Can you explain how motion detected recording works?

Motion detected recording has several benefits. It allows you to easily identify potentially important footage without having to trawl through hours of recordings. It also allows you to store incidents longer by reducing the amount of hard drive space used, you only film the important bits, not the space in between.

So how does motion detection work? The first thing to realise is that it isn’t the camera it’s self doing the detection, (like an alarm PIR detector). It is the DVR recorder which does all the work by looking at individual frames, comparing them to the next one and deciding if it thinks anything has changed. If change is detected then it assumes movement has taken place.

Because the DVR recorder isn’t as clever as you or I it can be tricked. Changes in light or the background movement of trees in the wind can trigger motion detected recordings for instance. To reduce the number of false triggers it is possible to blank off areas on the screen so the DVR is only looking at a small trigger area but one which is definitely going to be activated in a genuine event.

It is important to use motion detected recordings as part of your solution rather than the entire solution. Have it running alongside normal 24/7 recording. Our DVR recorders feature split hard drives which allow normal recordings to be stored in one section, motion triggered events in another. In this way the motion triggered recordings aren’t recorded over when the normal 24/7 section fills up and starts recording over it’s self.

Have a couple of cameras on your cctv system set to motion detect record so as not to over fill the events section of your hard drive. Use these cameras to identify times when you can review footage from other cameras.

Finally be aware that when not activated by motion triggered events the cameras still record as normal on a 24/7 basis so you don’t lose any information.