Footage review is a filter on an event log, not a 45 minute scrub of a DVR timeline.

The timeline scrub. Even if you know the camera, the date, and the time window within 30 minutes, you still have to log into the DVR (remote access is broken on roughly a third of the deployments we see), find the right channel, drag a mouse-driven timeline slider, watch at 4x or 8x speed, narrow to a minute or two, rewatch at real speed, and then export to USB or MP4. 30 to 60 minutes per incident is normal. With three tenant complaints in a week, that is half a workday gone to scrubbing.

Every event Cyrano emits is a nine-field JSON record plus a 480x270 JPEG thumbnail of the triggering tile. The fields are tile.label (the camera name the DVR stamps on the strip), tile.index (row-major position in the multiview), tile.coords (x, y, w, h in the composite frame), property (site identifier), layout_id (recorder layout, for example 4x4-std), overlay_mask (which DVR overlays got blanked before inference), event_class (person_in_zone, vehicle_dwell, loiter, tamper, and so on), iso8601_ts (recorder clock time), and latency_ms (capture-to-delivery time). Review is fast because you filter on those fields instead of scrubbing a timeline. Pick property + tile.label + event_class + a 30 minute iso8601_ts window and you get a thumbnail strip of every matching event. Click a thumbnail, watch the clip, done.

No. Cyrano taps the HDMI output on your existing DVR or NVR, the same output that feeds the multiview monitor on your office wall. The recorder sees nothing different. Your guard keeps watching the same tiled view. Cyrano sits in the middle, decodes each composite frame, does its filter pipeline, and writes an indexed event record plus a thumbnail to the dashboard. Installation is one HDMI cable and one network cable, under 2 minutes on the recorder already in your closet.

DVR-side smart search has three chronic problems. It indexes motion, not event classes, so a plastic bag drifting across a parking lot produces the same result as a loiterer at the mailroom. It rebuilds the index on demand, which is why it takes two to five minutes to run a query on a 24 hour window. And it is keyed on channel number, so when maintenance swaps the layout and your loading dock camera moves from CH6 to CH9, the stored queries break. Cyrano keys events on tile.label (the camera name the DVR stamps on the strip, for example Loading Dock NE), which survives layout changes. Cyrano also classifies event_class at index time, so the log already knows the difference between a delivery van and a person loitering.

The dashboard is the intended UI. You pick a property from a dropdown, pick a tile.label from a second dropdown (the camera names are the ones the DVR already stamps on the monitor, not engineer codes), pick an event_class filter (person_in_zone, loiter, vehicle_dwell, tamper, or all), and set a time window. The results show as a thumbnail strip sorted by iso8601_ts. Click a thumbnail, watch the 30 second clip, click Export if you need the file for insurance or police. SQL exists for portfolio-wide reporting and webhook integrations, but a property manager handling a tenant complaint does not need to write any.

No. The DVR still records everything continuously to its own disks, just like it always did. Cyrano does not touch the recorder's storage. What Cyrano adds is a parallel event-level index with thumbnails, so 99 percent of the time you can answer a review question from the index alone. For the remaining 1 percent (a request for the five minutes leading up to an event, or a subpoena for a specific two hour window that has no events), you still have the full DVR recording available. Time-to-first-clip drops for the common case without giving up the long-tail case.

Median capture-to-delivery latency is 7 to 8 seconds on a 25 tile multiview, with a 5 to 15 second envelope across the portfolio. That means a person who walks into a detection zone at 2:04:12 PM shows up in the dashboard event log at around 2:04:20 PM, with a thumbnail, a tile.label, and a clickable 30 second clip. You do not have to wait for end-of-day batch indexing or for a cloud upload to finish.

Open the dashboard, pick the property group, leave tile.label and event_class as All, set the time window to the last 7 days. You get a chronological thumbnail strip for every property across the whole portfolio. Filter down by event_class (loiter usually first, then tamper, then person_in_zone after hours), skim the thumbnails, click into the ones that look real. In practice this takes 15 to 25 minutes for a 12 property portfolio. Before Cyrano, that review either does not happen (95 percent case) or requires remoting into every DVR individually (the rare regional who still does this).

Whatever you already own. Cyrano is agnostic about camera brand, firmware, and cabling. It reads the HDMI composite that the DVR produces for the wall monitor, which means the source could be analog HD-over-coax, IP, a mixed system, or even a 10 year old BNC installation that nobody has the password to. Supported recorders include Hikvision DS-7xxx, Dahua XVR and NVR, Lorex, Amcrest, Reolink NVR, Uniview, Swann, Night Owl, Q-See, ANNKE, EZVIZ, Bosch DIVAR, Honeywell Performance, and Panasonic WJ-NX. The overlay mask templates for each recorder are what make the detector resistant to the clock and channel-bug pixels that would otherwise flood the index.

Representative numbers from a single Class C multifamily property with 16 active tiles: 5 to 8 tenant incident reviews per week, averaging 40 minutes each on the DVR scrub workflow, times 4 weeks, equals 13 to 21 hours per month of property manager time on footage retrieval alone. With the pre-indexed event log the same reviews take under 2 minutes each, which gives back 12 to 20 hours per month per property. Across a 12 property portfolio that is 2 to 3 full workdays per week of regional manager capacity back, most of which gets redirected to actually acting on what the footage shows instead of finding it.

The guard watches live. The indexed log exists for everything that happens when the guard is not watching, which for most properties is 90 percent of the hour because the eye wanders, and 100 percent of the time on properties without a dedicated guard. The log is also what you need when the incident is reported 6 hours or 2 days after the fact, which is the normal case for package theft, tenant disputes, and insurance claims. Live monitoring and indexed review solve different problems. Cyrano does both off the same HDMI tap.