How much disk will my cameras need?
The honest answer is that it depends on four things, but you can get to a sensible number in a couple of minutes — and recording on motion changes the arithmetic more than anything else.
As a practical guide, four or five cameras recording on motion fill about 500 GB in three to four months. That is the number to plan from, then adjust for the four factors below.
- How often something movesThe biggest factor by far. A camera on a quiet back gate records almost nothing; one facing a busy road records nearly continuously. Motion recording means your archive length depends on the scene, not the calendar.
- ResolutionGoing from 1080p to 4K is roughly four times the pixels. Use the resolution the job needs — high where you must read a face or a plate, lower where you only need to know something happened.
- Frame rateMost scenes are perfectly usable well below 30 frames a second. Halving the frame rate roughly halves the storage.
- CompressionH.265 is meaningfully smaller than H.264 for the same picture where both the camera and the PC support it.
- Draw the motion zone tightlyExclude the road, the trees and the neighbour's driveway and a camera can stop recording most of the day.
- Record incrementally as wellVISEC can keep a low-rate record — such as one frame a second — continuously, and full video only when motion happens. You keep a continuous timeline for a fraction of the space.
- Keep the pre-event footage shortRecording the moments before an event is valuable; recording a minute of them for every event is expensive.
- Add a drive instead of deletingVISEC can manage recordings across several drives automatically, so growing the archive does not mean replacing anything.
Quick answers.
Is 1 TB enough?
For a handful of cameras recording on motion, usually months of footage. For a dozen high-resolution cameras on a busy site, expect weeks.
Does VISEC delete old footage automatically?
Storage is managed in the camera's storage settings, and recordings can be spread across more than one drive. You decide how the space is used.
Do plate and QR reading need extra space?
The readings themselves are small. What takes space is the choice to also save a plate image and a full frame image for every read, which the LPR settings control.
Should I use a NAS?
You can point recording at network storage, but a local drive is simpler and less likely to drop a write. If the network path disappears mid-recording, that is a gap in your archive.
Try it on one camera.
The free license is the complete program — recording, alerts, plate recognition, QR reading and access control. It does not expire.