Recording

The DataBorder is part of the picture, so it survives whatever the picture survives. Most recorders keep it intact without any changes. This page lists what to check when setting one up.

The 1080p stream

The DataBorder is drawn on the camera's native 1920 × 1080 stream. Point the recorder's main recording at a 1080p profile. Lower-resolution profiles carry the overlay but not the DataBorder. A recorder that only stores a 720p sub-stream keeps the values on the picture but loses the data.

Bitrate

The DataBorder decodes fully at 1080p down to about 750 kbit/s, and the camera's default of a few megabits per second leaves a comfortable margin. If the recorder applies its own bitrate limit, keep it at 1 Mbit/s or more. A recorder that compresses harder than that shows up in the decoder's signal view as falling margin and rising corrections before decoding fails.

Archive copies

A recorder that re-encodes recordings for long-term storage, or downscales them, keeps the DataBorder as long as it does two things:

• It downscales at integer ratios. Scaling 1080p to 540p is a clean 2:1 and decodes fully at 1 Mbit/s. Scaling to 720p or 480p also decodes fully at thickness 4 or less. Thickness 5 and 6 fail at 480p because the 2.25:1 scaling smears the blocks.
• It keeps the whole frame. The ring must stay in the picture. Scaling, re-encoding, clipping and screen recording are all fine, but cropping is not.

Brightness and contrast changes are fine. The decoder calibrates itself on the ring's corner marks.

Cutting clips

Cut clips with stream copy whenever you can, so that the frames are untouched. The decoder's own clip extraction does this. If you export from the recorder, choose an export that does not re-encode when that option exists. Note that short clips may not carry the full set of historical data.

DataBorder damage

• Cropping the frame.
• A camera-native overlay drawn over the ring. See Camera overlays.
• Very low bitrates, or an encoder starved by a constrained bandwidth limit.
• Recording only a sub-stream that is not 1080p.
• JPEG snapshots and MJPEG streams, which carry neither the overlay nor the DataBorder by design.