Camera Motion-Only Recording Storage Calculator

When you add security camera to protect pets/thieves/whatever, you assume that it’s going to save everything, yet one week later, you discover it has filled up with footage of windy trees. Storage issues is nothing new. Surely motion recording solves this? Why bother capturing all those boring silent hours? Just skip ahead. Keep the interesting bits and get rid of rest.

But then there’s the math. The math are not kind. It doesn’t take long. And once you input your camera details, the calculator do the arithmetic for you. No need to guess if you can store a week of footage or a month.

How to Choose the Right Storage Size

And there’s where people get hung up: resolution. 4k vs. 1080p and everyone think 4k is superior. But most people don’t think about storage size. Does four hours of 4K with motion clips take up more space than two full days of 1080p without any motion? The problem isn’t resolution. It’s bitrate. Want crisp details? Turn your camera bitrate up. You’ll have huge files even if no motion happen at all. Use H.265 and you’ll be using half the storage as previous generation codecs like H.264 at equivalent quality. Why do newer systems insists on using it? Because it’s so fricking efficient. This is what dictates whether you buy a one-terabyte drive or a four-terabyte one.

Most people gets confused by buffers. When motion is detected, the camera doesn’t immediately start recording. Instead it captures a few seconds leading up to the event and then continues for several more seconds afterwards. The idea is that these buffer offer context, they show you who’s approaching the door instead of simply watching them leave. They also make a ten-second event last thirty seconds. And if there are fifty events per day, all that extra time adds up to hours of recording. That wasted space become valuable when reviewing an incident. Fortunately, the calculator consider this when allowing you to define a buffer length and clip length.

While you may feel like your driveway is silent, it’s not. Pets will trip it off. Vehicles driving past or clouds casting shadows on your driveway will also trip it off. This means an increased duty cycle, which is expressed in the results and reflects how much time per day it is recording. If that number climb above fifteen percent, you’re barely saving any storage compared to continuous recording anyway. So why bother with tuning the sensitivity settings? Just go ahead and just record non-stop and be done with it.

There are other tricky variables: namely, retention. Most people will tell you that 30 days is reasonable. However, this assumes a relatively small amount of daily storage usage. A single terabyte can be used up by a 4K camera with lots of motion within a couple of weeks. With the tool, you can determine whether your selected drive size aligns different than the retention you want. And then there’s overhead; specifically from system indexes and audio tracks, which tend to get overlooked until the drive has no more room.

Choosing the right storage plan isn’t about maximizing quality at all costs. Because that’s just stupid. You want to find the sweet spot between capturing enough information so you know what’s going on (recognize faces, read license plate numbers) and not clogging up your hard drive with nothing but sky. If you don’t have your camera specs in front of you, the tables on that page are a good place to start; then tweak them depending on your particular situation. That quiet backyard doesn’t require nearly as many bits as a crowded street corner.

The bottom line is that you shouldn’t lose important shots by accidentally letting the system overwrite them too soon. Know what’s going on with your buffer settings, your codec efficiency and your bitrate, so that you get your storage sized properally right out of the gate. You no longer have to wonder whether or not your configuration will last throughout a multi-day trip. Even if you guessed poorly at first, the math will set you straight, and that peace-of-mind is worth a couple minutes in front of a spreadsheet prior to investing in a luxurius hard drive.

You should of checked the specs first.