Vitamin D Video Reference Guide

Managing Your Video

This section describes how long video is saved, how to manage disk space, and how video clips are divided up. You can access settings to manage your video at by selecting Options from the Tools menu (Preferences from the Vitamin D Video menu on Mac OS).

The Basics

Vitamin D Video sets aside a certain amount of disk space to store two types of video:
- Saved video clips
  - Any event that is marked to be saved by a rule is kept as long as disk space is available.
  - When you run out of disk space, the oldest clips are deleted.
  - Rules that save clips are indicated by the save icon appearing next to the rule, in the Monitor View and Search View filter list (shown here):
- Temporary video
- In addition, you can save any individual clip permanently by selecting it in the Search view and choosing Tools > Export Clip....
To change the amount of video stored, you can set the following
- Total amount of disk space used for video. Change the number that appears after the text "To store video, don't user more than."

Amount of temporary video stored. Edit the number that appears after the text "Temporarily keep all video for up to."

Tips for managing video storage
- In general, it is more efficient to allocate less space to temporary video, which frees up more space for saved clips. That’s because if your rules accurately capture events of interest, nothing particularly important is happening in the rest of the temporary video. For example, if you average one hour of saved clips per day, then reducing the amount of temporary video by one day can give you three more weeks of saved clips (and vice versa). On the other hand, temporary video is useful if it’s important to have backup of video where objects may have been missed (e.g., in scenes of night or dark shadows).
- You can save space by scheduling the camera to only run at certain times, which is described here.

When you set up a camera, a rule is automatically created to save all clips of moving objects. If you want to create more specific rules, it is recommended to add a new rule rather than modify the original rule. That way, you have a backup of all detected motion.
If you delete or modify the default rule to record fewer objects, however, you can still search for any object recorded in the temporarily saved video. These objects are labeled "temporary video (not saved by a rule)" in the results list of the Search view. The only difference is that they will be deleted when the temporary video time period expires, which is usually sooner than when saved clips will be deleted.

IMPORTANT: Saving video at high resolution (Basic and Pro Edition only)
- If you save video at a higher resolution, the amount of video you can save in the same amount of disk space decreases significantly.
- As a result, if you use a higher resolution, it is recommended to increase the total amount of disk space used for video.
- Depending on your camera and how much activity is in the scene, a gigabyte of disk space should store roughly the following amounts of video (note that very dark scenes can generate video artifacts that make them equivalent to "busy" scenes):
  - 2.5 to 3 hours of QVGA (320 x 240)
  - 45 minutes of VGA (640 x 480)
  - 15 minutes of XGA (1024 x 768)
  - 10 minutes of SXGA (1280 x 1024)

Advanced details

How clips are created
- Each clip starts five seconds before the event that triggers the rule (e.g., person crossing a boundary), and ends 10 seconds after. The extra ten seconds allows you to see what happens after the trigger event occurs (e.g., what a person did after coming in a room).
- If a second object appears before the first object moves out of view, the clip is continued until the second object moves out of view. This continues if more objects appear before previous objects disappear.
- Note that in the search results list, you do not see video duplicated between clips (for example, you won't see the end of one clip contain the same video as the beginning of the next clip).
External video storage
- Vitamin D Video looks for video in a specific directory location.
- You can change this location, for example to use an external hard disk or server.
- Click "Move video..." in the Options dialog (Preferences dialog on Mac OS) to reassign your video directory. You can either move the files that you already have (which can take several hours if you have gigabytes of video), or delete the original files and start with a new location.