Setting Up Video Analytics for Alarm.com

[METAL CLANGING] [THUDDING] [CLICKING] Hi, DIYers. This is Michael from Alarm Grid and, today, I'm going to show you how to set up alarm.com video analytics using the alarm.com mobile app. Now, you can also do this using the alarm.com website, and we have an FAQ that shows you that process. But, today, we're going to be using the mobile app for setting up video analytics. If you aren't sure about what alarm.com video analytics are, it's just a really cool feature used with compatible alarm.com security cameras. You can set up the video analytics to get specific notifications. Say you want to get notified if a person is standing outside, but not if a vehicle moves by or an animal passes by, you can set up customized video analytics rules to meet your needs and get notifications that you want and not be annoyed by notifications that aren't important to you. We have some other videos and some FAQs that go into it in full detail, but, in this video, I'm just going to show you the basic process for setting up alarm.com video analytics. Just make sure you have a compatible alarm.com security camera added to your alarm.com account, and make sure that you have the Video Analytics Package feature added to your alarm.com account by your alarm monitoring company. So, now, we're going to turn our attention to our iPad-- or not our iPad, our Google tablet, here. We're using our Google tablet, today. And we have alarm.com already pulled up, so we're in there now, and we're into alarm.com. So we're going to click on the three bars in the upper left, just the Menu icon, if you will, and then we're going to choose Video. And we're going to click the gear icon in the upper right. That's the rules or the Settings section. And then we're going to click on Recording Rules, and it takes a little bit to load, but just be a bit patient. It will eventually give you the options. OK, and then you see the recording rules that you have set up previously. But to setup video analytics, you're going to choose Add New Rule in the upper right. And you see the Recommended Video Analytics button, here? You're going to click on that, and then you need to choose the camera that you want to use with video analytics. We have two choices because we are fortunate enough to have multiple alarm.com cameras that support video analytics. We'll use our test camera, today, because it is for testing purposes. Now, you need to choose what type of video analytics rule you want to set up. You can set up a Ground Zone rule or you can set up a Tripwire rule. A Ground Zone rule, it triggers when a person, object, animal, or vehicle remains in a particular-- in the detection area for a set amount of time. You can set the amount of time that you want, or you can create the Tripwire rule, which just creates a sort of invisible line for the camera. And if something crosses it, the type of activity, person, animal, object, or vehicle crosses the line, then it will trigger the rule. In our case, we're going to set up the Ground Zone rule because it offers a few more options and I want to make sure to show you all of them. So we have our ground zone selected. We have our test camera selected. So, now, we're good to press Next in the upper right corner, so we'll do that. And, now, you want to-- you're going to set set up like the object size that will trigger the video analytics rules, trigger the notifications. So we'll keep ours at the suggested. If you're wanting really small things to set off the video analytics, you can set it to Very Small. If you're wanting only video analytics trigger rules for large objects, you can adjust it accordingly to Very Large. But we'll keep ours at the suggested. And you also choose whether you want to use it indoors or outdoors, just based on the location of your camera. Our camera is indoors, so we'll keep ours at Indoors, but you can make that selection if you need do, and we're going to click Next in the upper-right, again. And, now, here is where we actually create the rule. So what you want to do first, you see in the upper-right corner that the rule is active? We want to leave that enabled. We need to make a rule name. We'll just choose Testing. We'll enter that is our rule name. And, now, you need to create the zone where the video analytics are being triggered. You can see, we have our camera man off to the side. And, yeah, there he is. We'll have it set up so that it triggers on the door only. We move these bars around, here, and you just want to get it positioned to where you want the activity to be detected. Whoosh! That should (LAUGHS) about do it. That's no problem. But we have it-- we have our video analytics setup right on the door, here. I positioned it pretty decently enough. That, that should be good. You can click that Clear Ground Zone button if you want to delete the zone that you have set up, but we'll just leave ours where it's at. And we have our duration of area inside-- the duration inside area of interest. This determines how long an object or person, animal has to remain inside that detection zone before the analytic is set out. So if you just have it set for-- if you have this set up to like 10 seconds-- let's