Storage of video clips

[Colin A]

Hi All,

We are very fortunate and have a good population of hedgehogs locally and they have responded to our efforts to encourage them and provide them with supplementary food and shelter and we have neighbours who now do similar.

I put out one or two cameras every night and get typically 100-150+ shots per night per camera this time of year This has you might imagine takes sometime each morning to go through and takes up a lot of storage space. The videos provide a lot of information however, we can recognise individuals, often sex them, recognise residents and transients and even particular habits of individuals. We even have been monitoring an individual male that appears to be completely blind but somehow copes with life and even attempts mating. They do seem more reliant on their sense of smell and hearing than eyesight and this guy manages well enough.

The issue i have is one of data storage. It’s got to the point i only now keep particular clips that are of special interest and dump the rest. However i realise this is a waste of potentially valuable information.

I wonder what others do in terms of storage of videos and cataloging, I need a more efficient system !!

Colin.

[Nic]

Hi Colin

I share your problem of loads of videos. I put them onto flash drives 64GB ones if I can get them and afford them, but some are smaller. I have loads of them from about 4 years which I keep in a plastic storage box, but I’m sure there must be something more purpose built.

I was a bit of a late comer to night cameras and before that filled loads of notebooks full of notes! So still have all those as well! I sometimes wonder whether it’s really worth keeping all the videos – I may not ever watch most of them again. I put labels on with the dates, but try do do indexes for each day, when I have time, on the actual flash drive. I find if I don’t do them daily I might not get round to it.

If I find a really interesting clip, I try to remember to put those in a file on the computer – but those will probably end up on a separate flash drive one day. It isn’t ideal and is easier to find things in the note books than from all those videos!

I’m interested to hear you have a blind hog there. I had one here a while back – no eyeshine at all. She got around pretty much like any other hog and although she didn’t spend the day in my garden, turned up every night for food. Interestingly, some of the other hogs seemed scared of her. She didn’t take any notice if there was another hog already at a food bowl but just marched straight up and tucked in to the food and the hog would give way! Even the males. It was as if they didn’t quite know what to make of her. She was quite a character!

I hope the blind hog there and the others continue to do well.

[Author]

Posts