In The Trenches Video Series
Security Experts Discuss Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) in a security camera
In this series we're talking about what is Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) in a security camera and why does it matter?
Our speakers today are:
- > Matthew Nederlanden
- > Ben Larue
- > James Campbell
- > Michael Bell
Video Transcript
Matthew Nederlanden:
A porch often has a area that is very bright. You're going to see the sky, you're going to see potentially even the sun, and then a place where it's going to be more shadowy because the overhang from the roof is casting a shadow on the face of the person that's there and it's in fact that area that you want to secure the most. And that doesn't...
Ben Larue:
Everyone, welcome to another episode of In The Trenches Round Table Series. Today we're doing a feature focused episode and we're going to be focusing on the feature that is WDR. So we've got our awesome panel of experts here again with us today.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Howdy.
James Campbell:
Howdy.
Ben Larue:
Great. And we're just going to go ahead and get right started. So what is WDR? This is for anybody to answer.
James Campbell:
We should probably start by talking WDR, what does it even stand for?
Michael Bell:
Wide dynamic range.
James Campbell:
Yeah, wide dynamic range.
Michael Bell:
Sorry.
James Campbell:
You're fine. We're all excited about what WDR here. So you got wide dynamic range and what actually is it? So wide dynamic range is a feature. We'll talk about the differences than the different sites, but essentially it's a deal with the fact that we live in a world that has shadows and shadows and security don't always play good together. You don't want to get somebody's face and have it be all shadowy and dark, not be able to see who it is. So WDR works to counter the bright areas and the dark areas so that you can see people more clearly as they're on cameras or anything that's clearly on, more on cameras so you're not shadowy essentially.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah, so I mean shadows are even difficult in regular photography. You want to take... If you're taking a photo of a well lit space, you want to have the shutter and that's the thing that mechanically opens so the lens lets light in it, you want that open longer or you want that open shorter so it doesn't absorb and over brighten the image. So what WDR does is it literally takes two photos and then it stitches them together. It makes the areas that are dark taken with a longer shutter speed to let more light in. And then that sort of overlays that image on top of the areas that it took with a shorter shutter speed so that the what's behind the subject so the person in front of the window isn't all dark and the window isn't so bright that it is overwhelming towards the subject.
Ben Larue:
And what the difference -
Michael Bell:
And it does an amazing job at it too. I was impressed the first time I ever saw it and then I wound up using it on my own home system. It does a great job at it.
James Campbell:
Gotcha.
Ben Larue:
That was going to be my next question was, so it sounds like not only there's so many factors you've got to kind of consider when you're looking at surveillance cameras, where to place them, and it sounds like lighting is one of those things that you should be considering.
James Campbell:
Definitely to a degree, lighting is one of the most important things. So if you're an inside, you're inside, you have these nice big windows and everything like that, and inside you're sort of... You're lighting up the area with that natural light and it looks good for us and it's nice level of light, but for the camera it's seeing... You're trying to see what's going on inside that building and you're seeing that big bright light over there. And that's just too much of a difference in lighting for the camera to do well in. That's where having that WDR function is so important and picking a camera that does the true WDR, which we'll talk about versus the digital WDR is even more important, so.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Another really good example, and one that I know for sure that we have a version of is a porch. A porch often has a area that is very bright. You're going to see the sky, you're going to see potentially even the sun, and then a place where it's going to be more shadowy because the overhang from the roof is casting a shadow on the face of the person that's there and it's in fact that area that you want to secure the most. And that does mean that it's usually a difficult job to... For a camera to get a photo of somebody that's inside the shadow that's being created from the overhang from the roof. But that's where your security threat is. You don't really care about the guy walking around on the street or the guy that's walking or on the sidewalk. You care when they come onto your porch. And so same idea for a lot of spaces.
When you're dealing with surveillance, the places where you want to have a photo is typically where the inside meets the outside because you want to protect from intrusion and that usually means bright and dark contrast at the same time in the same image. WDR is a really important feature to have.
