Frame rate, measured in frames per second (FPS), is the number of individual images a security camera captures each second, and it directly affects how smoothly motion appears in both live and recorded footage. General-purpose monitoring typically runs at 15 to 30 FPS, which is sufficient for most day-to-day coverage; higher frame rates, which can get up to 60 FPS or more, are reserved for areas where fast movement needs to be captured cleanly.
A camera running at too low a frame rate for the activity it’s covering can produce choppy or blurred footage, with fast-moving subjects appearing to skip between frames rather than move continuously. This becomes a practical problem, rather than a mere cosmetic one, in a couple of specific contexts:
- Vehicle entrances and license plate recognition, where a plate needs to be captured sharply during the brief window a vehicle passes through frame
- Any area where a fast, brief event, e.g., someone running or an object being thrown, needs to be reviewable frame by frame after the fact
Of course, higher frame rates come with a trade-off. More frames captured per second means more data to store and transmit, so frame rate is typically balanced against available bandwidth and storage capacity rather than maximized everywhere by default.
