Sentry Mode Recordings

[DeadHead616]

Came out to my M3 to find a couple of scuffs on the front bumper. Not horrible, I can get it off with some elbow grease, but would still like to see what happened. So when I unplug the USB and open the file on my MacBook, I've got a hundred video clips varying from 3-60 seconds in length. Is that right? So, because I don't know if the scuffs were there an hour ago or if they were there 2 days ago, I need to review every clip going back 48hrs? That could take a while.

Is this how it works? Am I doing something wrong? I drive with dash cam on and I only have sentry mode on at places I feel it necessary (mall parking lot, etc). But I never get clips over 60 seconds, just seems weird. I know this isn't supposed to be the perfect solution to these issues, but it seems like if someone hit the car hard enough to scuff the finish, there would be a clip front and center.....

 

[TiggerTime]

Yes, this is how it works. Anytime sentry is activated it stores series of minute clips. The time stamps are in UTC time so you would need to convert your local time to UTC to find specific time frame.

Interesting that if your car was hit it should have triggered the alarm and sent you an alert in the app. but doesn't sound like that happened. I would start from the time you noticed the scuffs and work backwards in this case since you didn't have an alert.

 

[fabian]

Came out to my M3 to find a couple of scuffs on the front bumper. Not horrible, I can get it off with some elbow grease, but would still like to see what happened. So when I unplug the USB and open the file on my MacBook, I've got a hundred video clips varying from 3-60 seconds in length. Is that right? So, because I don't know if the scuffs were there an hour ago or if they were there 2 days ago, I need to review every clip going back 48hrs? That could take a while.

Is this how it works? Am I doing something wrong? I drive with dash cam on and I only have sentry mode on at places I feel it necessary (mall parking lot, etc). But I never get clips over 60 seconds, just seems weird. I know this isn't supposed to be the perfect solution to these issues, but it seems like if someone hit the car hard enough to scuff the finish, there would be a clip front and center.....

When sentry mode detects something it saves 10 minutes split into 1 minute clips. The event that triggered it is always in the last minute so usually that's the only one you have to check if you want to find something.

 

[SMAlset]

The clips I believe are saved in 1 minute file increments per camera due to the the use of FAT32 and restrictions on file size. You will notice that the videos at their resolution and bitrate are at most 30MB each (sometimes a little under or over depending on where in the recording process the saving starts and ends and assuming there's no corruption which will reduce the file size).

The RecentClips buffer will only have the last recorded hour of footage the car was on. If something was saved during that hour it will get removed from RecentClips and stored separately in a 10-min file in SavedClips. That would free up some space in the buffer so sometimes you will have some older footage that hadn't been recorded over yet due to saving off the file.

This is why it's a good idea to periodically walk around your car to notice any damage so you have a time frame to look within. Also why pruning your SavedClips folder of unnecessary saved videos is a good idea so you are periodically starting with a clean slate so to speak.

BTW you should automatically be able to eliminate 2/3rds of the files to look through as only the front bumper and front camera would be involved initially. If you find some person or car in one of those front camera files involved then of course check the surrounding cameras or previous minutes prior to the incident. And after sometimes if the person or car was walking/driving away at that point.

 

[Knightshade]

The clips I believe are saved in 1 minute file increments per camera due to the the use of FAT32 and restrictions on file size.

FAT32 can handle individual files up to 4GB, so I don't think that's the reason it splits into 30MB files.

 

[jdeskins]

@DeadHead616 - If you have a Mac, you can concatenate all the files into one video clip and then fast-forward 2x or 5x through the video to find the incident. Downside is, if I remember, there isn't a timestamp on the Tesla videos. So may be hard to know exactly which file(s) contain the incident. I did this recently with some home security videos and worked great.

If there's a huge number of files, I would suggest grouping the videos into specific timeframes (such as hourly or daily).

Basically open one video file with QuickTime and then drag the other files into the player and automatically creates one larger video you can play without having to open each file individually. Here's a YouTube video I found demonstrating this.

 

[Magnets!]

The time stamp doesn't appear to work but it seems that the file name incorporates date and time (encoded as 24hr time).

 

[SMAlset]

@DeadHead616 - If you have a Mac, you can concatenate all the files into one video clip and then fast-forward 2x or 5x through the video to find the incident. Downside is, if I remember, there isn't a timestamp on the Tesla videos. So may be hard to know exactly which file(s) contain the incident. I did this recently with some home security videos and worked great.

If there's a huge number of files, I would suggest grouping the videos into specific timeframes (such as hourly or daily).

Basically open one video file with QuickTime and then drag the other files into the player and automatically creates one larger video you can play without having to open each file individually. Here's a YouTube video I found demonstrating this.

Thanks for posting that video. For whatever reason I never thought about dragging the videos into another video for purposes of my TeslaCam although I just did a quick video early today for a product using photos and videos of it, basically the same thing. Hit over the head and it sank in! BTW one of the features I love about the MacBookPro with that touch bar is when I load a video from my card adapter and microSD card and it brings the video up in QuicktimePlayer, you can just swipe your finger across the touch bar super quick to speed through the video. Saves a lot of time instead of scrubbing directly in QTPlayer.

 

[Rich C.]

At 2 o'clock this morning, this happened. Looks like Sentry Mode headlights scared him off. Dropbox - 2019-04-21_02-08-right_repeater 2 in the morning skateboarder trying door.mp4

 

[Nix Alba]

I've recently started using Sentry Mode and see that there are three files stored, one for the front and each side camera. Is there a way to include the rear camera in this too?

 

[Leeclanual]

I've recently started using Sentry Mode and see that there are three files stored, one for the front and each side camera. Is there a way to include the rear camera in this too?

Not yet...

 

[SMAlset]

@DeadHead616 - If you have a Mac, you can concatenate all the files into one video clip and then fast-forward 2x or 5x through the video to find the incident. Downside is, if I remember, there isn't a timestamp on the Tesla videos. So may be hard to know exactly which file(s) contain the incident. I did this recently with some home security videos and worked great.

If there's a huge number of files, I would suggest grouping the videos into specific timeframes (such as hourly or daily).

Basically open one video file with QuickTime and then drag the other files into the player and automatically creates one larger video you can play without having to open each file individually. Here's a YouTube video I found demonstrating this.

Wanted to put together some footage for when I got a Alarm notification for my car the other day and the QT method above doesn’t work in newer versions of QT (most of these videos/online instructions are rather old). Found I had to use iMovie (also a free app that comes with your device) and its a bit more complicated than above but I was able to figure out not having used iMovie before.