saving digital data

I'm not sure if this is the correct place to ask this but I'll post here anyway.

I have just bought a dash cam during Amazon's recent sales promotion. I'm not sure why I did this but thought it might be good for filming where we are on our travels and I was pleasantly surprised by the image quality. The camera appears to record 10 minute segments in 1.4Mb chunks on a 32Gb card. By my calculations this gives just under 4 hours of video per card. I obviously won't know at the beginning of a drive how much of it I will want to view again but I am hopeful that there will be sufficient for me to get concerned about how to save it.

I don't want to arm myself with 30 x 32Gb mini SD cards when there may be a better method to save the files. I don't really want to use up data allowances just chucking them into the ether either.

I don't have a laptop but I do have a tablet, and I have a collection of hard drives. I haven't really thought of what to do so while I am thinking up stupid plans has anybody got a ready made solution?

Dash cams were designed as an aid to driving in case of an accident/incident and some insurers offer discounts as an evidence aid in helping settling a claim.What they do is record in small chunk video files and once the memory stick is filled, the camera will loop back and delete the oldest file so that it is constantly recording. You should be able to manually stop a deletion by pressing a button or if the camera detects a sudden change in speed like an accident it should automatically store the file. Most cameras only support 32gb cards so be careful if you intend to buy a larger card it may not be compatible. What they were not really designed for is holiday type filming as you would need a stack full of cards to review your trip depending how long it is and a suitable device to store the data on, something like a laptop with a card slot so you can transfer files. Some have WiFi built in so you can transfer a file to a tablet or laptop but they can be very slow in transfer times.

I'm not at all sure Dave, but I think something like this might work. You certainly need some way of letting your tablet "talk" to the SD card, and an adapter like this would seem to be ideal.

http://tiny.cc/akukhy

You would probably need a file manager on your tablet, but there are several very good, free ones available.

dbroada wrote:
I don't have a laptop but I do have a tablet, and I have a collection of hard drives. I haven't really thought of what to do so while I am thinking up stupid plans has anybody got a ready made solution?

Do the hard drives work off the tablet?
Does your dashcam take micro SD cards?
If the answer is yes to both of these questions, then you should be able to put your camera card into your tablet, plug in a hard drive and transfer the files to that.

Frank

I thought similarly, until I reviewed the content of my SD card after a day in the Highlands. And then I discovered that you don't actually end up with anything very useful at all! All you get are hours and hours of the same viewpoint - and after I'd looked at about 10 minutes of it I didn't want to watch any more! It's really frustrating because the camera almost never follows the things that you want to look at.

No doubt different people react differently to fixed-angle, fixed focus footage that goes on for hours and hours, but it would be worth checking that you really are going to enjoy looking through it in real time subsequently (how else will you find the "interesting" bits?) and editing it down. It's also very hard to edit it in a way that looks anything less than a load of clips stacked end to end with jumps in between...

To answer myself and others, in no particular order.

The cam I have takes 32Gb SD cards and will either allow looping or stop when the card is full. From experience we rarely drive continuously for 4 hours so I think one card will be suitable for a morning/afternoon's worth of driving. If I can move all the files to a hard drive EASILY I only need one (but already have 2) cards.

I have the means of reading the files with my tablet but insufficient space to store them, hence the idea of a hard drive.

My cam chops the files up in to 10 minute chunks so hopefully we can make a note that the bit we want happened at *this* time and won't need to sit through 3 hours of M25 for each trip.

I don't "yet" have a means of getting the tablet to read a hard drive but even if I could I am still left with transferring "x" files from the cam to the tablet and then pass them on to the hard drive.

It may be possible to put the card in the tablet's card slot and when I get the correct cable attach the hard drive to the tablet's USB port and transfer directly.

Alternatively a cheap pre owned laptop might be a whole lot easier.

I *like* taking photos and the idea of video interests me. Viewing my photos is a much lower priority although I'm hoping next year's trip through Scandinavia will produce more than a few minutes of video worth looking at again.

dbroada wrote:
Alternatively a cheap pre owned laptop might be a whole lot easier.

Do you mean second hand?
I was looking for a cheap laptop to install Linux on, and found this site:
http://www.cheaplaptopcompany.co.uk/
I actually bought one from ebay which was a better spec for the price than any that he had in my price range.
If you go the laptop route, download Registrator Viewer, if your dashcam has GPS, you can watch your vid and see your position on a map at the same time. It can also trim the extra bits of each clip [if required] and join all your clips together to make one file.

HTH
Frank

Boxerman, yes second hand, third hand, whatever.

Thank you for the link, I will bear it in mind.

Generally although you can read a memory card on a tablet using an OTG adapter plus a card reader you cannot normally attach a hard disk to a tablet. I have tried with my Samsung, even using a powered usb hub and it does not work. The laptop route will be fine and the use of Registrator is a very good idea.