File sizes and intervals..

[jbrannen]

Ok, My video files used to be about 15 minutes each, and they're now about 2 minutes (or less!) each, and the file sizes seem huge.....a 2 minute clip at 1920x1080 (10 fps) is about 130 MB in the day and about half that at night. As you can imagine, even with only two cameras, this is making storage requirements pretty insane. I can easily use something like Adobe Premiere to compress these files to a fraction of this size with no discernible degradation, so I'm wondering if I have a setup parameter wrong or if there's something that I otherwise need to change.

Thoughts?

-Jason

[Devin]

Hi jbrannen,

These video files in the Sighthound Video data directory are not meant to be viewed or interacted with in any way, so the length of these files is not customizable. Depending on which folder you are in you may be viewing the temporary video that is later chopped up into your saved clips.

Like the length of the clips, you cannot set the file size in Sighthound Video. You can set Sighthound to save at a lower resolution, but if you are using the "Match Source" option it will attempt to keep as much quality as possible. Most cameras allow you to configure several options which can affect the size of the video. If available, I'd recommend switching CBR to VBR and lowering the bit rate.

If storage space is an issue and you only care about video that matches your rules, I'd recommend setting the "Temporarily keep all video for up to: __hours" option to a low number such as 1. This will allow more space for your saved clips. Please see https://www.sighthound.com/support/managing-your-video for more details on how long video is saved, how to manage disk space, and how video clips are divided up.

Regards,

-Devin

[jbrannen]

Cameras are set to VBR, and I cut the max bitrate in half (4096 to 2048) and there's no change. Upon looking at a typical file, Windows is reporting the bitrate to be ~7400kbps, so something is strange here.

[jbrannen]

Ok, more info....if I watch the network activity in Windows Task Manager, it shows exactly what I would expect for two cameras with a max bandwidth of 2048kbps: on a 100Mbps link, it's using 3%-4%, which is right on the money. But the files being saved to disk are showing bitrates of about 4x what the camera is delivering.

So...strange things are afoot at the Circle K....