James Campbell:
I guess in terms of one thing that we should make clear too is that WDR is actually not on by default. You do have to actually enable it. So if you pull out your cameras and you're seeing kind of this, you go, "Wait a minute, I thought I got this WDR." You actually do have to enable it within the camera before it actually works. And that's in the image settings and under expo... Under that setting, so.
Michael Bell:
Image and I believe it's exposure.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Ben Larue:
So how do I know if my camera has WDR as this feature?
Michael Bell:
All of our cameras have WDR. Most of them have the true WDR, but every single camera that SCW currently carries has WDR on it.
Ben Larue:
Gotcha, gotcha. And we've been talking a little bit about, I've heard, I think Matt, Michael, and even James, I think you've all mentioned it at some point, this notion of true is I guess not true or can you guys help me understand that a little bit more?
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah, the contrast there is between true and digital. True is a hardware chip that's taking two photos. Digital is sort of after effects type software that's trying to do the image.
James Campbell:
So yeah, basically it comes to digital WDR. This is not a feature you want to rely on to get good shadow and bright balance there. It's not going to do what you need it to do. You want a camera with a true WDR because it does the two images at the same time. Everything like that and the effect of it is much, much greater. I do think it's important to notice too about WDR though, that it is something that adjusts as the day goes on. So it's like some people, you only have a shadow for two or three hours during the course of a day, right? You might be worried that if you turn WDR on it's going to be too bright or something like that. But it'll actually compensate itself with the [inaudible 00:06:37]. There's a DB rating on them that tells you what the range is. Most of our cameras are 120 DB that allows you to... It will adjust between that shadow level.
So instead of taking two, one really bright, one really dark, it will kind of make it the effect a little bit less, I don't know if it [inaudible 00:06:59] the right word, but a little less large and you can have a slider basically from level, I guess, one to 10 or something like... Somewhere around there where you can make that adjustment. And so you can make it to where it's more aggressive or less aggressive essentially.
Ben Larue:
What happens at nighttime?
James Campbell:
It's a good question. Mean even in nighttime image, WDR can be helpful in some situations now and you're going to be dealing... There's less shadows at night of course because you don't have the sun, but you can still have some shadows from different lighting sources in there. It depends on if your camera is going into night mode or if it's staying in day mode because you have enough ambient lighting around. So there's lots of different factors there. But that's a good question. Even with IR mode, you can potentially be dealing with shadows where it helps to compensate from a darker area and a brighter area depending on your ambient lighting.
Ben Larue:
All right. I'm curious too, if I'm understanding this correctly, WDR kind of helps eliminate some of the shadow nest that can happen when looking at the camera screen. And I know sometimes motion detection recording is based off pixel change. Does WDR or true WDR help eliminate the false positives of motion detection? Not so much?
Michael Bell:
Something like motion, not really, because it is based off of a pixel change. So any change in the pixels can set off something like motion. Now it might help with something more like in intrusion detection or line crossing, just because you're brightening up that area that might be super dark. So your person and the area aren't so much of the same color that you're not seeing that. So yeah, I can definitely see it making a big difference there actually.
James Campbell:
Yeah, for analytic, for any of those VCA functions, that definitely.
Ben Larue:
Where would you rank WDR in terms of a feature set a camera should have? Is this something that found... Shop it for cameras, I should definitely look for cameras to have this or?
James Campbell:
Absolutely, because you never know what the lighting is going to look like throughout the day. It's going to change, you can go outside right now and it's an overcast day for us. You might even hear the thunder, but it's an overcast day and the shadows are not too bad for me today, but... So if I'm sitting there and I'm evaluating my video and I say, "Hey, I don't really have too many shadows, maybe I don't have to spring for it." With us, almost all of our cameras have the true WDR as well. So it's like not like you have to pay additional in order to get it. So as you're looking, if you're comparing us to somebody else, make sure they do have the true WDR not the digital WDR because you're really comparing apples to a rotten apple really, I guess.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah, I think digital wide dynamic range is one of those industry terms that really should have died a long time ago.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Matthew Nederlanden:
It really does do something, but it's not a lot.
James Campbell:
No.
