Ideal settings for recording

[MattS]

Hi All
I have a new setup
13 Dahua IP Cameras around the house.
BI5 running on an i7 server with 4TB Seagate drive.

I am thinking of recording continuously and using Sentry AI for alerts (currently bugs are alerting all night!!).

What settings should I have in Clips/Archiving - the size of New folder allocation. When to move to Stored. When to delete clips forever.

What resolution should I record in?

Any settings that will make it work better?

Screenshots would be great. Or if there is a good online tutorial that sets it up perfectly.

I just don’t have the time to trial and error for weeks!

Thanks for any/all advice!

Matt

[Matts1984]

There is a lot in there that I probably can't help with but I'll try where I can! That said, not expecting to tweak over time might have been better suited for an out-of-the-box solution and not something so custom and flexible. We can give advice and suggestions but you are going to want to tweak. Maximizing your disc space will only come over time to see what your cameras use up. 13 cameras can fill 4TB quickly.


First thing, and I stumbled upon this a couple of weeks ago before becoming involved on this forum... Direct to Disc recording is a must! Because my cameras support H.265 and the re-encoding by BI takes more resources, I ended up cutting my CPU usage in half and my recording clips cut in half too. You will likely want to configure your cameras to have a timestamp overlay however because the direct feed will be recorded, not a processed overlay done by BI. This also takes a lot of cycles off of BI too, so it's really win/win.

Resolution is a balancing act. The higher the resolution and fps, the faster it fills your disc. I personally want higher quality as I'm not concerned on space. I record at 2560x1440 and 20 fps. I do not have audio. I do record continuously.

Is your 4TB drive the only drive on your server? You just want to make sure you don't let BI use all the space and then cripple your server OS. I'd recommend either partitioning a second drive exclusively for BI (partition, not buy another drive) or limit BI to only have most of the space. Depending on if you use the server for anything else, you might want to reserve 100GB for the OS/main partition. After that it will come down to doing some math on your part, number of cameras times how much a days worth of recording takes up, times how many days you'd like to keep "New". I personally keep "New" for 7 days, and then "Stored" for 28 days before deleting. I'm only about 2 weeks into my Direct to Disc revelation so my numbers are still shrinking but my two cameras are consuming about 2.9TB of space. I have 6TB available so I know I can safely add probably 2 or 3 more without really changing settings.

13 cameras will obviously fill a lot faster. If you're content with say only 7 days of recordings, just keep them all in new and delete on the 7th day. Again, there is so much that depends on preference it's hard to tell you what to do.

[TimG]

Yes, that is a lot of questions with not much info

For example:

1. Do you already know if the cpu will cope with the cameras, or is it an assumption ? Have a look here for a similar system if you are unsure https://biupdatehelper.hopto.org/default.html#stats
2. What resolution are the cameras ? It's no good telling you to record at 4K if your cameras can't do it !
3. New/Storage folders - If you have multiple drives of different sizes and speeds, then it makes sense to put BI5 NEW (And the database) on a fast drive, and to move the files before the drive is full. If you only have one drive, there is no point in moving them to another folder.
4. When to delete ? Just before the drive gets full ! I leave a buffer to ensure BI5 doesn't overfill the drive and fall over. This is more important if you are running Windows on the same drive or if you have other programs filling up the same drive.
5. 4TB isn't a lot of storage for that many cameras if they are >=HD. I get just under a month with two 1080 H264 cameras, and the two old SD cameras recording 24/7. I have just set the H264 cameras to H265 so should get more storage time at the expense of cpu loading. I have dropped the fps to around 12 to keep the cpu load low enough to allows Homeseer/ Emby/ TVMosaic etc keep working with my ancient cpu.
6. Bugs - they are attracted to IR. I turned it off for my Dahua cam, and it no longer attracts them. This cam can see in the dark anyway, having a Starvis sensor, and it sends a Lights On command to Homeseer for normal lighting as well.

The answer to your question is, there is no easy answer