Configuring Take Snaps
The Take Snaps alert can be configured as a part of the Time based triggered alerts
or Motion/Noise detection based triggered alerts. Basically, the Take Snaps
Alert saves a specified number of snaps when Motion/Noise is detected or a specified
time interval is reached, depending on the type of Alert category selected.
To configure the Take Snap Alert:
- On the Tools menu, click Options
- Select the Alerts tab
- Under Take Snap, click Configure
You can also open the configuration window by clicking the Configure hyperlink
present under the Quick Settings pane.
Output Folder
Snap Folder Name
Select the folder to which all snaps are saved. During motion or noise detection,
this Alert will create a new file for every Snap it takes in the folder given in
Snap Folder Name.
File Name Options
Prefix
The Take Snap alert generates file names with the prefix specified here. You
can then choose to append a date and time or a sequential number to this prefix.
Append date and time to file name
When you select this option, then the Take Snap alert will append the date and time
of when it took the snap to the Prefix specified above.
Append numbers to file names
If you select this option, then the alert will append a sequential number to the
Prefix specified above. Under this option if you check Cycle numbers from 1
to ... then you can specify the maximum sequential number that you
want the alert to reach, after which the sequential number wraps and starts counting
up from 1 again. This is a good way to limit the number of snaps.
Overwrite existing file
When you select this option the snap file is generated with the same name as specified
in the Prefix. If the file by the same name is already present in the Snap
Folder then the new file will overwrite the old file. This setting is required
for a Web Server Hosting a
Web Site type of surveillance setup.
Snap Settings
Number of Snaps
Specify the number of snaps that you want to take every time the Take Snap alert
runs.
Take Snap after every
This number specifies the number of samples in the video received from the current
capture device to skip before taking the next snap. A video is composed of
frames that are essentially images. These frames, also called as samples,
are shown at some rate to produce motion. This rate is known as the frame
rate of the video. A video capture device typically captures at 10 frames
per second (images are displayed at a rate of 10 frames in one second). If
you configure this Alert to snap every image in the video then 5 frames will not
go beyond the first second of video and will convey hardly any information.
To gain more information, specify a value of 10, 20, 30 or 40 here, to skip these
many frames generating an approximate snap interval of 1, 2, 3 and 4 seconds respectively
with a 10 frames per second video.
JPEG Quality
Snaps are saved in the JPEG format. You can specify a quality between 25 to
100. Lower quality values produces smaller JPEG file sizes.
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