ChaseCam PDR 100 User Manual - page 18
INTELLIGENT VIDEO
ChaseCam PDR100 User Manual – 4/10/09
Page 18
Bullet cameras will also exhibit certain behavior under low voltage, such as wavy lines, colored
lines, loss of color.
Removal of External Power when Recording
If you are not using internal batteries for back up and you disconnect the power while recording,
you can lose the recorded file and can potentially corrupt the entire Compact Flash Card. Be
careful to not lose power and we do recommend using batteries for back up. If you lose power
while recording, your file size may not accurately display. If power fails during recording, we
recommend inserting the Compact Flash Card into the reader and using Windows Command Line
and type “chkdsk /f
by the PC. Do not type the quotation marks.
Compact Flash Cards
The PDR should accept any industry standard Type I or Type II Compact Flash Card. We are
testing various cards and if we find any that are compatible, they will be listed on our web site.
Cards larger than 4gigs must be formatted with FAT32. The PDR can write to FAT16 or FAT32
formats. Simply right click on the CF card/reader location on your computer and select “Format”.
Speed
The user will need to match the card to the intended “video quality” bit rate, or match the “video
quality” bit rate to the speed of the CF card that is installed. CF Cards are defined by some
manufacturers with these numbers as a
rough guide
:
24X is 3.6Mbits/SEC
40X is 6Mbits/SEC (Normal Video Quality)
60X is 9Mbits/SEC (Highest Video Quality
)
Note that excessive file fragmentation, space available, and manufacturing differences may affect
your actual speed. Some cards from certain manufacturers allow a faster speed than others,
regardless of what the number that is listed. We highly recommend careful choice of cards and to
allow some extra speed “capacity” when selecting your card.
If your card does not allow higher speeds that you have selected in the menu, the LCD will note
that CARD WAS SLOW! Your resulting video will be jumpy and have skips and you may have
audio drop outs. The number following the “CARD WAS SLOW” message indicates how severe
the problem was as a percentage. This will tend to be worse at higher video quality settings, on
larger cards, as the card gets more full, and as the card’s file system gets more fragmented. You
can try a fresh format, reducing the video quality setting, using less of the card’s capacity as ways
to test and solve this.
Capacity
Normal Video Quality at Full Resolution setting (4Mbits/Sec) will take up around 30 minutes per
gigabyte. The rest is mainly math. Half the resolution will take half the space. Double the quality
will take twice the space.
File Transfer and Video Editing
To transfer files from the Compact Flash card to a PC, remove the card from the PDR and insert
the card into a CF Card reader. It is recommend that files be copied to a PC for playing and
editing. Copying a large video file from a CF Card to a PC can take some number of minutes
depending on your type of connection such as USB and your system. A newer computer should
be able to transfer the files rapidly. We find we can transfer files at a rate of 1 gigabyte per minute
on the average using USB 2.0. On an older PC, this can increase to 10 minutes per gigabyte. We
do not recommend the use of PCMCIA adapter cards as they are normally slower.
Video playing on a PC. The video files from the PDR are MPEG-2 format, which use a standard
DVD Decoder to play. Your version of Windows Media Player or some other player you are using,