say we did that-- and then the person is only there for five seconds, you wouldn't get a trigger. They would have to stick around this zone for 10 seconds based on the one we've set up. As you can see, you can set it to-- you can set it all the way down to half a second, or you can set it up to 120 seconds. That's two minutes. We'll set ours to 10 seconds for testing purposes, whatever. And then-- so you see when this is triggered, when if someone's in that detection area for at least 10 seconds, it will trigger the video analytics rule. And the action it will take, it will begin recording a clip. We have that set here. You can set when the rule will run. We'll just keep ours set to All Times, but if you wanted to set yours-- maybe you only wanted to get alerts at night. You could set it up accordingly. But we'll just leave ours at All Times. And you can set a minimum delay between clips so, that way, it's not constantly recording clips. It will delay and save you some footage space. So let's say you had someone, you had someone lingering outside your home, and they just wouldn't leave. They were there for an hour straight, well, you wouldn't get constant clips. It would only record every, in our case, three minutes is what we have set to. But let's set it to 10 minutes, because I want to show something different. And you can also set some exemptions. So it won't record when the panel is disarmed or when the panel is an Armed Stay mode. You can select those if you want. We won't select those. We'll have ours recording at all times if someone was lingering by our video room door. And you can set whether you want it to be a person, vehicle, or animal or other. So you can just click them. So, in this case, right now, we have Vehicle not selected. We turned off Other, so we have Person and Animal selected. We'll go ahead and select all of them, but just to show you that you can do that. We do have-- you can you can set which-- where you get the notifications. You have SMS text notification options or you have email options. You see our email, there, support@alarmgrid.com. We'll leave it at that. So we have our rules set up. You see, we named our rule. We did create the area where we wanted the notifications to occur, that, in our case, we more or less selected the door. We moved around. You can move that whole thing around if you want, but we'll keep ours at the door, here. We said our duration of 10 seconds, for that's how long something has to be hanging around that area for an action, for the action to occur, for the recorded clip to take place. We set our minimum delay of 10 minutes so, that way, we're not getting constant clips. It'll only happen every 10 minutes. And we set it to happen at all time, and we gave all the options. So once you finish doing everything, make sure everything's correct, you can click Save in the upper-right, and it will begin saving the rule. Just be patient. It takes a little second. You'll have the little spinny icon going to enjoy. And we'll wait for that to finish. OK, and now our video analytics rule has been successfully saved. It is set up. It is ready to go. And, as you can see, we have a few video rules here. We have Test, which was me testing it yesterday, actually, and we have Testing, which is the one I just created. You can turn it on or off. Right now, we have it on, but I'm turning it off just so you can see what it looks like. It's taking a little bit to show to just turn off rule. You think that would happen faster, but apparently not. Let's see here, we're going into Recording Rules again. Get it to load. And, yeah, so we did manage to turn off the rule. We have it triggered off here, but let's say we wanted to turn back on. We just click the button, here, and it needs to take its sweet time to do it. But let's try going back in again. And it did remain off. Let's trigger that. OK, we have our rule back on, here. So if you ever wanted to disable a video analytics rule, you can do that from this menu. If you ever need to create a new rule, you can certainly do that. You can have multiple video analytics rules set up for the same camera, so multiple detection zones. Just set up each one individually, and you can set it up with its own notification settings. So you really get a lot of customization here, really, however you want. But we're good here. We showed of the feature. We showed how to set it up, and that's a great way to get started. Just make sure you have the feature enabled by your alarm monitoring company. So we'll go ahead, and we'll exit the alarm.com app. And that's the video analytics feature and how you can set it up using the mobile app. Remember, you can also do it on the alarm.com website, if you prefer. It's under the Video section. If you found this video helpful, please give it a thumbs up below to like the video. And remember to subscribe to our channel to get updates on future videos. And if you have any questions about alarm.com video analytics, or if you're interested in getting started with an alarm.com video monitoring plan with AlarmGrid, you can send us email to support@alarmgrid.com. And remember to check out our website, alarmgrid.com, We hope you enjoyed the video. Thank you.