Understanding Surveillance Recordings
Recording everything, around the clock, sounds thorough until you have to find one moment in a week of footage, and pay to store all of it. AI Live Insight takes a sharper approach: it records around the things that matter, the detections your cameras flag, and keeps those clips organized and ready to review in the Library. You get the evidence without the haystack.
This article explains what an event is, why recording is built around events, what each clip captures, and where it all lives.
What an Event Is
Everything starts with an event. An event is a single continuous detection of one object, from the moment it appears in the frame until it leaves. The instant it appears is the event's start, the instant it leaves is the end, and the span between them is its duration. While the object is still in view, the event is open and shows as live, with no end time yet. Each event also carries a confidence score, the AI's certainty about what it saw.
Think of an event as one object's stay in front of the camera: one person walking through the lobby is one event, start to finish, not a flurry of separate hits. That's what makes events useful. They're the unit that ties detection, recording, and playback together, so when you find an event in the feed, you can jump straight to that moment in the footage.
Why Recording Is Event-Driven
Because recording follows events, storage stays focused on the moments worth keeping instead of filling up with empty hallways. When a detection raises an alert, the camera captures a clip around it, with context on either side, so you see the lead-up and the aftermath, not just the single frame that tripped the alert.
What Each Clip Captures
Three settings on the camera's Camera Recording tab shape every clip:
- Pre record time (in seconds) keeps footage from the seconds just before the alert triggers, so the clip includes the run-up.
- Post record time (in seconds) keeps footage from the seconds after the alert ends, so the clip shows how it resolved.
- Max Recording (in minutes) caps how long a single recording runs. When a clip reaches the limit, it closes and a new one begins, so a long stretch of activity becomes a series of manageable clips instead of one endless file.
Together, the pre and post windows make sure a clip tells the whole short story of an event, while the maximum length keeps any one recording from growing unwieldy.
Where Recordings Live
Every clip lands in the Recording Folder set in the Surveillance app settings, inside the Library. One folder holds many recordings, organized by camera and by time, so you can find the right camera and the right moment without digging. A camera can also record to its own folder when you set that on the camera, which keeps a sensitive site's footage apart from the rest.
Because recordings live in the Library, they inherit everything that comes with it: the same access controls decide who can watch them, the same retention rules decide how long they're kept, and the same chain of custody tracks who did what with them. To set the folder, see How to Configure VIDIZMO Surveillance App Settings.