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 event 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 events will be retained until 30 days have passed.
```yaml
record:
enabled: True
retain:
days: 3
mode: all
events:
retain:
default: 30
mode: motion
```
### Reduced storage: Only saving video when motion is detected
In order to reduce storage requirements, you can adjust your config to only retain video where motion was detected.
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.
If you only used clips in previous versions with recordings disabled, you can use the following config to get the same behavior. This is also the default behavior when recordings are enabled.
This configuration will retain recording segments that overlap with events and have active tracked objects for 10 days. Because multiple events can reference the same recording segments, this avoids storing duplicate footage for overlapping events 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 events).
- 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.
The same options are available with events. Let's consider a scenario where you drive up and park in your driveway, go inside, then come back out 4 hours later.
- With the `motion` option all segments for the duration of the event with motion would be saved. This means any segment where a car drove by in the street, person walked by, lighting changed, etc. would be saved.
- With the `active_objects` it would only keep segments where the object was active. In this case the only segments that would be saved would be the ones where the car was driving up, you going inside, you coming outside, and the car driving away. Essentially reducing the 4 hours to a minute or two of event footage.
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:
The above configuration example can be added globally or on a per camera basis.
### Object Specific Retention
You can also set specific retention length for an object type. The below configuration example builds on from above but also specifies that recordings of dogs only need to be kept for 2 days and recordings of cars should be kept for 7 days.
The export page in the Frigate WebUI allows for exporting real time clips with a designated start and stop time as well as exporting a time-lapse for a designated start and stop time. These exports can take a while so it is important to leave the file until it is no longer in progress.
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:
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 get a reasonable file size nevertheless, 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.
