Motion Detection in Dahua NVR not showing in Playback

[CalmBlueOcean]

I'm wondering if users of Dahua NVR, working with Dahua and Hikvision cameras might be able to help me. I've been landed with the oversight and day to day management of the CCTV system at our school, but unfortunately that didn't extend as far as being able to decide which supplier to use, which system we would purchase, or indeed where the cameras would actually go. Hey-ho, never mind!

So the issue I've got is that I was told by the installers to use Smart PSS in order to view and playback all our cameras, including the older Hikvision cameras. For quite a while I had an issue with Hikvision cameras renaming themselves back to "IPC" every time I renamed them, but we seem to have got over that issue, albeit I'm not exactly sure how we managed it. Anyway, I think that's sorted.

My problem is I don't seem to get any option to just see times of motion when I review playback footage. The only recordings I have are all "General". If I deselect that from the Record type to look at, I see nothing.

I've gone into the Dahua NVR directly and set up Motion Detection on a few test cameras, as this wasn't selected on any of them by the installers. I ensure they are enabled, that "Record Channel" is enabled. It doesn't make any difference - I get no footage to review in Playback. Here's the strange bit for me - I do get motion detection alerts via email... but only on when I have set the Motion Detection directly on the camera (Dahua or Hikvision), rather than through the Dahua NVR. How can that be, when playback shows no areas of Motion Detection in Smart PSS, or indeed in the Dahua NVR's web front-end?

I don't find the Hikvision cameras play nicely at all through Smart PSS. If you review general recording footage on anything above 1x speed, it is very jumpy and jerky, and takes time to settle down again once you switch back to 1x. Again, is that normal, and maybe to expected as I'm not using iVMS anymore for them?

 

Thanks.

Edited February 22, 2023 by CalmBlueOcean

[jthompson]

I don't know if this will match up with the version of the Dahua NVR that you have, but on ours, to set it to record from motion detection, we need to go to Setup > Storage > Schedule, select the camera (i.e. channel) number, and then set each day of the week to have 'Motion' ticked for a 0h-24h time period. This then displays a yellow bar for the entirety of each day in the schedule. Repeat for each camera.

 

With that set, we then get yellow blocks in the playback timelines of each camera, indicating recorded footage based on motion detection.

 

Hope that helps. It's just another example of stuff being in crap menu locations.

[CalmBlueOcean]

Top man - that seems to have done it! I'd never thought of looking in there.

Does seem to be throwing up some spurious detections already, where there is no one there, but I can play around with that.

Thanks so much for the quick reply/answer!

[36Degrees]

Does seem to be throwing up some spurious detections already, where there is no one there, but I can play around with that.

 

We have this all the time as they seem to be quite sensitive with motion detection.

[jthompson]

I think you can tweak that and also disable motion detection for regions within the image. Not in front of the GUI just at the mo so can't remember the menu path for doing that.

 

On the cameras themselves (i.e. not via the NVR menus) you can also add privacy shades to black out regions, such as neighbouring properties, etc, so that video of those areas never gets seen by the NVR.

[jthompson]

Setup > Event > Video Detect. In the 'Motion Detect' tab. Pick the channel number. For 'Region' click Setup. You can then set the motion sensitivity of multiple regions within the image. If you have trees or other planting that blows about in the wind, you can exclude those parts of the image altogether to cut down on unwanted footage.

 

To block out parts of the image (i.e. privacy shield) go to Setup > Remote > Encode > Overlay tab. Pick the channel and then enable the 'Monitor' option to start adding black boxes.

 

Again, the menu paths are clearly showing off the design skills of the people who made this stuff.