Evidence work · dash and body-worn cameras
Card out, camera off. That is your entire job, and it decides everything that happens next. Most of these disputes end when about 30 seconds of the right footage appears on a screen. For that, the clip must still exist, must open, and must reach someone useful in time. Erased and damaged video comes back off SD cards, and off the memory soldered inside the camera body, in a form an insurer or an officer at Nottinghamshire Police can use. £400 + VAT. The first look is free, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Commercial vehicles make up a fair share of our work: vans out of the parcel depot at HinckleyPark on M69 junction 1, hauliers off the A1 at Newark.
An engineer will talk it through with you, in confidence
0115 8220606
| What is happening | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Clips wiped from the card | Data stays in the flash until another write replaces it | Get the card out now |
| The camera ran the whole way home | Every turn of the loop takes a little more | Shut the camera down |
| It plays back black | A write that was interrupted before it finished, or a flash card that has worn out | Put that card aside |
| Event files that will not open | Wrapped in a format only that model was built to read | Unwrapped here and converted |
| A bodycam broken open or soaked | The memory chip normally outlives the housing round it | Video comes off the chip itself |
| A loss adjuster or a solicitor wants it properly | The originals, an MP4, hashes and bench notes | Included in every job here |
Your case number is assigned when the item is received. Then an engineer works out what went wrong (no charge). At this point, you receive a basic summary of which parts are recoverable and which are not. You also receive a single written quote for the price of the recovery. Accept the quoted price or turn it down, and there is no obligation to pay anything.
Nothing from your camera is opened, exported or altered at any point. The entire contents of your memory card, or the memory inside the camera body, are copied sector by sector, and all the work after that runs on the copy, protected event files included. You get back exactly what you sent, in the condition it arrived.
Carving pulls erased clips back out of the image. A damaged clip first needs its header and index rebuilt; otherwise, no ordinary player will open it. Flash has a very simple rule: the more that card is used, the less there is left to recover.
Video evidence of driving offences goes to Nottinghamshire Police either through the force's own upload page or through the national dash cam safety portal, where the force takes part. Submit within days rather than weeks, since fourteen days is the whole allowance wherever a notice of intended prosecution is needed. Insurers receive what every CCTV job here produces: the originals, an MP4 that plays anywhere, hash values, and the method in writing.
A complete file list will be provided before any invoicing. Simply say "yes" or "no" to what we found: yes means it is billed, no means it is not, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. What we find is posted to you on media purchased specifically for your case, at no additional cost to you. We consider the process complete once you have opened those files yourself on your own computer.
The deadline that will never move: 14 days. That is the whole window for a range of road-traffic offences, and within it a notice of intended prosecution must be served on whoever the vehicle is registered to. Behind that there is a 6-month limit for starting most road-traffic prosecutions. Individual forces set their own, earlier cut-offs, so check what Nottinghamshire Police want before uploading. Day 12 is worth submitting. Day 20 rarely is.
Nothing at all was done to the card: an image was taken from it first, and the rest of the process worked from that image. Overnight, the requested clip had disappeared, though the picture data underneath it was still intact, so it was rebuilt from the copy, hashed, exported and in the insurer's hands within a week. Deleting is different from overwriting, and the card itself showed which one had happened.
Generally, yes. However, it needs to relate to something genuinely in dispute, and its authenticity must be shown. Authenticity depends on three things: the original file as the camera created it, metadata nobody has altered, and a written history of everyone who has held the file since. Once these are met, weight is for the court to decide.
There are two options. First, you can submit directly through Nottinghamshire Police's own upload page. Second, you can use the national dash cam safety portal, where the force takes part. Either way, you need the other vehicle's registration and a witness statement you have signed. Speed counts: on certain offences a notice of intended prosecution must reach the vehicle's registered keeper within fourteen days as a rule. The exceptions are where there was an accident or where the driver could not be identified in time.
Not usually lost, no. Deleting frees the space; it doesn't move the picture data. A typical flash card holds that data until it is overwritten, either when the loop comes round to that spot again or after enough further journeys have gone over the top. Remove the card, turn off the camera, and it is usually still recoverable.
It does. An identifiable person recorded on a body-worn camera is personal data, and that brings four key duties with it: a lawful basis, signage wherever it can go, storage under your control, and a defensible retention period for what you record. As evidence, treat it like CCTV: keep the original recording, hash any copies, and note who took what and when.
Remove power from the DVR before you do anything else: as long as it is powered, it keeps writing, and the oldest footage goes first. Then get a quote and post the disk in. The first look is free. CCTV and DVR work is £400 + VAT, quoted in writing before any work starts, and anything recovered from the disk goes no further than our bench.