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Exporting footage

When you need to hand footage to someone (a neighbor, an insurer, the police), Crumb lets you pull the relevant moments out and save them as ordinary video files, without giving anyone access to your system.

Building an export list​

Rather than exporting one clip at a time, Crumb works from a list. As you review clips or scrub the timeline, you add the moments you care about to an export list, from one camera or several, across a whole afternoon if you need to. A single export job takes up to 50 clips. When the list is complete you export it in one action and Crumb produces the video files for you to download.

This mirrors how a professional operator assembles an evidence package: gather the relevant moments first, review the list, then export once.

Options​

A few switches on the export, all optional:

  • Burn in the timestamp. Overlay the recording date and time on the video itself, so the footage carries its own timing even after it's copied around.
  • Include audio, for cameras that recorded it.
  • Password-protect the download. Set a password and Crumb wraps the export in an AES-256 encrypted ZIP, so it's useless to anyone who intercepts the file without the password. Hand the password over separately.

What you get​

If you export a single clip with no password, you get a plain video file, playable in any normal video player. As soon as there's more than one clip, or you set a password, Crumb bundles the files into one ZIP instead (encrypted when a password is set, a plain archive otherwise). Either way it's standard video, so the person you hand it to never needs an account, a login, or any access to your cameras or recordings, and with a password they need only the password.

Where exports live and how long they last​

Exports are written to their own storage area (EXPORT_DIR), separate from your recorded footage, so building an export never touches or competes with recording. Completed exports are cleaned up automatically after a while (EXPORT_TTL_SECONDS, 24 hours by default) so they don't accumulate. Download the export when it's ready; if it expires before you get to it, just export the list again.

See the environment reference for those two settings. Most installs never need to change them.