How to find CCTV evidence for an insurance claim

The claim letter rarely arrives the day something happens. It turns up weeks later, someone on the team vaguely remembers the afternoon in question, and the recorder is holding a couple of hundred hours that nobody wants to scrub through. Meanwhile the system is quietly overwriting itself, and the footage that settles the question either gets found soon or doesn't get found at all.

Find the incident in seconds, not an afternoon

Instead of scrubbing, describe what you're looking for. Type “someone slipped in the entrance” and Svid returns the matching moments in seconds, each linked to the exact point in the footage. It works on a live camera system, and just as well on exports you've already pulled, so a pile of USB-stick clips from the old recorder is a perfectly good starting point. Upload them and search.

Reconstruct what led to it

A claim usually turns on the before, not just the moment. When was the floor last cleaned, when did the spill actually happen, who walked through in between. Those are the questions an insurer asks, and they're answerable with more searches around the pinned moment; there's a fuller guide to reconstructing an incident if the sequence is complicated. Two report checks do the assembly for you: Incident Reconstruction reads a video's whole timeline and writes the sequence up in order, and Liability Evidence Pack gathers the relevant clips and context into a document you can actually hand over.

1. 01

   Get the footage in

   Connect the camera feed, or upload the exports covering the window in question. Live and recorded footage go through the same pipeline, so it doesn't matter which you start from.

2. 02

   Search for the incident and pin the moment

   Describe it in plain English and jump to the match. That fixes the time and camera, which is the anchor for everything that follows.

3. 03

   Work backwards and forwards

   Run more searches around the pinned moment to establish the sequence: the state of the floor an hour before, who passed through, what happened next. Each answer is seconds, not another viewing session.

4. 04

   Export the clips and timeline

   Send the insurer the relevant clips and the sequence around them, rather than a hard drive of raw footage. Liability Evidence Pack, a report check that reads the whole video, assembles exactly that.

Why the before matters as much as the moment

The slip itself is ten seconds of video. Whether a wet-floor sign was out, and for how long, is the part liability tends to turn on, and it lives in the hour before anyone fell. The footage can answer those factual questions either way; what they mean for the claim is a conversation between you, your insurer and your solicitor. On cost: the platform is priced from your own usage with a $9 a month minimum, the derivation is shown on screen before you pay, and report checks like these two start at a $3 a month floor. If footage governance matters here, a fully on-prem appliance mode exists, so nothing has to leave your building.

How do I find the exact moment of an incident in days of footage?

Describe it in plain English, for example “someone slipped in the entrance”, and jump straight to the matching moment. Searching described footage takes seconds, however many days of it there are.

Can I search footage that's already been exported from the recorder?

Yes. Uploaded exports go through the same pipeline as live feeds, so clips pulled onto a USB stick or a shared drive can be searched exactly the same way.

What should I actually send the insurer?

The relevant clips and the timeline around them, rather than a day of raw footage nobody will watch. Your insurer will tell you exactly what they need; Liability Evidence Pack makes gathering it quick.

How long is CCTV footage kept before it's overwritten?

It varies by system and setting, but most recorders work on a rolling window. The practical advice is the same everywhere: export the incident window as early as you can, because the footage won't wait for the paperwork.