Multistreaming Cameras

Description

Some users may desire to record a different resolution or frame rate from a camera when an event such as motion or an analytic is triggered. Reasons for this vary by site, but often comes down to wishing to record a lower amount of data when very little is happening, but they require high frame rates or high resolution recordings for forensic playback.

In the steps below, we step through creating a secondary stream but configuring them with different settings and schedules. These steps are examples and you will need to adjust the settings for your site’s needs. Mix and match resolution, frame rate, or recording format as desired.

Setup Steps

Navigate to the Camera Settings page for the camera you wish to configure.
Configure the settings for your first stream using the Recording tab on the bottom half of the page. It’s best to use this primary stream for your highest resolution and frame rate settings simply because most cameras provide fewer options for secondary streams.
 In this example, our primary stream is configured for a resolution of 3840 x 2160 (4K/8MP) and an image rate of 25 fps.
Assuming your camera supports Multistreaming, select a new Context from the Multistreaming settings and click the Add Stream button.
After pressing the Add Stream a new sub-stream, or child stream, will appear on the system navigation tree to the left, nested beneath the primary, or parent, stream you just configured. The Camera Settings page should update to display the settings for this stream.
Configure the Format as needed, then configure the Resolution and Image Rate desired for your lower end stream.
 In this example, the stream is configured for a resolution of 1024 x 576 and an image rate of just 10 fps.
Select the high resolution, high frame rate primary stream from the system tree and choose the Schedule tab. In this example, we’re going to configure the high resolution, high frame rate stream to only record on an analytic, in this case person detection.
Highlight the entire schedule grid and change these from the default of Motion to None. Apply your change.
Select the lower resolution, lower frame rate, secondary stream from the system tree, then select the Schedule tab. You could choose to set it to Free Run recording for continuous recording, or highlight the entire schedule and change it to Motion recording.
The low resolution, low frame rate stream will record based on the schedule configured on the Schedule tab. We need to tell the system when to record the higher resolution, high frame rate stream. Click the New button.
Navigate to the Event Linking node on the system tree.
We’re triggering off an analytic in this example, but you may use any Event Type you wish, such as Motion or an Input Trigger. We select Analytics, then choose the Enter Rule analytic, previously configured on the camera, from the Event Source panel.
Our Action Type will be Record Video.
The Action Target will be the high resolution, high frame rate primary stream.
Returning to the Schedule for this primary stream, we see the red corner flags are set indicating hours of the day in which our configured Event Link will record this camera stream. By default this will occur for all hours and days. Event Linking Source Groups could be used to configure specific days and hours to record on this event.
Save your configuration by selecting the Apply button.
Your configuration is complete and ready for testing. When performing a search you may search for recordings from either, or both, the primary and secondary streams but will likely rely on the primary stream for those high resolution or high frame rate forensic investigations of incidents.
Repeat these steps for other cameras where you may want the similar recording behavior.

For the multi head camera when imported from a CSV file the client uses 4 camera licenses and not just one. This is true for all other manufactured multi head camera on the system in .CSV

Previously we did not support this in our client. Dev build 21.09.2294700.0 included the following fix:
Enhancement – Added support for importing cameras with multiple inputs.

This is the Licensing Miscalculation Referred to.

One problem you might encounter is that when adding the input to the CSV file it should not say INPUT 1, 2,3,4. to allow the Input Name to show up correctly.

The input name should only be 1,2,3,4.
See below example:

The reason why is that we convert that field to a number and when the camera comes back we match that number to the input number on the camera to determine if it’s the right input to set the name on.

Below is an example of what happened after we included the ability to import multi head cameras into the import of the CSV file.

Select the CSV file under “Camera Import” and it correctly identifies the columns (including Input) as shown in Fig 1.

The client correctly counts the camera as only one license. Though it says it imported 4 Cameras and confirmed it only used a single license shown in Fig 2.

The camera shows up only one time in the “Add IP Cameras” list. Fig 3.

The camera correctly shows four inputs under the “Camera Recording”. But it did not import the names. Fig 4.

As seen in Fig 3 The INPUT Column need to only add 1,2,3,4 and Not Input1,2,3,4.