Monitor video with AIRA is easy and efficient. AIRA has been designed to maximize human attention on the cameras that need it most. The following are guidelines as to how you can maximize the monitoring experience in AIRA 2005.
For most users, using one monitor with AIRA Explorer is fine. The Main Console displays and summarizes activity across your enterprise adequately. For more advanced users or monitoring stations, the ability to see multiple windows and cameras at once may be a requirement. AIRA Explorer supports multiple monitors (the number of monitors depends on your PCs ability to decompress multiple video streams). This gives you the ability to display the Main Console in one screen, and the Multi-live on the other display. The Multi-Live view can be configured to automatically update which cameras are displayed, focusing your attention on only those cameras where activity is detected by AIRA. It is also easy to manually drag and drop cameras into a Multi-Live view window, by left clicking a camera and dragging it into a Multi-Live view pane. Using two monitors with Multi-live and the Main Console makes this less awkward and more efficient. For those who wish to see more than 16 cameras at once, additional monitors can be connected to the PC (provided your video card allows it, and your PC has enough processing power).
Using the Site Map is easy. To navigate to different cameras (to see a live view) simply left click on the Site Map on the camera you wish to see. You can also drag a camera from the Site Map into a Multi-Live view pane. The colours of the camera indicate camera status. Green means a normal video signal is detected, but no activity is detected. Yellow indicates activity is detected, Red indicates an alarm has occurred on the camera (see Policies on how to configure alarms). A grey signal indicates the camera signal is lost, and a white camera indicates a problem with our software on that camera (see Troubleshooting Live Video for more information).
The Alarm Log is in the Main Console is much like your email inbox. AIRA Explorer (AE) can be connected to multiple AIRA Servers at once. Each time an AIRA Server causes an alarm, it pushes a message to AE, and a new alarm entry appears in the Alarm Log. Simply click on new Alarms as they come in, and AIRA will automatically jump to the correct server and camera which caused the Alarm, allowing you to quickly inspect the video content. It is also a good idea to leave
After a new Alarm comes in, and you have inspected the Alarm, you can now mark the alarm as a real alarm, or a false alarm and leaving your notes. This allows security administrators to generate reports on how many alarms were detected by AIRA, the response time by security personnel, and keep track of real alarms to false alarms.
Monitoring agents or security staff need to know how to respond to different sorts of alarms. It is possible to save this information directly with AIRA. Users can display this information by right clicking on the alarm in the Alarm Log to see the instructions on how to handle the particular event. Server Instructions are set on each server, which gives a blanket set of instructions on how a monitoring person responds to an alarm. If Instructions were set directly in the Alarm Policy, then these Instructions will be displayed to the user in lieu of the Server Instructions.
The Alarm Console enables you to respond to Alarms through your internet connection, provided that you have a speaker configured on the remote location. When Alarms arrive through the Alarm Log, and you have assessed the alarm, marked it as false or real and added comments, you may choose to use the Alarm Console to engage a perpetrator. With the Alarm Console, you can speak, play sounds and more.
The Time Line is an integrated display within the Main Console. The Time Graph summarizes the activity per bar on a 30 minute basis. It is a quick way to know whether activity was detected before or after the alarm, without having to manually review video. If there is some activity summarized on the Time Graph, simply click on it to view a still image of that event. To watch video playback, simply hit Play on the bottom navigation bar.
Viewing Activity for all Cameras
The View Activity for all Cameras form allows you to see a merged Time Graph of multiple cameras. Through the Main Console, the currently selected camera's Time Graph is visible, but if you want to compare that with other cameras, you can see this summary through the View Activity for all Cameras form.
If too many alarms are coming in from a particular server or camera, you can temporarily disable alarms so the Alarm Log is not flooded with nuisance alarms.
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