Release notes: Alta Video 2.2.1 beta

For your Avigilon Ava cameras, you can now create privacy masks so that areas in the view of your device do not show or record any video, or have any analytics running in the defined areas.

See Define privacy areas for Ava cameras

You can now configure the Roles for your users to include permissions for using Counts.

See Create and edit Roles

When they are installed, it is often difficult to see the serial numbers for your Avigilon Alta or third-party cameras. Alta Video now reports the camera serial numbers in the Devices tool.

See Find camera information

To gather feedback on the gunshot detection, this feature has been released for beta testing only.

You can now use the GET HTTP method when configuring webhooks to send notifications to third-party applications.

See Create webhooks to send Alta Video notifications

You can now choose to record short snippets of audio at the point of each sound detection, and to download and listen to these snippets.

See:
Cameras for Alta Video
Set Alta camera settings locally
Create rules for sound detection

The default view in Video view and Map view now features improved dewarping and the ability to zoom in and pan around the field of view of panoramic cameras.

See Set your preferred panoramic view

When third-party cameras do not give the correct stream configurations as requested by Alta Video, you can now manually specify stream requirements.

See Improve video streams from problematic cameras

When setting up a loitering rule, you can now configure the time an object has to be present before the rule triggers.

See Create rules for loitering

This release gives more visibility and control over the anomaly detections from each camera.

See Configure anomaly settings for your cameras

For Alta Cloud Connectors that use multiple network interfaces, you can now define which interfaces to use for packet routing.

You can now lock and unlock user accounts, and have new options for enforcing password changes using different methods.

See Manage Alta Video user access

Augmenting the existing glass break detections, you can now configure rules to detect unspecified loud noises.

See Create rules for sound detection

When you have Avigilon Ava cameras connected to your Alta Video video management system, you are notified when a new version of the Avigilon Ava cameras software is released. Clicking the notification banner opens a dialog that enables you to select the Avigilon Ava cameras to upgrade.

See Upgrade your Ava cameras from Alta Video

Alta Video 2.0

Software upgrade packages for Alta Video are now encrypted by Avigilon Alta, to ensure that they cannot be altered before being installed.

Alta Video 2.0

Alta Video already lets you export video clips from the Video view and Map view tools; now you can export video from the Devices, the Alarms and from the Search preview tools.

See Export video clips from Alta Video

This release incorporates support for the Avigilon Ava cameras HDR and IR settings, embedded in the Alta Video user interface.

See Adjust camera video parameters from Alta Video

Create rules that trigger on Count areas, to gain intelligence about the physical areas you monitor, and to receive notifications when your pre-defined criteria are met.Alta Video

See Create rules for Counts

Bookmark video that needs further analysis, or that needs to be brought to the attention of your colleagues. You can also edit any links that you have shared with others, and Administrator users can monitor and if needed, delete shared links.

See:
Saved clips tool
Bookmark video clips
Edit Saved Clips

Monitor the total storage used across your Server groups, and the storage used by each camera.

See:
Monitor the storage used by each camera

When using an encoder or multisensor device, you might want to disable one or more channels.

See Enable or disable channels for encoders or multisource devices

In Map view, the available informational icons have been expanded to include Fire alarm pull stations.

See Link your site maps and add extra information markers

Building on the basic object counting (available from Alta Video 1.2), Live object counting counts all the people and vehicle objects in the view of a camera, or in the view of selected groups of cameras.

See: Create live counts of objects in view

Configure areas with line crossing rules, to count the number of people entering and leaving areas.

See: Create counts of objects that cross a line

Download the count information from either your Objects in view counts or Line crossing counts as comma separated variable files.

See: Download historic object count information

You can now search for objects directly from the Video view or Map view tools.

See: How to: Quick search from Video view,
Quick search from Map view

To improve the accuracy of object placement in Map view, configure Advanced Field of View for your cameras.

See: Set camera fields of view

Search for audio detections that have been logged by Alta Video.

See: Search for audio detections from Avigilon Ava cameras

Configure automatic updates for your Alta Video video management system.

Backup your Alta Video configurations to vcloud. When needed, select the appropriate backup to restore to Alta Video.

Choose whether to upgrade a specific Avigilon Ava camera from the Stable upgrade channel, or from the Beta upgrade channel.

See: Select the Ava camera upgrade channel

The Avigilon Ava cameras range of devices include audio analytics and detection. This release adds support in Alta Video for Audio Rules, showing the audio events on Map view.

See: Create rules for sound detection

The visual design and work-flows for the timelines have been updated.

See: View live video or play back recorded video

You can now link directly from the Alta Video user interface to the Avigilon Alta docs documentation portal.

