Extracting moments of interest from Dash Cam footage
DIY Dashcam Incident Logging with Apple Shortcuts After buying my first car at nearly 40, I needed a way to mark interesting dashcam moments while driving. My solution? A simple Apple Shortcut that voice-captures timestamp and location data into a note when I say "record incident."
Earlier this year, I've bought my very first car. (Managed to spend almot 20 years of my adult life without owning one, isn't that a bit impressive? 😊).
The first thing I did was to buy a dashcam. I went for a rather simple model, but with both a front and back camera. Being a rather new (active) driver, I wanted to make sure that everything that could happen was recorded just in case.
The dashcam itself is great, and it turns out there isn't more than a couple days passing by without an incident that I'd like to record. People tend to be very dangerous on the road, and I'm honestly surprised how we can give a ton of steel to everyone and send them on their merry way to the same locations every day, on a schedule without causing more mayhem.
One of the limitations of that dashcam is that there is no easy way to "mark" moments of interest to extract them later. Just like most dash cams, the camera simply has a SD Card inside it and continuously records the road on a rolling stream.
My first thought was to shout "RECORD" every time I saw something I wanted to extract later and post process the video files searching for those moments. That gave me the opportunity to play with OpenAI's whisper. But it turns out that that microphone from the dash cam is of mediocre quality, and I also have a bad tendency to play music extremely loud when I drive 😅. It's also extremely power and resource consuming because it requires transcripting the entirety of the video files before searching for the keyword occurrences.
I gave it another thought and realized that I could quickly build a very efficient poor man's version of the system I wanted using Apple Shortcuts.
This is how my current process looks like :
- Create variables with the current data and location
- Create a string of test with both variables concatenated
- Append this text to an existing note.
We constantly talk about AI those days, and I realised that I barely use Siri except to ask it to set an alarm or a timer while cooking. Turns out the shortcut application is very powerful, being able to open and close applications, run loops and much, much more. It even has a sort of scripting language.
The last thing left to do is to find a good name for the shortcut. I called it "Record incident" so it's generic enough, while still very easily understandable by Siri on top of music.
Because of the location variable (which I added as a bonus), Apple will ask for additional permissions the first time shortcut is being run but that's only a good thing in my opinion.
That's it for now! I now have a special notes on my apple devices that lists all of the moments of interests that I can easily trigger by voice and without being dangerous while driving.
The next step is to write a short script that will parse those values and create small clips from the video stream around those moments.
Always fun to discover new capabilities, and find cheap and efficient ways to achieve my goals 😊.