I’m looking for a way to make it possible to interrupt the camera feed on site for a defined time period. Technicians who aren’t happy being filmed while working are currently pulling the power plug to the camera, and sometimes forgetting to reconnect the camera afterwards. I’d like to offer them a better way of achieving the same goal of not being filmed. I’m aware that it’s possible to obscure part of the picture with a black rectangle or to blur the pixels.
This doesn’t really solve the problem however, as the technicians have no way of being sure that they aren’t being filmed. Ideally the camera would be switched off for say 30 minutes, and this would be recognizable through LEDs on the front of the camera. As I understand from the documentation, an event such as this could be triggered though movement or through sound.
Is there any possibility to do this?
Hello,
Did you figure out how to disarm the camera on an event?
Where are you located?
I would be happy to speak with you about the options.
Always happy to help.
Bob
thanks very much for your offer of help. I’m located in Germany.
I’ve had a look through the configuration settings via a web browser. If I could somehow trigger the black-out functionality automatically (through movement detection in a particular area of the picture perhaps), and then confirm this visually or audibly (using the LEDs on the camera body or emitting a tone), this could be sufficient.
Ideally, I would be able to shut down the camera for a time period, as mentioned in my first post. Not sure if that’s possible though.
I’m afraid turning off the record function won’t be enough. The issue is that people don’t want to be observed while they are working. No one is watching the live camera feed, but the workers want to make sure of this by simply unplugging the cameras. Often they forget and leave the site without plugging them in again afterwards. This is a problem as it’s not easy to return to the site simply to reconnect a camera. Also the plugs aren’t designed for repeated unplugging, which means they eventually break.
Also, the workers are not there at regular times, so adding a time-profile for blacking-out is not an option. The best solution would be simply to have the cameras shutdown as a response to a specific event.
There is not an option to shutdown the camera with an event. Even if it was the camera wouldnt be able to restart afterwards.
Only solution as I see it is to put a big enough swich somewhere easily accesible for the workers to turn on and off without having to worry about them damaging the cable.
Yes, a switch to cut the power supply to the cameras will probably be unavoidable.
I’d still like to investigate the possibility of blacking-out the screen in response to movement in a particular area of the picture. The workers could then wave their hand, for example, in order to trigger the blacking-out of the picture. This would need to be confirmed visually or audibly, so that they could be sure they aren’t being observed. I’ve tried to configure this on an M12, but so far without any success.
If the obscure area function is the same as the black-out function, then yes I have though about this. That’s actually the solution I’m focusing on now. But I can’t seem to find a way to enable/disable this dynamically. It only seems to be possible to use time-tables to enable/disable but this is impractical in this case.
I see that the m12 has by default only timetable option. Then I would suggest making a softbutton with an API function. Sorry I dont know the function, but I know there is one, that enableas and disables the configured obscure area. Maybe if you ask directly to support, they will send it you.
As it is an Http APi command, I guess you could also make a http shortcut (on the desktop) that would send this command to the IP of the camera. I use this to open the ramp at our company.
That sounds very promising, thanks. I’m just trying to find out how to form the command to do this which goes in the parameter field and Admin Menu → Softbuttons.
