General (properties)

When you configure video and recording for specific cameras, properties include:

Enabled	Cameras are by default enabled, meaning that provided they are scheduled to be online and that they can to transfer video to your system. You can disable an individual camera, in which case no video/audio is transferred from the camera source to your system.
Preview	Select this check box to show a preview of your camera's video. If you clear the check box, your system does not show a preview for your camera.
Camera Name	The name as it appears in the Management Application as well as in clients. You can overwrite the existing name with a new one. Names must be unique, and must not contain any of these special characters: *< > & ' " \ / : ? \| [ ]**
Camera shortcut number	Users of XProtect Smart Client can take advantage of keyboard shortcuts, some of which let the users toggle between viewing different cameras. Such shortcuts include numbers which are used to identify each camera. Shortcut numbers must be unique for each camera. A camera shortcut number must not contain any letters or special characters, and must not be longer than eight digits. Examples of correct camera shortcut numbers: 3, 12345678. Examples of incorrect camera shortcut numbers: Cam#3, 123456789. More information about using the keyboard shortcuts is available in the separate documentation for XProtect Smart Client.

These properties are to a large extent camera-specific. Since such properties vary from camera to camera, descriptions in the following are for guidance only. If you can access the selected camera, a live preview is displayed. Click the Camera Settings... button to open a separate window with properties for the selected camera.

The video properties typically let you control bandwidth, brightness, compression, contrast, resolution, rotation, and more by overwriting existing values of selecting new ones. When you adjust video settings, you can—for most cameras—preview the effect of your settings in an image below the fields.

Video settings may feature an Include Date and Time setting. If set to Yes, date and time from the camera are included in video. Note, however, that cameras are separate units which may have separate timing devices, power supplies, etc. Camera time and system time may therefore not correspond fully, and this may occasionally lead to confusion. As all frames are time-stamped by your system upon reception, and exact date and time information for each image is already known, it is recommended that the setting is set to No.

For consistent time synchronization, you may—if supported by the camera—automatically synchronize camera and system time through a time server.