Negative logic in marking clips?

[Semper Vaporo]

I have 6 cameras and 8 rules total. Some of the cameras have overlapping views or present a progression of paths that people can take near, onto, or on my property. I like to be able to view the entire list and look for clips that met a rule, view that video clip and then look at the other cameras to see the progression of what put a person into the position to cause that rule to be triggered. I select one of the adjacent clips from one of the other cameras to see what occurred within their view prior to or after the event that triggered the rule.

Such as, if a person triggers the rule associated with the camera aimed at my porch, it is sometimes useful to know how they got there… did they park in my driveway or walk up the front walk? I cannot trust the rules for my driveway to mark a clip because the person might have dallied such that a portion of the clip from that time on that camera was marked as “Not saved by a rule” and I have no visual clue in the list of clips to look at it. Same problem if they came up my front walk because there is lots of motion in other parts of the view of that camera that can cause the particular clip (showing them on the walk) to be tagged as “Not save by a rule”.

I sometimes miss whole events that did match a rule (or multiple rules) because the tags are that the clips are “not saved by rule” because of extraneous motion at the same time. I realize I can select each rule individually to see clips specific to each one, but that is extra time spent selecting each camera and waiting for the list to populate and if I have to switch cameras to see another camera’s views of the total event this can be a lot of time waiting for the list to populate again and again.

I would like for Sighthound to reverse the tag purpose altogether… any clip that does not contain any rule matching motion should have no tag line at all. And any clip has any portion that matches a rule should be marked as such, even if it is a long clip where the majority does not match any rule. This would reduce the possibility of missing an event because there was extraneous motion in the clip at or near that time.

Additionally, I would like the tag line to indicate which rule caused the clip to be saved. Some cameras have two rules and I’d like a more specific indication of which rule is involved.

Also… the list of clips shows a bold face title that indicates what was detected (“Unknown -”, “People -”, or “People, Unknown -”) and the name of the camera. Due to space limitations, when the Title has “People, Unknown -” the name of the camera is pushed off the right side of the column and thus cannot be read. The text name becomes important if, due to lighting conditions, it is difficult to tell from the thumbnail next to the text which camera it is. I have named my cameras with a leading digit to help me keep them in a particular order (the “name”, such as “North”, “South”, etc., might alphabetize them an order that is “poor” for the thumbnails on the main “Cameras” view) and as such I can widen the list column (by using the invisible drag line between the list column and the video window) exposing the leading digit to know which camera it is, but that reduces the size of the video window and I’d like to keep it as big as possible.

This also brings up another problem. The rules are named such that the camera name is the last thing in the rule name. Such as: “Any object entering or exiting my region in 3 North.” But in the dropdown list of rules, the name of the camera is thus lost off the right edge if I try to keep the video window at the maximum available space. Having multiple rules of the same type causes difficulty in deciding which one to click on to select a particular rule/camera.


There is a lot of “white space” in the two windows of the user interface that could be reduced or eliminated to provide more space for larger video views and to present useful textual information.