Briefcam would be what I recommend.  You would export clips out of the NVR then import them into Briefcam for processing.   This would be the most cost effective way to deploy Briefcam for this application.  Interested to see what other options there are.

Check out IronYun. http://ironyun.com/

Claim to have Google-like search engine with 70 per-configured search parameters such as backpacks, knives, bicycles, etc,  finding them in seconds from large recorded image files. Haven't actually used it but saw a demo.

Hi John,

our VTrack platform can process offline videos as well, by standard. No problems at all to provide free demo license and direct support, for checking if it can be of any help.

At disposal, cheers.

Simone

Pretty amazing that some/most of the top-of-the-line VMSes can’t use a recorded stream (instead of a live one) as input to any offered analytics.

Would this be a use case for "Video Analytics As-a-Service"?

Anyone out there try any of them in a similar capacity to be able to comment on the practical aspects?

Does the NVR/VMS have an HTTP/CGI command to enumerate the recorded video files?

Or does it have only HTTP/CGI to playback the recordings as an RTSP stream?

Camio currently has a batch import (https://camio.com/em) that was intended for scripted, batch import of NVR/VMS video files in bulk after fishing boats come ashore. But we're now launching "lazy indexing" that instead fetches the video from the NVR/VMS only upon search. For example, the query [garage 2am PDT to 6am PDT] knows that the video events are missing for that 4 hour time period and requests that all motion events recorded by the NVR in that period be indexed on-demand. The nice thing is that you pay only for the indexed portion you import. You can send your NVR/VMS details to support@camio.com and we'll follow up with info.

Please email support@camio.com if you would use this video importer:

go.camio.com/importer-prd

If 20 people confirm that it's useful at roughly 4 cents/hour imported, then we'll polish up this open source project for general release.

After discussing offline with Michael (originator of this thread), this importer seems to fill an important gap in available tools. So please feel free to comment in-place in the PRD so we can converge quickly on what's important/useful. I'm pasting the overview below.

Who's it for

System Integrators who collect video evidence for forensic investigations across NVRs of multiple clients.

Why it's needed

Continuous VMS/Analytics can be expensive. The per-stream licensing and hardware costs sometimes exceed the value for cameras intended only for post-incident review. Yet the time and effort to collect and share video evidence from multiple NVRs at remote locations is also expensive. So the importer makes it simple and inexpensive to share video evidence with pay-per-use billing that's a better value provisioning continuous analytics.

What it is

The importer is an Open Source project to automate the ingestion of video files so that they can be indexed for easy playback and labeling by any number of advanced classifiers running either locally or in the cloud. Camio provides the default Hooks for the importer to analyze, index and store the video in the cloud. Camio also provides usage-based billing at prices starting at $0.04 cents per hour of video imported.

Example: Joe opens his laptop with a folder containing 12 hours of video files from 20 cameras, starts the importer, and let's it run in the background for 10 minutes. He can see its progress as % complete, and if he interrupts the import at any time, it resumes from where it left off. On the local network, the importer rips through 12hrs*20=240 hours of video by asking the segmenter to label the video segments that might possibly warrant human attention (i.e. times when humans, cars or other significant objects were moving). Joe sees the message "100% complete" on his laptop when the analysis has finished, but he also receives an email notification upon completion with an invoice for $0.04*240=$9.60 and a link to the imported video for review and sharing in any HTML5 browser like:
https://camio.com/app/#search;q=5pm+PDT+to+6%3A30pm+PDT+July+2nd+v%3Ag1u0365k9yps

While it may not be what it's meant for, AgentVi was in effect able to do this with their Vi Search product - SavVi Video Search

Year ago I thought AgentVi should have marketed this way, enticing integrators to have their ViSearch product on hand as an emergency review tool after the fact. 

IIRC even years ago it could review video at x200 speed...

Post processing of recorded video will one day become the norm.  My friend once said that computers would be the one consuming the most video data, even more than human eyes with netflix one day.  one example is this , post processing on demand, not only for resolution but many more once the meta data has been analyzed .

Just a follow up on Briefcam: They confirmed that they don't have a product / option for a small camera count or low-cost investigation use case.

They do have an 'Investigator' offering but it is for Law Enforcement only and requires a 3-year subscription. With the 'regular' Briefcam, it includes 100 cameras in the base license.

If all you want is motion and not full analytics, any of the Nx Witness variants will do this.

Jon -

The Nx Witness variants require a second stream to do the Smart Motion Search so it wouldn't work for recorded video.

There was a break-in on a site our organisation rents, it was awkward accessing the landlord's CCTV and as I only had a limited time period to access the physical recorder I exported all potentially relevant footage for review later. Unfortunately, the event log hasn't exported for whatever reason and I'm stuck staring at a lot of footage for 3 seconds of motion. Is there any way of getting motion detection from the recorded video? Many Thanks.