i'm clay archer ceo dvc technology and today's episode two if you haven't seen episode one it's in the link in the description we're gonna set up the hike vision nvr connect the cameras and give our first impressions of the hike vision system i want to remind everybody that we're a managed service provider and we install camera systems for clients our viewpoint may be different than hobbyists or somebody setting up home systems also our average client is using less than 50 cameras so we're not doing large enterprise setups either and with that in mind let's not waste any time and let's jump right into the setup all right we're gonna fire up the unit here maybe takes a minute to beat up i've got it booting up straight into the wizard now okay so it's booted up you can see that it has a really annoying alarm saying that i haven't set up the hard drive yet so i've got it setting up i've i've turned it on once before but i've got it going right into the wizard let me go ahead and hit apply here and i must keep the wizard coming up keep the password the admin password the same i'll go into a little bit about my problems with setting that up but incorrect i'm empowered set it up to go in here the first time set the date and the time i'm in the eastern time zone here in the united states i'm gonna go ahead and just accept dhcp there i also gone through this once before and i let the software assign the ip addresses to the cameras again that annoying beep is going to continue until i partition the hard drive in this unit so i'm going to skip the hit connect for now i'm going to just go ahead and leave out all the same i'll go ahead and reset that from the system remotely here from my computer i'm going to go ahead and click on this and i'm going to initialize this drive to get rid of this horrible alarm yes we okay with that i will also say that i bought this off of amazon with a two terabyte drive already installed so i did not have to go through an install process on this okay so as soon as that initializes the annoying alarm goes off as you see let me go ahead and go next on enabling h.265 and i'm gonna go yes on continuous and yes on all day motion just for fun i'll probably go back and reset up all these settings here again this is my first time ever doing one that's it for getting it set up um you know it was a little bit of pain but i tried to do it headless and i kind of gave up and i came back and i did it with a monitor just because it seemed like that was the the quickest and easiest way to do it all right one last little thing i realized once i went back into the menus it will set up a pattern for you to try and i think this pattern is reusable for your password which is pretty cool in here you can get the main menu again i probably won't do most of this here i'll probably going to go into the web-based portal from my pc of my office so but anyways that pattern password is kind of interesting feature here uh which will let you get into the menu so if i exit in here and go back in the menu i think i don't have to give my mask uh master password again because i've already put that shape in so anyways that's it i'm gonna go ahead and go into the other room now all right so here we are i'm in the ivms 4200 software just real quickly before we dive in i will tell you that i've had quite a little bit of an issue we're just getting going on this video it's been a couple weeks uh since we did the unboxing video typically i'll fire the cameras up i'll play with them for a few days uh maybe do a night time do a daytime shoot and then we'll go outside and do a daytime and a nighttime shoot and that typically takes me about a week to do and by that time i've kind of gone deeply into the software found out you know all the warts and found out all the cool features that we want to go through get my thoughts together and then we'll do the the video the following week well it's been two weeks since we did the unboxing video and i will tell you this has been one of the more difficult videos that i've shot in my entire uh history on youtube the learning curve coming from unified protect is really steep there's a bunch of things about the nvr and the software that were hard for me to get over every time i get to one of those nights where i'm shooting something something threw me a curveball i logged into the web interface and certain things just didn't work so you know then i was like okay well i'll throw in the ivms software and thought hey maybe i can just kind of work through this and learn as i go but every last thing stopped me from being able to do that so i took a week an extra week watched a bunch of youtube videos kind of went through the system and still had you know a really steep learning curve i really wasn't super happy about installing the client version of the ivms on my hardware and so i did that there were a ton of permissions i had to give the software which were okay i'm just you know it's just clunky and i hate to install a bunch of services on my pc just to get things to work a lot of user account control stuff where you're giving it rights to to do things even at startup now obviously i'm new to ivms and i probably could have gotten away with not installing as many services and i may go back through an ad remove programs and start trying to take some of the features away from ivms that being said the software is clunking you know my my machine here has 16 gigs of ram it's a pretty strong little workstation some precision dell workstation is a nice computer and it's been struggling with it again my reference is you know i've got 25 years in tech i learn tech new technologies all the time this is a more cryptic system