Hik-Connect No events on playback?

[JB1970]

Thanks in that case, I think I may be able to find it if I play about in the settings. I think I'm experiencing ghosting as I've noticed that when people are walking past at night, it seems like there's a little ghost that follows behind their movement.

The following could cause ghosting/unwanted image artefacts:

• Using H265+ (as opposed to H265). I've had cases of static images being left persistent.
• Noise reduction. Leave at standard. Setting too high causes the image to look soft as it uses time and space pixel comparison to determine what is noise (time looks at the previous frames pixels, space looks at adjacent pixels and matches them).
• Smoothing setting. Best left at default. Too low will cause the bit rate to burst beyond its setting and too high could cause ghosting.

A few years ago one of the camera firmware versions came set incorrectly by Hikvision with either noise reduction or smoothing set to 100 (I can't recall which setting it was) The result was that if you did a star jump in front of the camera it looked like Da Vinci's 'The Vitruvian Man' (I had to look that up, I'm not really that cultured)

Also, I've noticed that when I do try to zoom into faces on our drivrway, there is a lot of blur and makes the faces almost seem like old games console characters.

Unfortunately that's expected. View the image at its native resolution, what you see is what you get. With a 4K image on a 1080P screen you may get away with a little digital zoom but you can't digitally zoom beyond the native resolution of the camera and resolve any additional detail. What you will see is noise.

The exposure is 1/100, the contrast is 35, WDR is on as it seems to help a lot with plate numbers. The max bitrate is on 8192. I'm not sure what other settings I could change to help with this. The FPS is 25 and the video quality is on highest.

I usually initially set the contrast to 45 (there are actually 'steps' of about 10 so you wouldn't notice any difference between smaller changes). A slight adjustment of the contrast has a pseudo WDR effect brightening the shadow areas of an image a little. I prefer that over WDR. Do you actually need to read plate numbers? I'm always surprised at how many users base camera performance on this.

 

[oil]

Thanks! I've checked your advice and it seems that most things were as they should be, however I have changed contrast from 35 to 45. I'm not sure how to find the smoothing, I've checked on the NVR and on browser.

You're right about zooming on the TV, I guess my TV resolution for the NVR is set at 1920 x 1080p and it won't let me choose 4K as it says the VGA output resolution cannot exceed 1080p. My TV is 4K however I guess my HDMI must not be.

In terms of WDR and the necessity of reading plates, I think you're right. I always thought it would be ideal to capture the plates if anything happened however I guess a lot of criminals will be using false plates anyway. Would you prefer HLC over WDR? Or would you just keep both off and just lower the contrast?

I've also increased the exposure to 1/150 to see how it goes tonight.

 

[oil]

I appreciate all your advice with this though, I've learnt a lot from this forum.

 

[JB1970]

Thanks! I've checked your advice and it seems that most things were as they should be, however I have changed contrast from 35 to 45. I'm not sure how to find the smoothing, I've checked on the NVR and on browser.

Smoothing is one of the few items that's only available if you log in to the cameras webpage directly, it's not in the NVR settings webpage. However if you haven't altered it, it will be at its default of 50 where it should be. There's little benefit for you to get into the cameras web page so I won't detail it here as there are loads of posts regarding it. From experience what happens when people mess around directly in the camera, is that they start altering settings in both the camera and the NVR not realising that they're setting the same thing in one and overwriting it in the other and then there's a post asking "should I do the settings in the camera or the NVR" (it comes up at least once a week)

You're right about zooming on the TV, I guess my TV resolution for the NVR is set at 1920 x 1080p and it won't let me choose 4K as it says the VGA output resolution cannot exceed 1080p. My TV is 4K however I guess my HDMI must not be.

It all depends how your NVR is connected to the TV and what NVR you have.

VGA cannot exceed 1080P so you can't set 4K if using a VGA cable. However if NVR is connected to the TV using a HDMI lead, you should be able to set the HDMI resolution to 4K 30Hz or 4K 60Hz if those options are available on the NVR. You don't mention what model NVR you're using. If the NVR has both VGA and HDMI monitor outputs there should be a separate setting for both in the menu. If you're using just HDMI I'd usually set the 'Menu Output Mode' to HDMI (default is Auto), the NVR will reboot itself, then alter the setting for HDMI. You'll get a popup onscreen with a countdown asking if you want to keep the setting - click OK before it times out. If you just get a black screen an no such message, your TV isn't supporting that resolution/refresh rate and as you can't click on the message you can't see it'll just time out and return to the previous resolution setting after about 15 secs.

Would you prefer HLC over WDR? Or would you just keep both off and just lower the contrast?

I personally won't use either unless I have to because of something static in the image that a setting improves.

 

[oil]

Hi, I was hoping you would be able to help me out with something. I've managed to pretty much set everything up but I'm just having a little issue. I have line crossing for my driveway and it seems to trigger off often even if somebody is just walking on the footpath outside of my driveway so they are far from the line. I actually moved my line back so it was further away from the pavement but it still triggers it.

 

[JB1970]

Hi, I was hoping you would be able to help me out with something. I've managed to pretty much set everything up but I'm just having a little issue. I have line crossing for my driveway and it seems to trigger off often even if somebody is just walking on the footpath outside of my driveway so they are far from the line. I actually moved my line back so it was further away from the pavement but it still triggers it.

Line crossing generally works best for left/right, right/left movement and also if it's not too close to the edge of the image. Depending on camera position it's not always possible to set it that way. A few things that can cause false triggers:

• shadows of people walking past extending onto the drive
• people walking past that are reflected in the windows of a car parked on the drive (person walking right to left can cause a reflection in a side car window moving toward the camera that will cause a trigger)

So first try and set the line to avoid the above.

I think you asked (but possibly deleted) regarding setting the minimum/maximum sizes not accessible in your NVR menu. If you access the camera web menu directly you can set those up. Just don't alter any settings that you've already set using the NVR as you'll end up with the NVR displaying a value that doesn't match what is set in the camera (set everything via the NVR that you can and only what you can't directly in the camera). Minimum/maximum can be useful to reduce false alerts as can sensitivity. The sensitivity value is inverse to the percentage of the target object that must cross the line to trigger an event. So if you set sensitivity at 40, firstly the target has to be between the minimum and maximum sizes set to be valid....then 60 percent of that target has to cross the line (allegedly)