Footage the Police Can Actually Use: Exporting CCTV Evidence Properly

The camera did its job. There is a clear recording of someone cutting the fence, loading a generator and driving off. Six weeks later nothing has happened, and the reason is rarely the footage itself — it is what happened to it afterwards. Filmed off a monitor with a phone. No date and time on it. The original long since overwritten. A clip that starts after the interesting part. None of that is difficult to avoid, but it does need doing in the first hours rather than the following week. Here is the practical version. Last updated: September 2026. Before anything else: stop the overwrite Every recorder is a loop. SD cards in 4G cameras, NVRs and cloud plans all recycle their oldest footage, and on a busy site that can be days rather than weeks. The first action after an incident is to protect the recording — lock or bookmark the event in the app, or pull the card and put a spare in. Do that before you start browsing for the good bit. While you're there, note what else was recording. A second camera that caught the vehicle arriving twenty minutes earlier is often worth more than the camera that caught the theft, because it gets you a direction of travel and sometimes a plate. Export the original file, not a video of a screen This is the single most common mistake. A phone recording of a monitor loses resolution, loses the embedded timestamp, and invites an argument about whether anything was altered. Use the export or download function in the camera app, NVR or cloud console and take the native file. A few things worth doing at export: Take a generous window. Start the clip a few minutes before the incident and run it a few minutes past. Context matters — approach, direction, how long they were on site. Export the highest quality stream available. Many systems default to the low-bitrate sub-stream for downloads because it's quicker. Check which one you're getting; the sub-stream is often useless for identification. Keep the audio if there is any, and don't re-encode or trim the file in a video editor. A clean original beats a tidy edit. Export from every relevant camera, each as its own file, rather than stitching them together. Get the time right An incorrect clock does more damage to a piece of footage than poor resolution does. If the camera's time is wrong, every statement built around it is wrong too, and the whole sequence becomes hard to line up with phone records, ANPR reads or a 999 call. Make sure the camera has an NTP time source set and the correct time zone — and remember the BST/GMT change catches out systems that were set manually. If you discover after the fact that the clock was out, do not fix it and re-export. Note the offset ("camera clock was 14 minutes fast") and hand that over with the footage. Keep the on-screen date-and-time overlay enabled. It travels with the picture even if the file metadata is stripped somewhere along the chain. Package it so someone else can use it Hand over a folder, not a single mystery file. Something like: The exported clips, named plainly: \