Ever wanted to download large amounts of video material from a video recorder via DSL?

Sometimes you are confronted with following problem: "... ten days ago we parked our equipment and went on vacation for a few days. Today we realized that one of our trailers disappeared ... the trailer is white and has a boxy shape..." This can easily mean that you will have to review several days worth of video material from possibly multiple cameras.

Note: Rather than reviewing the material online, we strongly recommend that you first download the material and then review the material on your workstation.

Here is the basic strategy:

"Box" the video material:

In addition to the estimated date and time frame dimension, define the target video material in at least one additional dimension, i.e. the Score dimension.

Note: The event score is a numeric, essentially representing the duration of the event and the significance of the detected motion.

Download the video material in "Layers":

Given that we are looking for a "boxy trailer pulled by a truck", we are most likely looking for events of longer duration and with a lot of motion. Hence, filter events for the estimated date and time frame, starting with the high-score events.

When filtering events, make sure that you start with only a few events returned by the filter so that the amount of the material prepared for the first download is not too large. We recommend that you keep the data amount for the first download between 10-20MB. Download the first data layer.

Use the "Thumbnail" folder-view for Review:

After the download, unpack and uncompress the data with your preferred Unzipper application (i.e. WinZIP) into a folder of your choice.

Rather than individually flipping through possibly several thousand images or reviewing long video files, we recommend that you scan thumbnails of the original images on a per-event basis.

Change the folder-view of the folder where you unzipped the events from List-view to Thumbnail-view and start scanning the thumbnails of each event. If you see something that is interesting double-click on the thumbnail to review the image in it's original resolution.