Customize your monitoring tile layouts
When you’re actively monitoring security, you can have several tiles with different video camera views up on the monitor. While that’s helpful, there are ways to maximize this space.
Try creating custom tile layouts and populating them with specific cameras, maps, or other important data that’s relevant to what you’re overseeing. For instance, beside an important camera viewpoint, you can have tiles with live ALPR reads and a map layout of your building.
Each layout can be fully customized according to the monitoring task at hand. As a school security guard, you’ll be monitoring students as they come into the building by having several different views. These may be from your main entrance cameras, cars coming onto the property, and an overview of alarms on the map of your facility.
You can also create different tile layouts within the monitoring task in Security Center, name them, and save them for future use. That way, you can simply click on the custom tile layout you need for a specific job, and monitor with context using all the necessary information up on your screen.
Configure your Visual Tracking overlays
Visual Tracking is a free feature in Security Center that can save you time during crucial moments to track suspects through a building. It also allows you to oversee video-based guard tours without leaving your office.
How does it work? You simply click on the graphical overlays of a specific area on a video tile to quickly switch from camera to camera. You can also hover over the overlay to get a preview of the video before clicking through to the camera.
Visual Tracking also works when looking at live or recorded video. That means you can follow intruders through your property during investigations, so you get a full forensic rundown of the event.
Taking time to configure your Visual Tracking settings is a must. It’s an easy setup process that allows you to quickly link cameras to one another Simply select a camera and then draw an overlay on the camera tile where you’d like to jump to the next view. You can then link that overlay to another camera, and you’re done. Overlays can be different sizes, shapes, and colors depending on your preferences or needs.
You can create as many overlays and camera links as you’d like, but generally, we recommend links that point to nearby cameras, so it’s easier for your team to move through a space or building as they would if they were walking the floor.
The best part is that you don’t need to do everything at once. You can start with your more sensitive or highly trafficked areas and expand from there.
Quick Search
When you’re actively monitoring your environment, you might come across something that doesn’t look right. Using the Quick Search feature in Security Center, you can immediately investigate suspicious activity to find out what happened.
For example, let’s say you’re jumping through cameras and notice a window is broken in a specific area. You can launch the Quick Search tool by clicking the briefcase icon on the side panel of your monitoring task.
Quick Search helps you narrow down video recordings to find the exact moment that an incident occurred. It does this by showing you thumbnails from equally spaced-out times throughout the period in question. From there, you can expand the selection between the thumbnails to see a set of images within that period until you can pinpoint the incident footage.
Link all your entities
Many operators find value in using the Plan Manager map feature within Security Center. It allows them to quickly find doors, intercoms, and cameras, especially in larger, more widespread environments or multi-site installations.
And while most have added all their entities on their maps, not all have taken the time to link entities together. This means making sure your doors are associated with nearby cameras or intercoms and other devices.
When your entities are linked, you’re able to do things such as unlocking a door during an intercom conversation. You can also immediately see the associated video whenever someone badges at the door.
Linking your entities across your environment is a key step in getting the most from unified security. And while it seems like something small, this type of next-level configuration can pay dividends in speeding up your incident response times. It saves you from having to go back to your map and find a nearby device while you’re in the middle of handling an important task.
Try out the Incident Recording feature
When you’re monitoring your environment and catch an incident underway, wouldn’t it be helpful to start recording evidence immediately? That’s now possible using the Incident Recording feature in Security Center.
After enabling Incident Recording, you can drag the cameras you want to record into your monitoring tile. Video recordings from the cameras will then be automatically kept in sequence as one single video clip.
The Incident Recording feature lets you create a storyboard of the incident underway. You can then save and export that compiled video sequence with operator notes, alarms, or other information. This gives you a complete incident report to save for future reference or to share with third parties. Recipients can easily view the file through a video player.
Using the Incident report task in tandem with Visual Tracking is a powerhouse combination that streamlines your whole response and investigatory process. Not only will you be able to track intruders and collaborate with on-the-ground personnel to intercept them, but you can also package all your evidence and notes in one tidy, easy-to-share file.