Matthew Nederlanden:
And it's so confusing and so close to true wide dynamic range, which does something that is a lot and the words are so close together and often there's so many things that when you put digital in front of them, it doesn't mean it's bad. A digital video recorder was an improvement upon a VCR. There's so many things where when you put digital in front of it, you're talking about improvement. This is not one of those things. This is a drastic reduction in quality if you're comparing something with true wide dynamic range versus something with digital wide dynamic range. It's very similar to the way that we talk about zoom, where a varifocal optical zoom camera is a thousand times better than digital zoom. And it ends up creating all this market confusion because somebody goes, "They both had zoom." Same thing is happening here. A lot of people say, "They both have wide dynamic range and this one's a little cheaper." They are not in any way the same.
James Campbell:
Not to be negative, but that is exactly intention of digital WDR. Some manufacturers probably wanted to say, "This camera has WDR. Look at it." And even though it didn't really have the true WDR function, I'm thinking, I'm not a hundred percent sure on this, but I'd imagine true WDR came first and then in order to make lower cost things seem better, they said, "Let's do this contrast and brightness adjustment thing on it." And then, "Look, we have WDR now too." And of course it's not a comparable function whatsoever. So I mean that's unfortunately probably where it came from. It sounds confusing and it sounds deceptive probably because it was, so.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yes, I completely agree with that.
Michael Bell:
Yep.
Matthew Nederlanden:
It's definitely a deceptive term.
Michael Bell:
Absolutely. Don't they call it HDR nowadays too? [inaudible 00:11:39]
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah, high dynamic range instead of wide dynamic range.
James Campbell:
Yeah, in the security camera world it's that. Unlike if you go and you, I grab and I take three pictures and I combine them together. And for photography it is called HDR. So yeah, little... Your phone will also call HDR if you're in HDR mode. So that's a good analogy actually, if you -
Matthew Nederlanden:
A lot of TVs have HDR mode now too.
James Campbell:
Yeah, if you have a smartphone and you're taking pictures and it's a nice little... You might have had two situations, you're at a beautiful sunset, you're trying to take pictures of somebody there and you bring up your phone and sun's all nice and bright and then the face is completely shadow. Now if you get a newer phone, phones are a lot more smart about doing something like WDR where it actually will take two pictures basically and combine them into one. And so that technology and that idea behind that is spread across multiple industries and everything like that. So if you've experienced that on your newer phone, you go, "Wow, that's so impressive. I can see the sunset and my face." That's a similar effect to what you're going to get with true WDR on a camera.
Matthew Nederlanden:
And just to be clear, there is a company out there that says they have true high dynamic range and this is not a thing, this is not a real thing. High dynamic range is a synonym for digital wide dynamic range. Wide dynamic range is physical hardware in a camera. So putting the word true on high dynamic range is exactly what James was saying earlier. It's just intentionally designed to be misleading. Yeah, because true wide dynamic range means a physical piece of hardware that's taking two different photos and high dynamic range just is a synonym for digital wide dynamic range. Putting true in front of it is just trying to hide what you made.
James Campbell:
That's marketing.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah, yeah,
Ben Larue:
Yeah. No kidding. Sorry, one more question about products and just how this all works. So you mentioned that almost all, I believe all of our cameras have WDR and it works on PTZs the same it does on fixed lens, right? PTZs might move around so their shadows would be affected a little bit more, but it changes on the fly.
Michael Bell:
Yep, absolutely.
James Campbell:
Absolutely. RPDs have true WDR as well.
Ben Larue:
Yeah. Well that's it. That's WDR in a nutshell. Make sure to check out a lot of the links to some of the resources we'll have in the description above or below. And if you have any comments or feedback, drop them in the comments. We really appreciate you stopping by and checking out this In the Trenches Round Table, this feature focus on WDR. If you have any questions, feel free to call our support team, our sales team. We'll be happy to walk you through anything regarding WDR or any of the other topics that we've discussed in these round tables. So until next time, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Bye-bye for now.
James Campbell:
See you.
Michael Bell:
Bye.