than than you would expect and two kind of observations that i have based off of just my experiences one from my perspective we're an i.t company here um i've got 10 or 15 techs here that are going to go out and deploy these out in the field training 10 15 people on how to use the system there's not a lot of resources now youtube is wonderful but you know just as a protocol or a documentation issue for training i think that this would be a much harder system for me to deploy to a project team and say hey you guys need to know this inside now my my secondary concern is that we are deploying this to clients and my clients typically do not use many of the features of their systems until you know it's six months in and they want to see when somebody came in the front door or when something went missing and i don't think this is a a system that you could have an uneducated end user use and be able to just jump in after maybe months of no exposure and right click on something and be able just to kind of go through stuff i'll point that out as we go through this in the series of videos obviously i'm going to use the hikvision nvr software here and then i'm going to go into the synology and then i'm going to go into the blue iris and i'm going to compare all of those to unify this this video is just going to be a basic overview of the hike vision my immediate first impressions of what the cameras look like i by no means mean this is a deep dive into hike vision so without going much further in that i'm gonna go jump into the software and kind of show you how we use the software over the last couple of weeks in our first impressions of the cameras so this is the main dashboard of the ims software i think that this is really laid out relatively well you can see just like main view and remote playback reports um this is pretty self-explanatory and i think that if you just came in here you're gonna use this like this you would be pretty happy with the layout of this main screen across the top here i have these tabs these are tabs that i have opened up from these different buttons that i'm going to go over in this video these are kind of the the main tabs that i've used as we've gone through the system i'm going to start if we can go from uh right to left here this maintenance and management tab was kind of the first one you go into kind of to get into the nvr you can do some of your setup here you know one of the things that i think is kind of was hardest to get my head around was kind of the typography of the network here basically i think everything goes through the nvr the nvr acts like a router and then beyond the nvr are the cameras um sometimes you're going to get to some of the features of the cameras through this ims software some of the times you have to actually hit the cameras themselves through their ip address and translate that through the nvr which is acting like a router the other night i was trying to turn on and turn off the ir emitters and that was something that i needed to go into the camera itself and hit them now in unify you have that same kind of setup where you sometimes you do have to go in the camera maybe to turn off a microphone or something but most of that is available through the software and i found it kind of difficult to to get my head around the way these things set up one other thing here is there's multiple ways to get into things and so what i see assumed was the right way sometimes was kind of a shortcut way and not necessarily the right way like i could go into the cameras here and set up the cameras individually and i can edit some stuff on these cameras here but you know at the end of the day sometimes you get in one way and you can do certain things and you go to another way you can do other things and that that was a little cumbersome for me but anyways this main screen here you can set up some of your event configuration your storage schedule some backups some system configuration system logs that kind of stuff i'm not going to dive too deep into there's a ton of videos on youtube about how to set up this software um but this is the main spot you would do just to manage your devices the main screen that you're going to see is called the main view here obviously and it does basically what you would assume that it does you can store a bunch of different custom views um all your cameras are going to show up here down below nvr is going to show up there if you had multiple nvrs you could join them over here and you can set these up in groups in a bunch of different ways basically you just drag your cameras over onto the screen and you've set up your views and you can save those views um pretty self-explanatory nothing really all that cumbersome to this but let's go over my first impression of these cameras now obviously these cameras are in the 100 to two hundred dollar range i've got two eight megapixel cameras here and i've got a four megapixel camera again as i do on all the ubiquity cameras i leave them uh just as they are out of camera you can tell really quickly that the top two are a little bit hot the bottom one seems to have a more neutral appearance to it one of the things i always mention on the ubiquity cameras hey phil uh is the wide dynamic range the g4 cameras on the on ubiquity tend to see a better dynamic range i will tell you the dynamic range on these cameras do not look to be super high and one of the ways that i always take a look at that is in the lights up in the ceiling in all three of these cameras you really can't see any of the actual fixture itself it's just a white light another way you can tell the dynamic range is out in the front here past this glass is