This article will take you step by step through the process of enabling motion activated recording in your DVR or NVR recorder that you have purchased from CCTV Camera World. This is a very straightforward and simple process that should be very similar regardless of your unit and firmware. When you have your cameras set to motion detection, they will only record video when they are triggered by a motion occurrence. Enabling motion will save you immensely on hard drive storage space and enable you to fast froward video playback to when motion events occur.

The first step is to access your DVR's main menu and find the appropriate section. Under the "Settings" section of the main menu, select the option "Storage."

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You will be brought to the menu for your schedule settings. You should see a colored grid reflecting the types of recording and hours you have it set for.  Green bars are for "regular", constant recording. Yellow bars are for "MD" or motion detection. You have two different ways to actually set the hours and types of recording.  The easiest is to draw them on to the graph, the other is to set it based on input.

I will describe both ways here. When looking at the colored graph, you will see an option for "Channel."  Channel means what camera you are selecting. You will have to set the recording schedule for each camera individually. Select the channel you would like. Then you have to select the days of the week you would like to set. You can select the option for "All" if you would just like one type of recording for the entire week. Now you will draw on the graph by clicking on the day you are setting and dragging to fill in the bar. The graph goes from 0-24 reflecting the 24 hours of the day. To change from drawing green "regular" recording to "MD" for motion recording, you must click the yellow check box above the graph. When you have selected the appropriate times and types of recording, make sure to click "Apply" at the bottom so these changes take effect.

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The other option is inputting the times you would like, this then autofills the graph. On the graph showing the colored lines, select the gear icon to the right most of the screen. This will bring up the appropriate menu. Here you can go day by day or again select the "all" option to affect all days. From there, you can input the times you want, and the type of recording you would like to do. Once you have completed this, make sure to hit save and apply at the bottom.

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Next you will have to tell your DVR that you want each channel to follow the set recording schedule as opposed to manual recording which is used for other functions. This is a vital step, without  enabling this for each channel, your cameras will not follow the set schedule. While still in the "storage" section of the menu, select "record" from the left tab.

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Here you will see a menu showing the camera channels and options for recording types. Select "schedule" for all channels and make sure to hit "apply" and "save" to make these changes take effect.

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One last thing to make sure is enabled, channel to channel you must make sure motion detection is enabled on that channel. While this seems redundant, there is different settings in the DVR to allow for flexibility in its functions. Under the settings option from the main menu, select the option for "Event." "Motion detect" should be the first tab along the top selected. From here you must just go from channel to channel making sure that the "Enable" box is selected for each channel.

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As always, save and apply your settings and from here you should be ready for motion detection based recording.

You can also view the entire process in video form below:

Here is a video demonstrating how to accomplish this by logging into your DVR or NVR through it's built-in web interface using Internet Explorer.

Matt Rossi is a Technical Support Manager at CCTV Camera World, a leading CCTV Camera distributor located in Buffalo, NY. He is a technical support expert for everything video surveillance related.

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