Hey YouTube, I'm Tristan from Smart Home Point.
Ring cameras and Ring doorbells tend to film in full HD
(apart from one or two exceptions that film in 720p).
Now this is fairly good and it captures a fairly good level of quality,
however if you're watching a recording back and you want to zoom in on a particular
bit of footage, you can pinch the screen to zoom in. However this doesn't use any
sort of optical zoom lens, it's literally just a digital
zoom. As a result the quality and the information you get by zooming isn't
always that good. So I wanted to film this video and just
show you a few examples of what happens when you zoom in on the Ring app,
and also what happens if you download the video and you zoom in on a computer
instead, just to show you the level of detail you
can expect if you do zoom in. And as a result you can decide whether a
Ring device is a good choice for you or not.
Let's take a look!
Okay so to test out the zoom, I'm going to go into a couple of recordings: one taken
from the daytime and one taken at night time, and i'm going to see what
level of detail I can get.
Let's go to this one... quarter to seven in the morning. Hello Mr Cat!
Right so this is a fairly basic scene, um you can see everything's fairly
static here, apart from that cat, so if I try and scroll in - scroll in on
my neighbor's reg number - you can't actually make anything out,
even though that's completely static. Uh, I'll do the same with another
neighbor. Again - you know - you can't make out
anything up there. Finally there's a van parked down there,
let's try and see what they are. Um so maybe it's a window company...
maybe... there's a 'w' and a 'd' 'and an 'o' and 'ws'. Yeah it looks like some kind of window
company. So I can't make out completely who they are.
I can tell that they probably are some kind of window company.
Um yeah, and that's about it really so for this recording.
Obviously - you know - if there's a person going past or like that cat that went
past, I could probably see... make out... some information about them, but
I certainly wouldn't be able to make out information about a car
reg number or anything like that. But obviously I would be able to make
out - you know - a type of car, not necessarily
based on any sort of logo, but just based on how
they look. So that's still useful information for
the police, for example, if you needed to give this video to the police,
but it's not like you can just instantly look up the reg number.
Okay next up let's look at something taken at night, see if we can
make anything out there. So obviously because of the headlights - you
know - you see a car going past. I'll zoom in in a second but that's the
clip.
Let's zoom in a bit and see if we can actually make out any information.
[mumbles] let's go back. No, so I mean - you know - because of all the lights in
night vision mode, you can't actually make anything out here.
The only thing you can really make out is the type of car,
and then it is kind of difficult, in fact even then you can't really see the
car, you can just see it's more of a saloon type car - uhm, it's more of a family car.
But other than that you can't really make anything out either.
Okay so to test things out on a computer instead,
I'll just look at a single clip which would be the one at
quarter to seven, just because that had slightly better... you could see more.
Okay so we're going to full screen.
Obviously you can see the cat going past... [mumbles] let me just turn that down... yes you can
see the cat going past there, and obviously there's a decent level of
detail there. Um, certainly if it's a person as well
you'll be able to make out who the person is,
that's fine, but then anything beyond that is slightly worse.
Obviously from here you can't see the reg number,
you can't - well you can sort of see - there's a window company there.
Um in terms of zoom, as you can see there's no real options down here for
zoom. There's no option there and if I was to
hold CTRL and try and zoom in, or ALTand try and zoom in, I can't do
that like you can do with some apps. What you got to do instead - if you wanted
to try and zoom - is download the video, and to do that
you might click share and not see an option, but what you actually have to do
instead on the computer is right click, go to 'save video as'
and just download it. So i'll just do... [mumbles] 6:45 a.m clip doesn't matter too much...
Okay so now let's open that up.
Okay so I've opened this video clip up in
VLC media player,
and again - you know - you're going to see the same thing as the web app in general,
which is that there's only limited detail on anything you want to zoom in
on. Equally there doesn't seem to be any zoom options down here, and holding
ALT or CTRL, it doesn't allow me to zoom. It just does subtitle text scale,
which is not what. What you can do is - if I just pause this video -
is at the top here, you can go to 'Tools', 'Effects and Filters', and a lot of
different options here, which is nice. Obviously this depends... this option - any
options - will depend on your video player, but VLC media player is completely free,
and it's a quite cool tool to check out because there's a lot
of different options. Uhm, so up here under 'Tools', 'Adjustments and
effects', we'll go to 'Video effects' and 'Geometry', we'll enable 'Interactive
zoom'. So let's click 'save'... [mumbles] save... and go out to
that. What you've basically got up here is
you've got this little box up in the top left here that will
determine where you're zooming in on, which is quite a nice feature because
you actually get more control over things than you'd
assume. Right so let's have a look now at more detailed zooming in on different
parts of the clip. Okay so there you have the cat.
Obviously you can get a decent level of detail there, having zoomed in, but
obviously previously you already had quite a lot of detail anyway.
So really any detail you can see in zoom mode is just because you can
see it in normal mode as well, and that's kind of key here. Let's try and make out
other detail in this zoom mode. Okay here we got that reg number, which
again you can't make out - or the plate
number. Similarly with the cars over there,
you're not going to make anything out. If we go over here,
you still can't make out exactly what window company it is.
Uhm, one final thing we'll try is to actually enhance the image so to speak,
like you sometimes see in the films. So let's do a print screen of that,
I'll go to Photopea, is it 'Photo-pea'? - however you pronounce
that, and then we just open up that. Right,
so let me just take that one clip and let's... or just that one bit of the...
yeah that one clip, the van, I just want to see if iIm actually able to see
anything. So trim, I'll zoom in a bit,
I'm certainly not gonna see much there. 'Something'
of 'something' windows! Let's try and apply a filter.
So let's sharpen up!
That's not really going to help,
it's just going to keep getting grannier. If I sharpen up really...
um I still can see this... as 'something of something
windows', but I'm more guessing - you know - as opposed to
knowing for sure what they're saying. Let me try smart sharpen -
will that do anything useful?
That's kind of a cool thing, you can preview.
You can try different options out as well.
No that's not very useful. It's really... you'd want a sort of a low
radius, I think, it's one by default.
But certainly... yeah - you know - even with the sharpen you're not going to get too
much detail out of anything. As you can see, you know
the wide-angle lens here captures a lot of detail
about your street which is good because if somebody's coming
- you know - down the street, you'll be able to capture them so that's good to know.
But the downside of that is if you've got - if you want to zoom in on a
particular level of detail which isn't a person's face that's just
gone past - then you are going to struggle to get any information.
And you know unlike the films where they enhance
and get really good levels of detail, there's a limit how much you're going to
get, especially with Ring. Now Nest Hello -
which is owned by Google - does actually have slightly better
zoom functionality. It still doesn't have a zoom lens,
but you do get slightly more information when you zoom in because it's using
Google's AI, and obviously Google are super smart.
They're going to have much better algorithms than what I'm doing here.
And actually in Nest Hello you can do something called 'enhance', so you can
- like I did here - I focus on a particular area,
Nest Hello can actually focus on that particular area and then
get an extra good quality level of detail from that one particular area.
Uhm, and that's using Google's photo AI and all of its smartness to actually
enhance that clip and give you better information,
just like a Google Pixel phone does so, even on the Google Pixel 3,
it only has a single phone lens. But when you take a photo, you can zoom in
absolutely loads, because Google's photo AI is actually pulling extra information
out of it, and enhancing the image. So if
zooming in on video clips is important to you, something like the Nest Hello
might be more useful to you than the Ring cameras
and the Ring doorbells.
But if zooming in isn't as important to you, then obviously Ring's devices
are pretty useful.
So that wraps up today's video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please click
the thumbs up button and don't forget to subscribe.
Thank you!