actually exterior the building and the light out there in the lower left you can see that you can kind of see out the the building there and in the upper two uh it's much more blown out but where i will tell you the cameras are doing well is in eight megapixels so if i zoom in here um i can see this 2020 line pretty well um i think that's pretty similar to what you saw out of the ubiquiti g4 pro maybe a little less there but obviously this is a wide angle lens here whereas the g4 pro is a bullet which you know actually has zoom and we'll get into the comparison a little bit more in the next video where these are falling short is the wide dynamic range i'm getting a little bit more blown out in the highs and probably a little bit more less detail in the darks all three of the cameras are doing pretty well with the width um you can see they're all pretty similar you know they're not mounted exactly in the same spot but they are pretty comparable on how wide you're getting you can see you get all the way to the left side of the stack of boxes and we're getting the first monitor in in this top left one we're getting a little bit further we can always see in the tina's window on the bottom just a little less of that monitor because we're going a little bit further to the left so i would i would on all three of these cameras i would say hey they look relatively good i'm not complaining about any of these images and the 4k versus 8k if i go in here and i do i zoom in you can definitely see when we do this that you're you know you're falling off way before that 2020 line and there's a lot less detail in there one other thing about these cameras in particular that i noticed and i don't know i haven't gotten too deep into it it's just there's any lens distortion correction um if somebody were to walk over on the very very far left side of the image things get compressed a little bit so people look uh a little strange you know there is a little bit of that again i typically turn that off in the ubiquity cameras because i'd rather see further than have the correction for that lens distortion turned on and maybe a little bit of a crop so i really can't complain about anything here i think these are nice solid cameras for the price they're not definitely anything that is going to make you go oh my gosh that's the best camera ever you know when i put a g4 pro on for the first time you go wow that's amazing but of course that's a 450 camera and you should you should feel that way um real quickly if i go back into the timeline here this is one of the areas where i feel like this is falling way short of ubiquity's offering there you know their time-lapse feature was really super smooth this is not super smooth so basically i don't have events turned on here yet and i will do events in the next video if you don't have an on motion event here you know finding the exact time something happened without this this movement being really smooth and me being able to see in between here makes me have to watch a bunch of video which is you know a little bit disappointing i thought that would be a little bit smoother the features here being able to do that really quickly in this mode are nice it isn't anything that's amazing or uh you know i you basically have you know you could go down single frame and you can go forward and backwards and play it backwards you know all that stuff and if you want to go back to live you just click on live view you know right clicking there does give me pretty much most of the stuff that i wanted to see here that's going to bring us to the next tab here if i go to remote playback this is where you can go back and look at multiple cameras at the same move forward here in the time where there's data for everybody and i can drag multiple cameras onto the timeline and move them forward and backwards so that they're all at the same time or they can move them independently of each other pretty cool stuff i'm here you can also see the night view of the cameras last night yeah you know as far as the cameras go all three i do have to report that all three of their ir emitters are on here so you're getting a little bit of overblown ir that was one of the issues i was having is turning off individual ir emitters made me go into the cameras themselves every time i try and do something small like just turn off ir emitters it takes me watching a youtube video or two and experimenting a little bit it's really a long kind of drawn out arduous process so it's something that should be relatively easy to do but you can see here um the night image here out of the 2cd 208 5g one a mix megapixel camera not really super impressed by this image i mean obviously if somebody came in the room i would be able to see what's going on there it is overblown because all three ir emitters are going here at once you can see the shadow of the one next to it but i'm not really blown away by the image here it's okay it's decent um you know seems all right seems sharp enough but you know if i compared that to uh you know and i will in the next video i compare that to ubiquiti's offerings uh i think it's probably a little subpar not bad i you know this one is the best of all of them this is the tcd two three eight five fwd eight megapixel camera pretty good now in all fairness this is blown out because i've got three hour emitters going on it at once um but i can really see what's going on in the room even way off in the on the in the peripheral of this it looks good so i you know i would be pretty happy with that result the one that i'm actually not all that happy with um surprise surprise it's another dome camera the dome seems to suffer from the same ir cast