You are routed to the correct documentation portal; either the main https://docs.video.ava.uk portal if your Alta Video is on the stable track, or to https://beta.docs.video.ava.uk if your Alta Video is on the beta track.

To improve the accuracy of the line-crossing detection, changes have been made to the algorithm used for these detections.

See: How Alta Video detects line-crossing events
Create rules for line-crossing, and
Search for line-crossing

This release combines the live and playback features into a single pane.

You can also now choose to view bounding boxes on objects (people, and/or vehicles) detected by the Avigilon Alta analytics, and display a count of people and vehicles.

See: View live video or play back recorded video,
Enable additional information in Video view, and
Enable basic object counting in Video view

The ability to delete the data from a specific camera, perhaps in response to a privacy compromise or a breach of regulations, has been added into the Alta Video software.

See Delete recordings from a camera

The way that the Alarms tool handles long lists has been improved. Additionally, you can now use advanced search to more easily find specific alarms.

See:Alarms tool
How to: Review Alarms created by Alta Video

Alta Video 1.2 introduces the ability to configure webhooks to enable Alta Video to sent alerts using the communication or messaging tools of your choice.

See: Create webhooks to send Alta Video notifications

In the event of a camera failing, Alta Video now includes options to replace the camera, synchronize the video from the original camera, and to add the new camera on the Video view and Map view.

See: Swap out a broken camera in Alta Video

You can now define areas of a view where analytics should not be run.

See: Define areas without analytics

This release introduces fine-grained access permissions, so that you can define roles and decide which permissions are assigned to each role.

Using this feature, you can now define access on a per-site basis.

See: Users tool

From this release, you can apply a specific role to a group of users for specific sites or camera groups. This enables you, for example, to create an administrator role just for devices within a single office or region.

See: Users tool

Error logging has been improved so that more information useful in diagnosing issues is captured in the log files.

See: Download log bundles from your Alta Video deployments

You can now configure multiple NTP servers for use by your Avigilon Alta clusters, server groups, and servers.

You can now use Map view to track vehicles in the field of view of your cameras.

The choices of icons you want displayed on Map view has also improved.

See: View additional information on your Map view

This release includes improvements to the search bar used in the Devices tool, and Video view. These search bars now include a filter option enabling you to search for detailed information, for example, the Manufacturer, or the IP address of a camera.

See: Devices tool

If Alta Video does not receive suitable video streams from the cameras connected to it, the analytics might be degraded or not available. This release provides better feedback to users in this situation.

See: Alta Video Video stream requirements

To maintain compatibility with the widest possible number of third-party cameras, Alta Video can now rotate the video being supplied from the camera, to ensure the correct image orientation when displayed in Video view.

See: Adjust camera video parameters from Alta Video

This Alta Video release includes features to upgrade the camera software from Alta Video. You can also use the manual and auto-focus controls in Alta Video to change the Avigilon Ava camera focus.

See: Devices tool

Create clusters of Alta Cloud Connectors that work together to provide multi-site coverage.

Alta Video 1.0

Alta Video 1.0

Alta Video 1.0

Alta Video 1.0

Alta Video 1.0

Alta Video 1.0

Alta Video 1.0

An issue where, when using the zoomed dewarp features on panoramic cameras, and then pinning the camera in Video view while in the dewarped state showed the dewarped view incorrectly has been resolved.

A vulnerability has been resolved in the Alta Video and vcloud software.

2404, 2582

Issue: When applying a privacy mask to the view of a Avigilon Ava cameras device, the Avigilon Ava cameras does not take into account the rotation of the camera. This means that if the camera view is rotated from the Avigilon Ava cameras software after a privacy mask is applied, the mask is not reoriented.

Workaround: To rotate the image after applying a privacy mask, use the controls in the Alta VideoDevices tool.

Issue: In a clustered setup, if you edit any device settings from an Alta Cloud Connector other than the one to which the device is connected, you cannot immediately see the changes.

Workaround: Refresh the screen to see the updated information.

Issue: In some circumstances, when viewing the Alta Video user interface, users are being logged out of the interface.

Workaround: Logging back into the Alta Video user interface enables the user to continue with their tasks.

Issue: When trying to view too complex a Video view layout on a PC with insufficient hardware specification, a significant delay in live video may be experienced. This situation is exasperated when using cameras that provide fewer than three concurrent video streams, as higher than optimum resolutions and frame rates are then used for the viewing live video.

Workaround: Using PCs with higher hardware specifications (especially with better GPUs) reduces the delay experienced. Also, simplifying the Video view layout, and using a 2nd PC to display some of the Video views will further reduce the delays.

Issue: In clustered Alta Cloud Connector installations, you cannot currently export video from a camera connected to a node other than the one you are currently logged into.

Workaround: Log into the Alta Cloud Connector node that includes the connected camera, before exporting the required video.