Recordings can be enabled and are stored at `/media/frigate/recordings`. The folder structure for the recordings is `YYYY-MM-DD/HH/<camera_name>/MM.SS.mp4` in **UTC time**. These recordings are written directly from your camera stream without re-encoding. Each camera supports a configurable retention policy in the config. Frigate chooses the largest matching retention value between the recording retention and the tracked object retention when determining if a recording should be removed.
For users deploying Frigate in environments where it is important to have contiguous video stored even if there was no detectable motion, the following config will store all video for 3 days. After 3 days, only video containing motion and overlapping with alerts or detections will be retained until 30 days have passed.
The number of days to retain continuous recordings can be set via the following config where X is a number, by default continuous recording is disabled.
This configuration will retain recording segments that overlap with alerts and detections for 10 days. Because multiple tracked objects can reference the same recording segments, this avoids storing duplicate footage for overlapping tracked objects and reduces overall storage needs.
**WARNING**: Recordings still must be enabled in the config. If a camera has recordings disabled in the config, enabling via the methods listed above will have no effect.
Frigate saves from the stream with the `record` role in 10 second segments. These options determine which recording segments are kept for continuous recording (but can also affect tracked objects).
- With the `motion` option the only parts of those 48 hours would be segments that Frigate detected motion. This is the middle ground option that won't keep all 48 hours, but will likely keep all segments of interest along with the potential for some extra segments.
- With the `active_objects` option the only segments that would be kept are those where there was a true positive object that was not considered stationary.
A configuration example of the above retain modes where all `motion` segments are stored for 7 days and `active objects` are stored for 14 days would be as follows:
Footage can be exported from Frigate by right-clicking (desktop) or long pressing (mobile) on a review item in the Review pane or by clicking the Export button in the History view. Exported footage is then organized and searchable through the Export view, accessible from the main navigation bar.
Time lapse exporting is available only via the [HTTP API](../integrations/api/export-recording-export-camera-name-start-start-time-end-end-time-post.api.mdx).
When exporting a time-lapse the default speed-up is 25x with 30 FPS. This means that every 25 seconds of (real-time) recording is condensed into 1 second of time-lapse video (always without audio) with a smoothness of 30 FPS.
To configure the speed-up factor, the frame rate and further custom settings, the configuration parameter `timelapse_args` can be used. The below configuration example would change the time-lapse speed to 60x (for fitting 1 hour of recording into 1 minute of time-lapse) with 25 FPS:
```yaml
record:
enabled: True
export:
timelapse_args: "-vf setpts=PTS/60 -r 25"
```
:::tip
When using `hwaccel_args` globally hardware encoding is used for time lapse generation. The encoder determines its own behavior so the resulting file size may be undesirably large.
To reduce the output file size the ffmpeg parameter `-qp n` can be utilized (where `n` stands for the value of the quantisation parameter). The value can be adjusted to get an acceptable tradeoff between quality and file size for the given scenario.
In some cases the recordings files may be deleted but Frigate will not know this has happened. Recordings sync can be enabled which will tell Frigate to check the file system and delete any db entries for files which don't exist.
