How to prepare CCTV footage for counting traffic.

The camera

• No movement during the recording. The camera must not pan, tilt or zoom, because the crossing lines and zones are drawn on one frame.
• Mounted high. An elevated view along the road separates vehicles; a low view across the road hides them behind one another.
• A clear view where the counting happens. Poles, signs, gantries and trees that hide vehicles are the usual reason a vehicle is not counted. You choose where the lines and zones go, so put them where the view is clear.

The files

• Send MP4 (H.264) files at whatever resolution the camera records. 1080p at about 4 Mbps is typical and works well, at roughly 1.8 GB an hour.
• One file per camera per period. Long recordings can be split into files of any length; Wayro joins them back together by camera and time.
• Uploads run in the background while you set up the rest of the job.

Naming cameras

Wayro reads the camera ID from the filename: everything before the first dot.

L31456.2026-07-21.mp4      camera L31456

Name your files the same way every time. A camera you have sent before is then recognised, with its saved lines and zones ready for you to confirm, so every later job on it takes a minute to set up.

The clock

If the camera shows a clock in the picture, draw a box around it once and every record carries the camera's own time. If it does not, enter the recording date, start time and end time. Either way, intervals and the busiest hours come out on the right clock.

Night, rain and glare

These are harder than daylight, and accuracy changes with them. Send a sample of the worst conditions in your footage and judge the result before you commit. The 12 free hours are there for exactly that: use them on your most difficult camera, not your easiest.

What happens next

1. You draw the crossing lines, lane zones, entries and exits on each camera, choose your vehicle classes and deliverables, and approve the quote.
2. Once the invoice is paid, a trained engineer checks every marking, free, within 24 to 72 hours.
3. The AI processes the footage and the results are released per camera, in the dashboard and as CSV, Excel, JSON or the API. The footage is then deleted.

Read the documentationRead how footage is handled, step by step