Complete Motion Capture - User-Configurable Length and Cooldown

Beta
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I’m not sure if this feedback belongs in the wishlist, but it seems weird to put it there for improvements to a beta feature, so I’m putting it here for now.

Having tested the new CMC feature a bit, it would be even more useful if the user could define the maximum length and minimum cooldown for a single event. Currently, CMC works with no cooldown period, and the video continues recording until motion ends. (It seems like maybe there’s a 5-minute maximum, but I’m not 100% sure on that. The only time mine recorded a 5-minute event, it also broke everything and didn’t upload the video. Haha.)

There are a few reasons the ability to customize this would be better for some people:

  • One reason is that notifications don’t happen until after the event is finished. Longer video events also take longer to upload. Since notifications are tied to the upload of the event, if you have a 5-minute event and it takes a minute or two to upload, your notification could end up being 6 or 7 minutes after the actual event began.

  • Another reason is security. In the event that someone with nefarious intent decides to unplug the camera before the event finishes recording, that recording will never get uploaded, regardless of what the camera might have captured. By contrast, if you’ve set the camera set to record 10-second videos with no cooldown, your odds of having useful footage sitting in the cloud are much higher, even if you have to stitch the videos together.

  • Another reason is person detection. My understanding is that the person detection algorithm only examines the first 12 seconds of the video, regardless of how long the video is. That means that people who were hoping to use CMC to overcome some of the limitations of the cooldown period related to person detection might not get the benefit they think they’re getting. (If a person appears on the 13th second of a motion event, they still won’t get a notification, regardless of the fact that the cooldown period has been eliminated.) If the user could manually limit the recordings to 12 seconds with a 0-second cooldown, they should theoretically get any person detection notification that the camera can successfully detect in the first place.

Any thoughts on this, @UserCustomerGwen @Wendy @ArthurH? (Not completely sure which ones of you it makes sense to tag. Haha. Sorry.)

6 Likes
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That looks like a solid tag list! Thanks for not putting this in the Wishlist yet. But once we release it, these will be good things to put in there. :slight_smile:

4 Likes
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very valid points. I like where your frame of mind is with this.

1 Like
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good suggestion

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Excellent post!

I’d like to add one more point:

This option can also allow people to use less data, potentially saving them money.

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glad to see this in the works. I had an ‘issue’ last week when my neighbor told me a car had driven through his backyard, between our houses, and out my driveway. we back up to a cemetery and there had been a service the day he said it happened. My issue: no ‘events’ on the camera captured it, and I only had an 8gb card in it which had rolled the footage off by the time he told me.

What I Did notice: one event in the time window this would have occurred had a massive group of birds flying past and out the front yard. I can only presume that this was related and the car scared the birds, which triggered the camera event, which then recorded the birds but cut off before the car actually came into frame driving through our yards. By the time the motion trigger reset, the car was gone.

My neighbor is old, but he’s never told wild tales before, and we were able to locate what appeared to be faint car tire tracks in some hard dirt in the yard.