Uploading camera footage
========================

A model performs best on the kind of images it was trained on, so
the dataset should come from the camera that will run it -- same
sensor, same lens, same framing. The easiest way to gather a lot of
those images quickly is to record a short video on the camera and
let Roboflow break it into frames.

Record a clip of the target object -- move it around, change the
angle and distance, vary the background and lighting -- and save it
off the camera. On the project's **Upload Data** page, drop the
video file in.

Sampling the video into frames
------------------------------

Roboflow asks how often to sample the video into still images. The
slider trades quantity against redundancy: too fast and consecutive
frames are near-duplicates that pad the dataset without teaching the
model anything new; too slow and you miss poses. One frame every
second or two is a reasonable starting point -- a half-minute clip
becomes a few hundred varied images.

.. figure:: figures/sample.jpg
   :class: framed
   :width: 100%
   :alt: Roboflow's "How often should we sample this video?" dialog with a frame-rate slider and an image-count readout

   Choosing the sampling rate -- the readout shows how
   many images the clip will produce.

Pick a rate and Roboflow extracts the frames and adds them to the
project as unlabelled images.

.. note::

   You don't need an SD card to record the clip. The IDE's
   :doc:`Record button <../ide/recording>` captures the camera's
   live video straight to a file on your computer -- run a plain
   capture script, record the clip, and upload that file to
   Roboflow.