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Security Camera System Tips : DVR FPS Settings

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With the dip in the economy over the last decade, we’re all looking to get the most out of our money. It’s no secret, there’s no shame in it. Times are tougher, money is tighter, and it’s only natural that we want the most bang out of our buck. Investing in a security system is more affordable than you think and changing the frames per second setting on your security DVR is a quick tweak that can help maximize the effectiveness of your system. Before we get into the settings, we need to first understand what it does so we can adjust it with confidence.

A security video camera essentially takes a series of photographs and when those photographs are strung together into a single file, the illusion of motion is created. They best way I have found to wrap my head around it is like a movie reel you may have seen in the movie theater projectors. Each image, or frame, captures a singular moment of whatever the camera was recording. The more frames captured in a second, the more fluid the “video” will be when it is played back.

We’ve made a video demo that will give you a better idea of what video feeds look like at different fps settings and I highly suggest you watch it before you read the rest of the article.

The human eye perceives the environment around us at 30 fps. Every wave of the hand, speeding car, and person walking down the street is seen at this speed so anything less will appear to be jerky. Naturally, you’ll want to have all of your cameras record at this frame rate since it’s comfortable to view, it captures all the details, and it looks great on your DVR. Here’s the thing though, it eats up storage space on your hard drive like no other and shortens the amount of time able to be recorded.

Remember how I said that video is essentially a string of images stitched together? The higher resolution camera you use, the larger the image captured will be and it’ll take up more space on your hard drive so having that setting on every camera in your system is going to eat through that hard drive just like Kobayashi at a hot dog eating contest. It’s going to be ugly and you’re going to be upset, but don’t worry, I’m here to help.

Visually speaking, there’s not much difference between 15 and 30 fps. If you were to glance at a screen with a 15 and 30 fps video clip placed side by side, you’d barely be able to tell the difference. Don’t believe me? Go back and watch the video again, they’re the bottom two frames. When you break it down to file size, a 15 fps clip takes up half as much space as a 30 fps clip and will free up more room on that hard drive to store more video in your archive. In some circumstances you can even set your cameras to record at a lower frame rate if the areas monitored don’t have much foot traffic or the camera has a wide field of view.

This is just one of many tweaks that you can make to your system to squeeze out more functionality and we’ve got more on the way. Keep checking in for my next article in which we’ll discuss the proper application of motion detection.

If you have any more questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below or give us a shout at 800-997-8460. We’re more than happy to help however we can!


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