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Feature Request: Multiple masks

mtsmts
edited December 2018 in SecuritySpy
Multiple masks would be nice for use with PTZ cameras. Also if this could be enabled via script it would make motion detection for multiple positions possible.

Comments

  • Are you suggesting a feature whereby the motion mask is tied to the PTZ position of the camera? This would be quite difficult to achieve, because it's not always possible to accurately obtain the PTZ position. Another option could be masks that are loaded when a particular PTZ preset position is invoked. The third option, as you say, would be a feature to save/restore masks via AppleScript. We'll consider all these options.
  • I wasn’t thinking about an arbitrary ptz position since I’m not sure how useful that would be to me. Having the mask tied to one or more ptz positions would be great since I could monitor multiple phone ositions for motion. If you could also expose this via apple events I would be able to script multiple viewpoint monitoring which would really make this useful.

    Thanks for considering this.
  • Ben,

    Independent (but related) of mts’s feature request, I have a different request that still involves multiple masks so I’m posting here.

    Feature request: Different mask settings for recording vs alerting

    I am thinking it would be great if you could set up two different masks per camera - one for what it uses to detect motion for purposes of recording. And then a different mask that it would use for alerting of motion.

    Here’s the use case I have...

    Live in a cul-de-sac and one of the cameras is pointed down the driveway. Without a mask starting at the end of my driveway, motion is detected virtually every time a cul-de-sac neighbor enters or leaves their home. Work trucks also circle around coming and going.

    It would give better security to not have that mask on. I don’t mind recording extra clips to the HD. But I don’t want to have to see pop-ups on my phone all day long (would probably be 50+ alerts a day). So to combat that, I have the mask so that it only detects motion when something/someone is actually in MY driveway.

    But it would be awesome if I could set one mask (less restrictive) to record clips of any motion the camera sees but have a second (more restrictive, to just my driveway) mask that would signify “motion I really care about”. And then for notifications, I could pick the mask or masks I want to get notified about.

    Let me know if this makes sense and whether I’ve explained it well enough.

    -Cameron
  • Hi Cameron, yes this makes total sense and I agree with you - different masks (or possibly completely different motion detection settings) for Motion Capture vs. Actions is something we have been thinking of. We haven't quite worked out a nice way of actually implementing this in terms of the user interface in the Preferences window, but it's a strong possibility that we'll be able to work this out and add this flexibility in a future version of SecuritySpy.
  • Is the "different masks for actions vs. capture" possible just by creating two cameras with identical sources, but with the different masks? I seem to recall in past versions that this would not incur a 2x CPU/network penalty due to some clever re-use of a single stream... or is that not the case?

    JT
  • Yes, the workaround is to create two instances of the camera in SecuritySpy, and as long as the device settings are the same (i.e. same IP address, profile, ports etc.), SecuritySpy will recognise the two instances as the same device and won't pull two separate feeds from the camera. This works well and achieves the goal of different motion capture vs. actions triggers, however this does increase CPU usage somewhat, and is a bit of a clunky solution.
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