I have contact sensor on the front door that is setup to record a video when it opens. My V2 cam is aimed at the sidewalk in front yard.
I have noticed that once the smart video alert is triggered there seems to be 5 min cool down. When I open the door and walk out after 12 sec it doesn’t catch me on the event video. It doesn’t flag as a person detect.
But I can go back to the video on the SD card and it shows me. The SD is not set up for continuous but motion only.
Is that normally how it is supposed to work? Should I turn off the contact option to record video?
Does this happen after the first trigger(during cool down)?
There’s a 5 minute cool down and 12 second video limit for sensor videos too.
If I understand, you are comparing this to other triggers? If you trigger a bulb, it is instantaneous every time.
For V2, regardless of the trigger, one must wait the cool down period between triggers.
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What you are talking about is an event “automation” and yes, if you use a sensor (contact or motion sensor) to trigger a video upload to the cloud, it has positives and negatives.
On the plus side, it will bypass the 5-minute cool down limit. You can have cloud recordings more often than once every 5 minutes, but on the negative side, instead of being labeled as person or motion or sound, they will be labeled as automation and you do not have a notification setting to get notifications about automation events. You would have to get notifications about the sensor then navigate to events to view the automation.
Yes, I use lots of automation events too.
It appears to me that sometimes at least some automation videos aren’t analyzed or labeled by the AI, so even if there is a person in the video, you may not get a person alert. I have a few theories on this. See, I still get person alerts for these sometimes, just not always. I believe the AI still only analyzes videos once every 5 minutes, so if there was a non-automation event within the last 5 minutes (such as a moving leaf) then the new automation video is not analyzed by the AI even though it still uploads to the cloud within that 5 minute limitation. Theory 2 is that if the sensor triggers the upload first, then the AI ignores it. If the camera detects motion first and triggers the upload before the sensor initiates it, then the AI analyzes it.
I have sometimes had events listed with the exact same time twice. Once as Person and once as automation for the same event clip being duplicated. But other times I only get one or the other. It doesn’t seem to be consistent.
In summary, you are correct, your automations forcing a cloud upload could sometimes be interfering with receiving a person alert notification. There are ways around this (ie get a sensor notification instead), but no perfect solution. I’ve done some casual testing on this on my own, but it doesn’t seem to be consistent. You could disable the automated uploads, but you’ll go back to only 1 cloud event every 5 minutes.
Weigh your pros vs cons or do some of your own testing. In the end it’s a personal preference thing.
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