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Put recordings on UTC

Trinet cameras don't have a real-time clock: their timestamps count from power-on. To line card recordings up with other sensors, logs or cameras, the wireless UTC tool gives every take — and optionally every frame — a UTC time, with an uncertainty and a confidence.

How it works

While cameras record to their cards, they broadcast their status over Bluetooth, and the Trinet app's Wireless status logs every start and stop with the phone's UTC time. The tool matches that log to the takes on the cards and fits each camera's clock to UTC. It also corrects for an inaccurate phone clock. In a field check, three cameras agreed within 0.32 ms.

Steps

  1. Update cameras to firmware 0.5.9 or newer and the app to 0.5.3 or newer.
  2. Keep Wireless status running on a phone near the cameras for the whole session (background logging lets you turn the screen off).
  3. After the session, export the history from the app (a .jsonl.gz file).
  4. Run the tool with the export and the cards (or copies of them): 
    python scripts/wireless_utc.py phone_export.jsonl.gz --recordings /media/CARD1 /media/CARD2

Useful options

Option Does
--per-frame A UTC time for every frame, not just first and last
--write-sidecars Write the UTC results next to each recording
--csv, --json, -o DIR Output formats and folder
--unit ID Only one camera
--inspect Show what the log contains (cameras, models, firmware) without matching
--min-confidence, --strict Reject weak matches

The method, accuracy and output columns are described in the toolkit's wireless UTC guide.