Working with Clips
The term "clip" is used in GadWatch to refer to either a movie or a still image (single frame) file. Clips are created by automated camera recording options, or by using the snapshot or movie camera toolbar icons.
Here's a GadWatch screenshot showing both the Clip List and the Clip Viewer:
Notice that when the Viewer window is open, the live camera window is moved to the lower-right hand corner. If you have more than one camera, you may cycle through them by double-clicking on the "Cameras" window title bar. If you click on the live video image, the viewer will be closed.
As clips are created, "thumbnail" images are created on the clip list. The clip list has a vertical scroll bar, and zoom in/out buttons. When you zoom out, more clips and their associated thumbnails will fit into the clip list window before it becomes necessary to use the scroll bar. However, a number of graphical clip features are only visible in the fully "zoomed-in" view.
To the right of the thumbnail image, you will find the camera name and time of capture. Beneath that is the duration and file size. A green bar is displayed to graphically show the clip's size relative to others in the folder. This allows you to see at a glance which clips are longest r occupying the greatest amount of disk space. Finally, there are three icons that may possibly be displayed: Protected, Audio, and Archive. Is the clip is marked as Protected, it will not be automatically moved, deleted or recycled according to the automatic clean-up rules (discussed below). If the clip has the Audio icon, it has an audio track. If the clip has the Archive icon, it will be copied to your web archive.
Click on a clip's thumbnail to "select" the clip. Once you've done this, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move up and down in the list. Now, press Enter, or double-click a clip to "open" the clip for viewing. More than one clip may be selected at a time by holding down the Ctrl key as you click on different clips. If you click on one clip, then click on another while holding the Shift key, all of the clips in-between the two will be selected.
There are two default folders created for you: "New" and "Stored." All new recordings go to this folder. Clips may then be manually or automatically moved to the Stored folder. The current folder name is displayed at the top of the Clip List:
Click the folder icon to switch between New and Stored. To the right of the folder icon is an arrow icon which toggles the clip sort order between date ascending and descending.
You may also create any number of subfolders to allow you to organize your clips. Right-click in the Clip List and select "Goto folder..." to see the folder tree:
Click the "Make New Folder" button to place a new folder at the highlighted position. When this folder tree is changed, the list of folders will be updated at the top of the Clip List. You may view any subfolder by selecting it from the drop-down list. The ".." entry in the list moves you "up" or "backwards" in the folder tree. To move clips between folders, select one or more clips, then right-click on the Clip List and select "Move to another folder..."
While viewing the New folder (or one of its subfolders), right-click on a clip and select "Store" to move it to the Storage folder. From the Stored folder, you may "Un-store" clips to move then back to the New folder. If a clip is in a subfolder, that subfolder is automatically created in the Stored or New folder tree. That is, when you Store a clip in New\Home, the folder Stored\Home is created if it does not yet exist.
You may have a camera automatically place its new clips directly into a subfolder by adding the subfolder name(s) to the beginning of the filename on the camera's Record Properties page. For example, Home\&CAM.%Y%m%d_%H%M%S will place new clips into the New\Home folder (you must retain the code following Home\ which specifies the default filename consisting of the camera name and the date).
The clip viewer allows you to play the clip, if it is a movie, either frame by frame, or full-speed. There is a slider which represents the current frame position within the video. There is also a tempo slider which may be used to slow down or speed up the playback from 1/8th to 8x real-time. If the movie has sound, you can also adjust the playback volume with a third slider.
The play button becomes the pause button when you click it. Use the buttons on either side of the play button to step frame-by-frame forward or backward. Holding down either of these buttons will automatically repeat the stepping. The button at the far-left will rewind to the beginning. The button at the far-right will cue to the end of the video.
Use the mouse wheel over the viewer window to digitally zoom in and out. When you are zoomed-in, you may use the left mouse button to "drag" the video within the window.
To close the Clip Viewer and return to the live camera view, click on the live camera view or the X icon at the top-right of the viewer window.
Deleting Clips
When you right-click on a clip and select the Delete menu, you have a choice of Recycle or Destroy. When you recycle, clips are moved to the Windows recycle bin. When you destroy, they are permanently deleted.
Editing Clips
The clip viewer allows you to edit clips by moving the two markers you see below the position slider--there's a green or "start" point and a red or "stop" point. When you click Play, playback loops from the start point to the stop point. It is possible to place the stop point before the start point, which in effect denotes a section of the video NOT to play.
