Subscriber Discussion

Avigilon 5MP Camera - Cloud Around Moving Objects

OC
Orhan Camkara
Apr 15, 2014

I have installed Avigilon 5MP bullet cameras. Including live view, recorded footages also have same issue on all cameras as seen on the screenshot below. This is happening time by time and always. I can say around every 4-5 minutes! Any idea what I am doing wrong?

screenshot

JH
John Honovich
Apr 15, 2014
IPVM

What's the codecc and bit rate of the camera? It looks like either the network has insufficient bandwidth or the camera bitrate is set too low.

OC
Orhan Camkara
Apr 15, 2014

Hi John,

Bitrate is set to 12000 on all cameras and network connection is Gigabit. It is not a congested network as CCTV network is dedicated and only several cameras in test stage at the moment.

MI
Matt Ion
Apr 15, 2014

What switch(es) are you using? I've seen high bitrates like that choke desktop-grade switches pretty quickly, even gigabit ones.

OC
Orhan Camkara
Apr 15, 2014

I am using Dell PowerConnect 6248P. At the moment only 9 cameras connected and nothing else.

Dedicated Server is: Dell PowerEdge R520 with RAID5 (6x600GB 15k SAS), 32GB DDR3

JH
John Honovich
Apr 16, 2014
IPVM

Orhan,

Btw, what codec are you using? what frame rate? what quality level? 12Mb/s is fairly high overall but depending on the combination of camera settings, it could be too low. Just trying to rule that out.

OC
Orhan Camkara
Apr 16, 2014

I have tryed lower resolutions too. Bandwith looks only 3.9Mbps.

screenshot2

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Apr 16, 2014
Exposure settings? Go at least 1/50
DM
Duncan Miller
Apr 16, 2014

Its hard to determine whats wrong in the first photo but the second looks like you lost some packets which caused the video stream to have some artifacts. One thing I see is you key frame interval is ever 30 frames. I would recommend changing that to at least 1 for ever second so if you are doing 13fps you should have a key frame every 13 frames.

Are there any settings in the camera for the transmission protocol?

OC
Orhan Camkara
Apr 16, 2014

I set the cameras key frame interval to 13, I have noticed it helped but problem still there. Should I reduce even more? Here below more details from the settings.

settings

JH
John Honovich
Apr 16, 2014
IPVM

To start, your key frame interval was effectively 1 every 2.3 seconds. With longer key frame intervals, (meaning more p frames in between I frames) there is a possibility of video smearing (or as you noted 'clouding'). See our Test: H.264 I vs P Frame Impact

If setting it to 13 helped, try going lower again, say to 6 or 7 and see that.

One thing to pay attention to is the change in the bandwidth. I see the bandwidth on the screencap with keyframe interval = 13 is now 8.2Mb/s. Over the course of a day, see how much bandwidth has changed versus the keyframe interval = 0 scenario.

Avatar
Paul Grefenstette
Apr 16, 2014
  • Quality should be 4-5 at most
  • Exposure 1/50
  • Image rate 15fps for 2mp or 13fps for 5mp
  • Keyframe should match fps - 15 or 13 for 5mp
  • Max gain 20db

if you can put the cameras on their own subnet and use one nic in server for them and then the clients on a 2nd subnet and use the 2nd nic in the server for the clients

good luck

JH
John Honovich
Apr 16, 2014
IPVM

Thanks, Paul and Duncan.

Orhan, on the quality level, is there some reason that it is set at 1 (High)? Was the default of 6 causing problems? Did the image quality for your scenes get materially better 'looking' when sliding down to 1? As Paul alludes, typically there is not much of a quality improvement going to max quality (on any camera) but it can consume a lot more bandwidth.

OC
Orhan Camkara
Apr 16, 2014

Thanks very much gentlemen, I will try the new advises and will get back to you with a feedback.

@John - One camera totally dedicated to the gate to capture the license plates (we couldn't afford LPR Camera) and its really giivng awesome result day/night (except high beam).

Rest of cameras set to the highest possible setting to see and observe the differences. If that's the case I will reduce them accordingly and see how it goes.

Kind regards

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #2
Apr 16, 2014

You are dropping packets. Check the logs in Avigilon and it will tell you that there is x% of packet loss. This is a networking issue which could be caused by: bad port, broadcast storm, too little bandwidth, bad NIC, etc... maybe it's a gig switch but does the server have a gig connection to it? If it is @ 10/100 and you have the cams set to quality level 1 then they are for sure pushing 12mbs each and you will be @ 108mbs with 9 cameras.

Set the cameras to quality level 5. Set the image rate to 10 and the keyframe to 10 (or whatever closest rate you can get to 10). Set the maximum bitrate to 9000.

Check your server network speed. Check your connections.

Avatar
Brian Karas
Apr 16, 2014
Pelican Zero

I asked a couple of folks inside Avigilon about this, and got the same response. This appears to be a network issue, with packets getting lost or corrupted somehow.

I'd probably go through the standard network troubleshooting basics.

OC
Orhan Camkara
Apr 16, 2014

On the server I can see that network utilization not beyond of 10% on confirmed gigabit connection. I also will try to set the cameras to the lowest settings to observe the effect on the system.

UPDATE and EDIT: Server application logs shows following error which confirm your point.

Error: Network package loss at unacceptable level for device Camera1' 3% packets lost over last 160 seconds.

I will run wireshark to see why packages are dropping.

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #2
Apr 16, 2014

Have you called Avigilon tech support? They can remote in to the server and help you out.

AS
Ashley Schofield
Apr 16, 2014

Hi Orhan,

Change the max bit rate to 9500 and also change the flicker control to 50hz.
Image quality should be 5 or 6.
How many switches do the cameras go through to connect back to the NVR?
I see this issue on my edge switches (veracity quads) from time to time.
Also try run the camera on 10 fps with the same keyframe.

I got your email the other day but have been out of the office to reply.
I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
Thanks

Ash

Avatar
Shawn Brown
Apr 21, 2014
IPVMU Certified

Orhan, as you saw, it is possible to have packet drop with video traffic even when utilization appears to never exceed 10%. The reason is most utilization measures are an average over a period of time. Even when this time period is only 1 second, there can be bursts of less than a second that overwhelm a switch or a buffer. That is why we need to specifically look for packet loss rather than looking at utilization.

Shawn

OC
Orhan Camkara
Apr 25, 2014

We have found out that the server NIC set is faulty. It appears working but with some reason all built in NICs are dropping the packages according to wireshark. Installed another NIC and everything seems perfectly fine and server logs are clean.

Thanks very much gentlemen for your help.

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