ir illuminator follow up

[Laughter] [Music] welcome to crosstalk solutions my name is Chris along with the Brandon Yarborough also with crosstalk Solutions and we are here working late night and we're going to be doing a follow-up to the Univision ater video that I did a while back and in that video I will put a link to it up on the screen things didn't seem to work out very well and what it turns out what's happening is I just didn't fully understand the way these ubiquity cameras work Brandon knew right away of course but he wasn't here recording with me the first time so I have a g2 camera here this is the gen 2 camera this is not the one that we're testing with because all of those are currently outside and working so what happened in my last video is I had the external illuminator on and then I would turn off the IR to the camera and then the entire picture would go dark right so I was thinking like while that IR illuminator doesn't seem to illuminate IR very well everything went dark but actually what happens is in these cameras there is a mechanical IR cut filter now that's in the datasheet and I've seen that I've even talked about the mechanical IR cut filter on some of these videos but I guess I never really understood exactly what that meant or what it did so here's what it does the IR cut filter puts a filter in front of the camera there's an audible click when the camera switches over from day to night or from night to day and that's the IR cut filter being put in place or removed so when it switches from night mode to day mode the IR cut filter is put in place and what it does is it filters out any IR light that comes in from the camera that's how you understand it as well correct so basically what was happening is I was manually triggering these into day mode it would put down the IR filter and cut out not only the lights on the camera but also the external illuminator IR would also be cut out okay so you kind of just have to think of it a little bit differently so the IR illuminate the external IR illuminator should be thought of more as a supplemental IR as opposed to a replacement IR would that be affairs so if you have a dark spot typically when you're trying to illuminate outdoor areas even with the IR extender you are only getting so far with those IR extender so if you're trying to view a large area the illuminator will help you in luminate a larger space outside not necessarily great for indoor environments unless you're trying to light up say a gem or anything like that but great outside yeah so okay so we're gonna put that to the test here I can get rid of this now and essentially what we're gonna do is show you the g3 Pro with and without the external illuminator the g3 with the IR extender and then with and without the illuminator and then we will show you the standard g3 camera without with and without the illuminator okay so let's get started with the g3 Pro here we have this camera online right now and are we running the G delimiters currently off yeah so we have this power strip here chain hitting this button allows us to turn the external illuminator on and off so we can see on my screen here everything looks kind of normal we're going to go ahead and turn on the illuminator so this is the g3 Pro regular night mode turning on the illuminator now just so everyone's aware the illuminator is about 10 feet above the camera's not washing out the camera from behind okay so as you can see here it didn't really change the picture that much so we have it on right now the external luminaires on let's turn it off a little bit of adjustment let's turn it back on there we go now the one thing that the g3 Pro can do is you can adjust the brightness of the onboard IR lights this is not something you can do with the standard g3 camera at least not through the GUI interface will show you a way to do it through SSH but if I come over here to my cameras and I click on my pros live feed let me bring this up a little bit bigger so it's easier to see but settings IR or infrared we can see the LED level of being fred is currently all the way up okay so the brightness here is a measurement from 0 to 99 we're gonna bring it all the way down and we still see not much change in the picture now what I just did there is I am now I have turned off the IR lights onboard the g3 camera but the external illuminator is still on so now let's turn off the external illuminator boom and so the amazing thing about this g3 pro camera is that that is pretty much pitch black outside and the reason you're able to see light still is because that one light that's right down in the center there is coming from my bedroom two stories up okay so the light is on in my bedroom it's shining down and the low-light performance of this camera is such that it is actually able to pick that up which i think is pretty pretty awesome right so even without any IR it looks decent so let's go ahead and turn on the IR of the g3 Pro there we go so it definitely makes it brighter it also makes the picture a lot clearer and now let's turn on the IR externa the illuminator and again a little bit brighter but not much difference all right let's now try the g3 with IR with the IR extender okay so now you can see this is the g3 with the IR extender that's like a $79 add-on to this camera and it looks pretty decent as is okay so now let's go ahead and flip on the external IR illuminator boom and there you can see it didn't really change the foreground that much but it definitely lit up the background quite significantly so if you see in the back here we've got the creepy conductor leaning up against that tree that trees probably about what 30 feet away 40 feet away from Yammer's easily yeah so let's turn off the external illuminator off and then we're gonna turn on the external illuminator boom there we go so again not too much difference but I wouldn't expect there would be too much difference because you already have the extra IR extender on that camera now with this we did a little bit of testing so you can