It’s 9:30am on Tuesday; you’ve just checked your email and you’ve got another complaint from the yoga studio next door about your staff using your shared dumpster area to go on smoke breaks. Great start to your day. Now if you want to keep the peace with your neighbor, you’re going to have to spend an hour or two searching through security camera footage, trying to pinpoint which staff members might have used the rear fire exit to go sneak a smoke.
The good news is, with Solink’s Motion Search tool, you’ll be able to solve this mystery in just a few minutes.
What is Motion Search?
Motion Search is a cutting-edge feature of Solink’s video surveillance platform + app. Motion Search allows you to manually select any area of a security camera view and search historically through video surveillance footage for motion in that area.
How does Motion Search work?
This little video shows you the actual steps. In short: use your finger or mouse to ‘color in’ any area on a camera view. Look for the motion indicator on the timeline bar. Visit any of those points in time to see what motion was taking place.
Watch this example of our Motion Search feature.
Now, something that could have taken you hours to search for manually is right there, highlighted on your screen, within a matter of seconds. At 9pm, you see Jimmy take the trash out to the dumpster and head right back in. At 10pm, Nat carries out a broken kettle, then heads back in. And because you can highlight just your own door or dumpster, it’s easy to screen out motion like cars going by or a stray cat on screen. You see only the moments of motion that happen within your selected region.
It looks like you’re not going to find anything…but wait: there, at 11:05pm, you see that red headed yoga instructor from next door walk behind the dumpster and light up. It wasn’t even your staff who were smoking! You’ve just saved yourself and your staff from a useless witch hunt. No need to tell off your team, no need to schedule late-night drive-by’s to check on the alley.
How else does Motion Search help a business?
Motion Search captures and pinpoints any historical motion, even in just a small region of a camera view. This makes it a precision tool for:
- Determining time of order delivery
- Checking on back room activity
- Tracking a pickpocket who grabbed a customer’s wallet off a table
- Seeing when the coffee was last made fresh
- Gathering footage for a slip and fall claim
- Seeing how often people visited a certain display
- Checking when the bathrooms were cleaned (just highlight the mop bucket; Solink will show you when it last moved!)
- Investigating who dumped trash into your dumpster
- Checking for non-customers loitering around your doorways after hours
- and much, much more.
What do Solink users think?
Here are a couple stories about how Motion Search helped our clients:
Motion Search is deceptively simple, but it’s one of the most mind-blowing tools that Solink’s commercial security system has to offer. Best of all: it dramatically reduces the stress of an owner or manager who feels like they need to be on site to really know what happens. Screening surveillance footage instantly by motion means that you spend less time drilling your staff for information, and more time enjoying the busy flow of your business.
