Loop Recording - length?

[SandLake]

Are there any pros and cons to the 'length' of files?

Following an accident I am buying a Mini 0906 and using a 128Gb MicroSD card.

I don't really see the point of having gazillions of 1 minute files, 3 or 5 minute seems quite reasonable and even 10 minute would be OK to my novice perspective. IS there anything I should be taking account of?

Thanks

 

[Nigel]

1 minute files do have a few advantages:

• For cameras with Wi-Fi (which is normally basic slow Wi-Fi on dashcams), 1 minute is a more manageable size for download and viewing on the road.
• If a file becomes corrupted then you only loose a maximum of 1 minute instead of 10 minutes.
• The card can contain a few extra minutes of video before it has to be deleted for recycling, the bit you need might be in those few minutes!
• If you want to give a file to the police at the scene of the accident, you might not want to give them the previous 10 minutes.

The other sizes don't really have any advantage as long as your viewing software can show them as a single video, and even if it can't, longer lengths aren't necessarily better for viewing.

With very big memory cards, the huge number of files might exceed the file system capabilities, or slow down access, but even with 1 minute files I don't think any current cameras exceed 10,000 files on the biggest current cards so that is not currently an issue. The overhead of creating and deleting lots of files is not significant with current memory cards and cameras, back in the days of class 4 cards it could be an issue.

 

[SawMaster]

Welcome to DCT and good on the choice of cam

FAT32 has an inherent limit of file size which limits the possibilities. Most folks find 3-5 minutes easier to work with when viewing or looking for a specific incident. Should a file's data get corrupted (rarely happens with good cards and cams) a smaller file size means less recording lost. I've gone from 5 minutes to 3 minutes as what I like, but one cam I use does 1 minute files and I'm OK with that too. It's really just personal preference

Phil

 

[AstroKat]

One of the reasons I chose the Blacksys CH-200 is because of its event handling. It saves 30secs before and 30secs after you hit the button. I was planning on having the max recording time to reduce the number of regular files but there are some good points here about why it may be better to use a shorter interval.

 

[kamkar]

I think 3 minutes are the most popular setting.
In regard to events, it is nice what we are moving away from a small buffer time in the camera and toward whole segments of footage.
Now i just have to acustom myself with using the damn event button, cuz in the past years i have been using mental notes and with my memory thats not the best approach, at least not if i dont get the footage off the camera at once.
24 hours later i can still remember there was something interesting in my drive yesterday, but where in the 2 X 45 minute drive are usually gone by then.
I especially like cameras with a remote event button so i dont have to lean forward and mess around in front of the mirror.

Dont fear the huge numbers of files, if you want to save a drive to one file it just take you dropping XX files into what ever editor you like to use ( cameras with no overlap between segments )
If you have a camera with overlap ( often 1 second ) then there is a good chance that camera are supported by registrator viewer ( RV ), and using that to save a drive or parts of one making up of XX segments are pretty easy and just take 4-5 clicks of the mouse, and RV will automatic remove the overlap in between segments once you have entered that time ( 1000 ms / 1 second ) once into the software, and then output your XX number of files as one single file.

And RV can strip GPS metadata from the footage, and it can strip audio, and best of all it handle the original format and dont do anything to change the quality of the footage.

 

[Agent 86]

OK, I've read the above posts, and am admittedly a newbee but what I'm seeing is a 30 or 40 second gap between each file. I have it set to 3 minutes, but can tell that I'm missing a lot of time when it closes one file and starts recording into another. Am I doing something wrong? I have a VIOFO A119s V2.

 

[Nigel]

OK, I've read the above posts, and am admittedly a newbee but what I'm seeing is a 30 or 40 second gap between each file. I have it set to 3 minutes, but can tell that I'm missing a lot of time when it closes one file and starts recording into another. Am I doing something wrong? I have a VIOFO A119s V2.

It should be continuous (a gap of 1/30th second for 30fps).

Have you made the mistake of turning on motion detection?

 

[Agent 86]

It should be continuous (a gap of 1/30th second for 30fps).

Have you made the mistake of turning on motion detection?

I’ll check the motion detection and ensure it’s off. Thx

 

[Agent 86]

I’ll check the motion detection and ensure it’s off. Thx

I doubel checked the Motion Detection and it is in fact Off.

 

[jokiin]

what memory card are you using?

 

[Agent 86]

what memory card are you using?

Im usine a Samsung EVO plus class 10

 

[jokiin]

check the card with h2testw and see what the results are

are you using the included power supply?

 

[Agent 86]

I’m using the invluded hardwire kit. What is h2testW?

 

[jokiin]

h2testw is a program for testing memory cards

try the included power supply as a test to rule out a power or installation related issue

 

[TonyM]

I tend to use the shortest loop length on all my cameras. I've never experienced a corrupted video file, but taking shorter clips does reduce the potential impact of having a corrupt file at some stage. The main reason I use the shortest loop length is to minimise the size of each file, both in duration and MB. This makes it quicker for me to upload and share an unedited video clip, and reduces the times when I feel a need to edit the file first by clipping to a reasonable length.

 

[mikey94025]

I tend to use the shortest loop length on all my cameras. I've never experienced a corrupted video file, but taking shorter clips does reduce the potential impact of having a corrupt file at some stage. The main reason I use the shortest loop length is to minimise the size of each file, both in duration and MB. This makes it quicker for me to upload and share an unedited video clip, and reduces the times when I feel a need to edit the file first by clipping to a reasonable length.

It's also easy to concatenate the short video files so there is not much downside to shorter videos. There are free programs to merge video files - Windows has Clipchamp (simplistic, only supports HD not UDH), OpenShot (a little more complicated), DaVinci Resolve (fairly complicated), etc. Adobe even offers this free Merge Videos web tool (requires free Adobe registration, it's unbearable slow because the large dashcam videos have to upload first): https://express.adobe.com/tools/merge-videos.

I just tried them all to merge a few A139 Pro 1-minute videos. OpenShot is pretty easy to use for merging and supports 4K UHD export and even H.265 (though though it hung at 1.91% so I went back to exporting as H.264).