manually turn the brightness up and down on the standard g3 with an SSH command but in our testing with the IR extender in place it actually only changes the the onboard the internal the internal IR of that camera so it doesn't really make any difference for us to show you that here so we're just going to move on now to the g3 the standard g3 camera with no IR extender okay so here we have the UVC g3 now this is the standard g3 camera no IR extender and this is with the onboard IR now looking at this picture here you can tell why you would need that IR extender you really can't see anything I mean see almost nothing I mean maybe 10 to 15 feet in front of that camera if someone walked by there you'd be able to see you'd be able to see them and but maybe not even recognize and like I said before the bullets with the internal IR s is really for inside environments where those IR s can bounce off walls and really illuminate well outside they do not perform well without the IR extender or an illuminator of some type right so now let's go ahead and turn on the external illuminator boom and look at that difference okay so now you can see where an external illuminator might come in handy and the question then becomes is it better to have a standard g3 with an external IR illuminator that was like 30 bucks or a g3 with the IR extender at 80 bucks or 76 it's like in that range somewhere you have to take into consideration the additional expense for wiring these this particular one runs off of 12 volts which has a small transformer so unless you want to maybe do some tricky wiring on the PV cable which I don't recommend then you'd have to have an electrician wire a socket yeah they do make IR extenders or IR illuminators that rpoe pass through correct but I don't know if they make ones that's 24-volt passive POA passed through you'd have to have an 802 2 3 AF capable camera which again isn't a problem the latest cameras are all 802 dot AF compatible if you're ordering them starting today they don't even can't really even buy the previous models anymore 3rd 24 volt passive only yeah ok so now let's look at the other fun thing that we learned and this came from comments as well if comments on the last video now if you look at this file now I am SSH into the camera itself this is SSH into the g3 camera and if you do a cat which is just a readout of the file of slash slash class backlight 0 dot pwn underscore BL slash brightness we get a value of 99 okay so that means maximum brightness so zero is no brightness LEDs or IR s are off but the make it but the night mode is still enabled 99 means night modes enabled full brightness so what we can do is we can say echo 0 into sis class backlight 0 brightness oops brightness boom now what that does is that just turned off the onboard IR of the g3 camera now if I turn off the external illuminator there you go pitch blackness so absolutely nothing so let's look at that again let's turn the brightness on the on board all the way up 99 so there we're back to our standard brightness let's put it back to zero and now let's turn on the IR illuminator with the IR brightness of the camera set to zero boom there we go ok so you can see that the IR illuminator is definitely doing its job and if you do that in conjunction with the camera being at you know brightness 99 it really doesn't make that much difference honestly so the onboard IR of the g3 is just so crappy that it doesn't really make a difference you have to have some sort of external illumination either the IR extender or an external IR illuminator like we're using here to have any sort of outside IR night-vision with this camera now the other advantage that you have though with the external illuminator is that you can put it in a different location and it's almost like a spotlight right so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go outside and we're gonna take the illuminator in our hands and we're gonna shine it around and you guys will see how much of a difference or how much IR that thing actually puts out [Music] okay so there we go how did that look you were watching the cameras while I was doing that it looked really good the closer you got to an object to keep the light actually made it look more like a spotlight versus a flood light compared to when it's behind the camera it's really luminate a lot more area if it really disperses a little bit of light over a large area much better it really depends on your use case is what I would say if you're using this g3 indoors you probably don't need external illumination if using it outdoors I would say you definitely need external illumination in the form of the IR extender or something like this unit VV IR illuminator there are some disadvantages and that it has to have its own separate power and that sort of stuff but the advantage is you can move it where you need it right and you're not just using the you know you're not just fixed location where the camera is just shining out you can put it a little bit further away or at an angle or you know illuminating what you actually need to illuminate yes okay so I hope you guys enjoyed this quick follow-up look at the univision der it definitely works a lot better than it did in my first video and of course I always like to do an update whenever we find out some new information so if you guys did enjoy the video please give us a thumbs up if you'd like to see more videos like this please click subscribe my name is Chris and crosstalk solutions along with a Brandon from crosstalk Solutions and thank you guys so much for watching you [Music]

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 33,618

Keywords: unifi, unifi video, ubiquiti, ubiquity, uvc-g3, uvc g3, uvc-g3-af, uvc-g3-pro, uvc pro, ubiquiti g3, ir, ir illuminator, infared illuminator, unifi video review, uvc-g3 night, ubiquiti g3 night, ubiquiti g3 vs g3 pro, ubiquiti g3 review, crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, uvc-g3-af review

Id: REOUsRQqsWM

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018