Best practices for manually saving dash-cam footage?

[Fictional_Yeti]

I’ve been trying to figure out a best practice for manually saving dash cam footage. A couple of days ago, I witnessed a crash and a college student in front of me got hit by another vehicle that ran. I was a little surprised and caught up in the moment but immediately pressed the “download” clip button to download. We waved the poor girl over and said we would send the footage.

When I got home, all footage was there but of course immediately ended about 10 seconds after the accident since I pressed the download button. I really wanted the hit car to see that the driver of the other car ran but those 10 seconds didn’t exist.

In accidents like these, should the response not be to simply save +- 10 minutes of download instead of having to think about delaying the manual download? If I was hit and couldn’t think clearly, I have no idea what I would do.

Any points would be appreciated!

 

[Ther0ck]

You can read the manual how dashcam works.

Model 3 Owner's Manual | Tesla

Basically either you honk (if setup), press and hold the dashcam or you've been in an accident.

 

[Garigari]

You can read the manual how dashcam works.

Model 3 Owner's Manual | Tesla

Basically either you honk (if setup), press and hold the dashcam or you've been in an accident.

HONK -: it’s easy and instinctive, once set up it’ll be there when you need it.

 

[Fictional_Yeti]

Ok, maybe my original post wasn’t clear enough and came across as confusing posting things like RTFM or I didn’t know how this worked. What I’m mainly saying may be a feature request I’d like to pose to Tesla.

My point was, if you see an accident, the way tesla dash cam currently works is that you have to mentally “think about” when to manually download the needed footage. I don’t care about the honk or manually pressing the button, my mind just didn’t think clearly that I needed to physically wait about 3 more minutes after the accident I saw to see the complete footage including the hit/run to save the last 10 minutes. Essentially, my mind was too smart to manually download what happened which then lost about 10-20 seconds of footage that was needed after the hit. This was when the other car took off.

Cheers.

 

[moa999]

Current best practice seems to be wait a minute or two.
Otherwise as you say you risk the incident being cutoff.

 

[Transformer]

Thinking about best practices now, it seems better to first tap the dashcam button (or the horn) right after a collision to save a recording of the most recent 10 minutes. Then do it again any time something else happens.

Or tap again a few minutes later just in case, but don't wait because we might forget or be busy calling 9-1-1 or rendering aid.

Don't press and hold the dashcam button until you're ready to stop all recording and unmount the USB drive.

 

[MY1stEV]

You can also press the right scroll wheel and say "save that" if you don't want to be randomly honking or take your eyes off the road to find the dashcam button on the screen.

 

[Piwacet]

Just a warning about attempting to save footage more than once in a very short time period (she has "save on honk" set and honked several times which interferred with recording the full event):

 

[Transformer]

Just a warning about attempting to save footage more than once in a very short time period (she has "save on honk" set and honked several times which interferred with recording the full event)

The video description is unclear on the main point.

After the first honk saves a 10 minute clip, is it that more honks soon after do nothing (don't save additional, overlapping clips)? Or does Dashcam pause recording while saving a clip, and thus the new video isn't even going into the continuous recording files?

Ditto with the dashcam button and the "save that" voice command?

This calls for experimentation, and might change the best practice that @Fictional_Yeti asked about.

The YouTube comments shed some additional light.
Sara:

But it didn’t save my second and third honk at all.

Colin:

dash DOES have the last hour or so of your drive, but it is NOT saved/kept once you go into park... if you need to keep that, stop and/or eject the USB to preserve it! (long-press on dashcam icon to stop recording, then can pull it out safely...) Previous behavior for "save on honk" (or save by button too), would tend to truncate the last few seconds (often the most critical!) as it rendered/saved the current video to USB... Later recent update, seemed to change behavior, it would actually automatically wait a minute before saving, to avoid this issue!

 

[Manbutter]

Never having had to deal with getting footage before, I just realized how stupid it is that Tesla only saves the last hour of footage.

I have the exact opposite problem as the OP. After most incidents, my frazzled mind doesn’t even think to stop and save video. It is only when I get home and calmed down that I’m like “oh wow, my Tesla has cameras and recorded that.” Yesterday, I needed a video but it turns out that the incident I needed happened 1:10 after I shut the car off. Ridiculous. Especially since my SSD drive is 1tb and was 80% empty.

No reason at all not to save as much loop as possible and then delete when fulll.

My other cars all have off the shelf dashcams (Thinkware, Garmin) and they ALL loop and max out the size of the SD card. Which is usually more than 48 hrs of video.

 

[LarryClay]

Or a setting which would allow for longer video loop.

 

[RonAz]

Once you save a clip, how do you share it?

 

[jjrandorin]

Once you save a clip, how do you share it?

You take your drive out of the car, plug it into a computer, and copy the file off of it.

 

[MY1stEV]

If you really want to nerd out, this guy explains how to setup a Raspberry Pi based solution to have your Tesla automatically upload your dashcam footage to your computer whenever you return to your home wifi network.

 

[Fictional_Yeti]

Or a setting which would allow for longer video loop.

Completely agree. I guess this is maybe tied to battery usage and other things but with a 1 tb ssd, why doesn’t dashcam work kind of like Time Machine for macOS, just continuous recording until needing to delete old footage?