To make your edit permanent, right-click the viewer window and click Trim to remove the video that's both before the start point and after the stop point. You may choose to replace the current video or to create a new one. If you choose to replace, the video is automatically re-opened in the viewer; otherwise, you will see a new clip created in the clip list. Note that if you are starting with a GadWatch DVR (.bvr) file, the resultant new file will always be an AVI file, which means its final size must be less than 1GB.
Exporting Clips
When you right-click on a clip and select the Export menu, you have a choice of Move, Copy or Email. The Move and Copy options allow you to browse your computer's hard drive for a place to put the file. If you selected Move, the original clip is removed from your GadWatch folder.
When you select Email, the clip is added as an attachment to a new email message which will be sent by your email client (for example Outlook Express).
Please note that GadWatch DVR (.bvr) files are only readable by GadWatch. Before you export a video, you may wish to Edit it (described above) to both shorten it to the section of interest and convert it to an interchangeable format (AVI).
The Clip Options window allows you to specify the physical location on your hard drive where New clips will be stored. There's also a Stored folder that you may specify. This is a folder which serves as an "extended stay" location for clips which are cluttering up New clip list, but you are not yet ready to delete. The Stored folder does not need to be located on the same hard drive or PC as the the New clips folder.
GadWatch may be configured to automatically store or delete clips based on age and disk space specifications. The New and Stored folders are handled completely independently. Each has its own age and disk space quota.
By default, GadWatch uses the Windows Recycle Bin when deleting clips. The advantage of the recycle bin is that you may easily recover recently deleted files. The disadvantage is that the recycle bin uses a fixed portion of your hard drive space, and moving a file to the recycle bin does not free up hard disk space unless the recycle bin is full.
A clip may be protected from automatic storage or deletion by right-clicking it and selecting "Protect." You may make this the default for all new clips by selecting an option on the camera's Record Properties page. To protect an entire folder, right-click in the Clip List and select the option "Protect entire folder."
Select "use FTP to backup clips to the Internet" to enable Web archival of your clips. You will need to enter a valid FTP server address, user ID and password. Leave the folder box blank to use the default folder; if you specify a folder, that folder must be manually created on your server using an FTP client. In general, passive transfers are more widely supported by FTP servers.
To archive a clip to the Web, right-click it and select "Archive." An FTP icon will be displayed on the clip in the clip list until it has been successfully uploaded. If GadWatch is interrupted during a file transfer, a partial file may exist on your server until GadWatch is restarted and retries the transfer. Until a clip is actually sent, you may right-click it and select "Don't archive." Clips may be marked automatically for archival via an option on a camera's Record Properties page.
NOTE that if you have updated from a previous version of GadWatch that did not have the Web archival feature, you may have to manually reset the "archive" flag on your clips in a Windows Explorer window, unless you want all of your pre-existing clips to be archived.
The Stopwatch toolbar icon opens the GadWatch Stats window.
Gadwatch
The first stats page contains a list of system messages. There are three classes of messages:
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Information -- the application startup time, for example. |
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Warning -- a resource conflict, for example. Warnings cause the warning symbol to appear in the GadWatch status bar. |
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Error -- a server connection could not be established, for example. Errors also cause the warning symbol to appear in the GadWatch status bar. |
Camera Stats
In addition to the messages page, the stats window contains a page for each camera.
A camera stats page tracks the amount of time for which the camera has been online, and the total number of frames processed. There's also a count for the number of those frames in which motion was detected. Below that are counters for the number of frames broadcast, the number of images posted, and the number of new clips created.
A second column of counters tracks the number of each type of Alert that's been issued since the camera came online.
The "Connections" list shows the IP addresses and bandwidth for viewers using a webcasting connection. There's a counter for the elapsed time since the most recent connection time. There're also counters for the total number of connections, total time connection, and total frames served. These stats are "zeroed" each time you start GadWatch. They persist, however, through a camera reset. The "user" column will have usernames if you have enabled authentication on the server options page.
When a connection becomes idle, it becomes grayed and italicized, and is moved down the list as necessary to keep active connections at the top of the list. When a connection is added or is reactivated, it appears at the top of the list. If you've configured the option on the webcasting page, a sound is played when a connection is activated.
