does want that set up, more than happy to help, more than happy to get that set up for them because there are some cases where people do need that and I'm more than happy to help them do it as long as they take our warning, "You're going to get a lot." When I say a lot, I mean a lot. We have one customer, I believe she was receiving minimum 400 emails a night because she lived in a warm climate so it's worth saying. So 400 a night, and I would throw my phone away, I'm sorry.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah, the limit on a paid account in Gmail is 10,000 per day and a free account is significantly lower than that. So this can be a problem, but honestly if you're sending that many notifications to begin with, there's no real way to review them. And that's the whole point of this, you should be getting an alert when it matters, not setting up to get so many alerts. This is an excellent tool to decide when I record and not an incredible tool, especially outside, to decide when I get an alert.
Ben Larue:
And I think it's important to cover that stuff because I think a lot of people have experienced that, and experienced tossing up motion, hitting a notification bell and regretting it later. So I'm curious, I'm going to ask the audience, let us know in the comments below the total number of notifications you've ever had the winner, we'll send you something a little special from SCW, so that'd be super cool.
Michael Bell:
Ooh, what are they going to get?
Ben Larue:
Surprise.
Michael Bell:
I might want one.
Ben Larue:
Surprise. Probably an autograph copy of our catalog, I'm just kidding. It'll be some t-shirt or something, we'll figure it out. But let us know the comments below, how many total notifications have you gotten from accidentally setting up motion notifications? Super curious on that. I think that does it for today, unless we're missing something big, I think we covered it all. When to use it, when to apply it, when it makes the most sense, what it actually means.
Michael Bell:
I do have something I might want to add in the trigger action section of your motion recording, so whenever you're setting up your motion, you can set a trigger action for that particular camera to start recording on other cameras as well. So if you have two cameras or maybe more looking in the same area, you can actually have that one camera tell others to record just in case they get the same area. So I've set that up quite a bit here recently, just to kind of throw that out there as a extra feature I guess that the motion can do. I have one other thing. Another action that you can do is you can set a motion event on a camera to trigger a PTZ to go to a certain preset. That is fun, that is super fun I like that one a lot, I think we use that one here.
James Campbell:
So actually the only way I've set that up would be a VCA because like we did it with the line crossing one on that PTZ, like the line cross PTZ went over because somebody, a vehicle crossed that line. I don't want every time motion there, it can happen, but that's again, probably another place where I'd say a VCA is a better option. But actually going back to that recording multiple cameras, the way I've seen that typically done is somebody will have an exterior camera right in top of their door and they want that camera to trigger the inside one that's looking down the hallway because they were trying to get more of a complete look at them as they opened the door and everything like that. And as they walked down the hallway, you know could probably get something similar at the pre-record too, but in this case, that's how the customer wanted to set it up and that's what we did.
Ben Larue:
Nice, right on. Well, I'm sure we could probably go on for a couple more hours if I just kept asking you what more, so I think that's a good place to stop for now. We've got some links to few past videos in the description below, so make sure you check out those for intrusion, some of those panorama cameras that were mentioned. And then of course all the resources will be linked below as well, feel free to reach us on the website, you can always contact us there as well. As Michael mentioned, support's happy to help, sales is happy to help, James in tech is happy to help, so we're super excited. Make sure you tune in next week, we're going to have an exciting one for you. Thanks so much for joining us today, see you later.