Hey guys, what's goin on? It's Tyler from Nelly's Security and today I don't have any lights or
fancy camera gear or anything like that going because I want to talk about these fluorescent
lights up here. I know you've had this experience. You go to install a camera indoors and you end
up with something like this. This annoying flicker caused by these fluorescent lights.
It's actually a really simple reason for this and an even simpler fix. To understand what's
causing these lights to flicker you first have to understand AC currents in the United States
and elsewhere in the world . We actually have a blog post about the difference between AC
and DC currents, which I will link down in the description below. But in a nutshell,
what you really need to know for this video is that AC stands for Alternating Current.
The AC standard in the United States is 60 Hz. Pretty much everywhere else in the world,
the standard is 50 Hz. When we are talking about these fluorescent lights operating on
an AC current of 60 Hz in the United States, these lights are actually pulsing 120 times per second.
Now if we were in pretty much anywhere else in the world where the standard is 50 Hz, these lights
would be pulsing on and off 100 times per second, and that is the root of the issue here with these
Uniview cameras, which were not developed in the United States, and by default are not set up for
60 Hz operation. Let's hop into the image settings here and I'll show you what I'm talking about.
We'll go to setup and image and you can see right away in this little preview image here...
Ah, you see that flicker? That... that is annoying.
So let's fix that. To do that, we're going to pop open this exposure tab,
and you can see in here that this exposure mode is set to indoor at 50 Hz, which would make sense
if we were anywhere in the world outside of the United States, but we're not. So let's
change this to indoor 60 Hz. And boom, those flickers disappear instantly. Check that out.
Super easy fix. Now if you have a camera that is flickering like this and it doesn't have
these exposure mode settings, if it just has automatic and manual, let me show you how to fix
this manually. If we come into manual, you can see that the shutter speed is set to 1/60. If I change
this instead to 1/50, boom. You can see we have these flickers again. If I change this to 120,
the flickering stops. If I change this to 100, it flickers. So the key here is, if you have to
set this manually, to set the shutter speed where this bottom number is divisible by 120. So we can
set the shutter speed to 1/120, it's fine. We can shet... set the sutter... shutter speed to
1/160 and it's fine, or we can set the shutter speed--that's hard to say--or we can set the
shutter speed to 1/30 and it's fine. Pretty much anything else, 1/25 is going to give us flickers,
1/50 is going to give us flickers, and 1/100 is going to give us flickers.
Something to keep in mind here also is your frame rate. So if we come in here to
video and check out what our frame rate is, right now it is 25, but we could set this
up to 30, so let's do that. And now with our frame rate at 30, we can come in
here and manually set our shutter speed to 1/60. That's going to give us really nice,
fluid motion. So we now have this shutter speed as 2 times the frame rate of this camera, and also
it's divisible by the 120, which is the amount of times these fluorescent lights pulse per second.
I hope that makes sense. if you are not in the United States, basically you can
ignore everything I just said and you will want to set this to 50 Hz, or 1/50, 1/100.
Alright guys, that was just a quick video. I hope it was helpful for you and I hope you learned
a thing or two. If you did, be sure to like this video, subscribe to our YouTube channel,
follow us across social media so you never miss another security video.
Happy installing, and I will catch you in the next one!