that i have on the ubiquity cameras this dome has never been off you know and like the ubiquities where you can move the dome on and off this one's kind of more fixed there are a ton of emitters inside of this dome but i'm getting this cast at the end of the day if somebody walked in this room would i be able to see them and probably identify them yes but i'm not really blown away by that images either of the upper images i think are i think are subpar but you know back to this software again i don't have a bunch of events i don't have any events turned on but if i did i could see all of these different there would be little spikes down here where i could go to motion events or you know a face detection event or a vehicle detection event and we'll do that in the next video but um it is nice to be able to scrub the timeline and see all cameras in the same timelines that way if you know this one was the front hall and this one was the back door and this one was the the front door you could see somebody and where they kind of uh where the entire facility was at a certain time and then kind of move forward and backwards to see somebody walking from one area to another so i do see some power here um i'm just not as big a fan of how you scrub through the timeline here i do think that they could have done this in a more of a more powerful way and there's more in here you can kind of go through into different types of playbacks event playbacks you can search events and time um and you know kind of go this day to that day there's a bunch you can do here the the power of this is is pretty high it also means that it's a little bit more complex and a little bit more cryptic to find everything here i'm gonna go to data retrieval this is another one you know i haven't played much with this because i haven't set up on the events but you can see you know the facial recognition the human recognition behavioral analysis you can kind of see where things are kind of coming and going and we think when things are out of like a normal state uh vehicle retrieval so you'll be able to see you know everybody's license plates for over a time frame um uh people frequency and the frequency of personal peers rarely appeared person and these are all really interesting features here i will test these out uh you know against smart detections in the next video as we add some of these detections to the cameras another feature you know i probably won't really spend much time in here but you can see the the grander features of this software is the ability to monitor dozens and dozens of cameras and then bring back some reporting based off of of a lot of data so you can see they have people counting uh q management where you can see where people are in a line or waiting how long they've been waiting uh heat maps to see where people are in a room or in an area surface temperatures real time density and people counting in you know temperature maps to see what kind of things are then those are really neat you know these are things i probably would never use personally you know typically our employments are to professionals um maybe a warehouse but we're not typically putting out hundreds and hundreds of cameras at once um and these features would be great if you had somebody sitting behind uh you know a security counter like a security guard or something that was really trying to manage a ton of areas and kind of decide where to put assets some of these features would have definitely helped in these reportings would definitely help in those kind of things a little bit beyond the scope of kind of what i'm trying to do here and then you have your event center and i where i can see this is we're going to be our comparable to our smart detections and unify as i set these up we will do a comparison of this event center versus uh the smart detection center and uh the protect software and see how those all play off against each other as i said before i do have some opinions about the software and its complexity but i'm going to save most of those for the comparison video at this point i'm going to go back to the studio we're going to wrap up this video and we'll tell you what's coming ahead in the next videos my first impression is this is not a great consumer facing system the learning curve is much deeper than it needs to be but you can see the power and the scalability of the system as you dive deeper into its features i have to say that this has been the hardest review that i've done to this point the lack of basic instructions and the complexity of what should be simple procedures like adding cameras to the web interface or turning off ir emitters are cryptic and they make you feel like either you're an idiot or something's broken and that's not a position i ever want to put a client or an employee in other issues like user account control rights and a bunch of services running to general system slowness are major drawbacks we had to use an hdmi display out to a capture card on a laptop to even get footage of the ivms software that wasn't jittery or unusable let me frame this up by saying i'm a complete novice when it comes to hike edition i would love your comments and feedback below to help guide me through the next comparison videos i want to thank everybody on the reddit and facebook forums for their questions and guidance i also want to thank all the youtube creators out there that helped me get as far as i have over the past few weeks in the next video we are going to put the unified protect system head to head against the hike vision and see who comes out on top if you like this kind of content please like and subscribe and we'll see you in the next
2021-02-28