For anyone with video footage to review
Ten minutes of evidence, without paying for twenty-four hours of watching.
Surveillance Review scans every hour you give it — one hour or two hundred — without skimming and without getting tired. Then it hands back the minutes that matter: each one a clipA short piece of video cut from the footage around one event — the few seconds before and after, so you can watch what happened without scrubbing for it., a stillA single frame saved as a picture. Each event gets one, chosen to show the moment clearly, and it is what goes in the report., a descriptionThe only paid stage: a frame is sent to the AI for a written description of who is present and what they appear to be doing. Nothing else leaves your machine. of what it found, and a timestampThe exact time an event happened — both where it sits in the file and, when the recording's start time is known, the real clock time.. It runs on your own computer, so the footageThe video files themselves — whatever came off the camera or the recorder, in whatever length. A case can hold one file or hundreds. never leaves the machine it is on.
macOS and Windows · your footage stays local
The problem
Surveillance is mostly nothing, and the nothing still has to be watched.
A day of static camera footage is twenty-three hours of an empty driveway and a few minutes that matter. Finding those minutes is the job, and it is the part that scales worst: the footage keeps getting longer, the day does not.
Scrubbing at 6x speed works until it doesn’t. The thing you needed was eleven seconds long, at 04:57, in the dark, at the edge of the frame — and you were watching the driveway. Those are also the hours that are hardest to bill for: nobody wants an invoice itemising the time it took to watch nothing happen.
How it works
Four stages, each one narrowing what the next has to look at.
Nothing is sent anywhere until the cheap local passes have thrown out the still frames — which is most of them.
01
Motion scan
The footage is scanned for change, in resumableYou can stop a scan and pick up exactly where it left off. A 200-hour file doesn't have to be done in one sitting. blocks. You can stop it and pick up exactly where it left off, so however long the file is, it does not have to be done in one sitting.
02
Object detection
Every moment that moved is checked for people and vehicles by a detector running locally. A parked car that a shadow crossed is not a vehicle in motion, and it is not treated as one.
03
AI description
Only the framesA single still image taken from the video — one moment. The AI describes frames, not the whole file, which is why quiet footage costs almost nothing. that survived the first two stages are described — who is present, what they appear to be doing, and where in the frame it happened.
04
Events and clips
Related moments are grouped into events, each with its own clip, still and timestamp, ready to confirm or dismiss.
Where your footage lives
On your machine. That is the whole answer.
What that means
The video file is never uploaded. Motion detectionThe first pass: the app watches for pixels changing between frames and ignores everything that stayed still. Runs on your computer and costs nothing. and object detectionThe second pass: a model on your computer checks each moment of motion for a person or a vehicle. A shadow crossing a parked car isn't a vehicle moving. run entirely on your computer. Cases, clips and stills are written to your own disk, and deleting the app does not touch them.
The footage never leaves. What goes out is still frames — only the ones that survived the motion and object stages — sent to the AI to describe them.
See exactly what leaves this computer
When you run an analysis, the frames that survived go out for description — the images, each labelled with nothing but its position in the file: frame 3, about 148 seconds in. Those frames are pictures of your scene. We strip everything that would say whose case it is — not what the camera saw.
We don’t send the video, the file name, the case, or your notes. No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting. And the connection is encrypted.
What comes back is a line of text — the description you read on the event.
Your machine, your rules
Cases, clips and stills are ordinary files in a folder you choose, on a disk you control — under whatever security that machine already has, the same as the footage was before it reached us.
Signing in gates the app; what protects the files is the disk they sit on. If full-disk encryption isn’t already on, it is worth turning on — FileVault on a Mac, BitLocker on Windows — and it covers these files along with everything else.
Scope
Analyze the part of the frame — and the part of the day — that matters.
ZonesAn area of the camera's view you draw to include or exclude — a public sidewalk, a road beyond the fence — so the app ignores what isn't yours to watch.
Draw over the areas to ignore, or the only area to watch. A public road at the edge of frame produces traffic all night; excluded, it produces nothing. Zones are applied while scanning, so excluded movement never becomes an event.
SectionsA time window inside a long file — 6pm to 6am, say — so you scan only the hours that matter.
Pick the hours worth scanning. If the subject leaves for work at seven, the six hours before that are not evidence of anything — and not analyzing them is the single biggest thing you can do to cut both time and cost.
Review
Every event is a clip, a still and a timestamp — confirm it or dismiss it.
Dismissing asks why, and the reason stays on the record. Months later, the question is never just what you found; it is what you looked at and set aside.
Timeline
Every event on one bar, day and night shaded from the footage itself rather than the clock. Click a marker to jump to it, or zoom into a single section when the events are packed too tightly to tell apart.
Trim and mark
Adjust where a clip starts and ends, and mark the key frameThe single still from an event that best shows what happened — the one that goes in the report. — the one that best shows what happened. It becomes the clip’s thumbnail.
Annotate
Timestamped notes on any event, showing who wrote them and when, and editable after the fact with the edit visible.
Who it's for
The job is the same whoever it lands on.
Reviewing footage is not a profession, it is a task — and it arrives on desks that otherwise have nothing in common. What they share is the arithmetic: far more hours of video than anyone can afford to sit through, and the part that matters buried somewhere inside them.
Private investigators
Static-camera surveillance, days at a stretch. This was built alongside working investigators and against real casework, so it is the use it has been tested hardest against.
Attorneys and legal teams
Footage turns up in discovery by the hour, and someone has to find the minutes that bear on the claim. That someone is usually billing for the time it takes to watch nothing happen.
Insurance and claims
A disputed slip, a staged collision, a workers' comp claim that does not match the activity on the driveway. The question is narrow; the footage is not.
Law enforcement and public safety
Canvassed footage from a dozen businesses, each with its own recorder and its own clock, all of it needing a first pass before anyone knows which parts to look at properly.
If none of those is quite you, the test is simpler than a job title: you have more video than time, and paying a person to watch the empty parts of it is the only way you have found to get through it.
Whoever is doing the work, the software does the same thing and makes the same promise. It narrows; it does not decide. Every event it surfaces is yours to confirm or dismiss, nothing is deleted or hidden from you, and nothing about running footage through it changes what that footage is or where it can be used.
Requirements
What it needs to run.
- Operating system
- macOS (Apple SiliconMacs with Apple's own chips — M1, M2, M3, M4 — sold since late 2020. Apple menu → About This Mac tells you which you have. or Intel) and Windows 10 or later. There is no cap on how much footage you bring — it scales with the storage you add.
- Footage
- MP4, MOV, AVI and MKV. Files on an external drive can be analyzed where they are, without copying them in.
- Internet
- Only for the AI description stage and for updates. The scan itself runs offline.
Volume
It grows with what you throw at it.
Nothing in the software caps the size of a file, the length of the footage or the number of cases. Uploads stream rather than load, the scan works in short resumable windows, and footage on an external drive is read where it sits. Bring more and it takes more — add storage, add a machine, and it keeps going.
For a sense of scale: a six-hour file finished end to end in about twenty minutes on a current Mac laptop (measured, August 2026). A firm running fifteen cameras around the clock is generating something like ten thousand hours a month — which is roughly one machine kept busy. Narrowing with sections and zones moves that number further than faster hardware does.
And you don’t have to keep the footage
Footage can be analyzed where it sits — on an external drive, without being copied in. Once a case has been analyzed, the events, clips, stills, descriptions and notes live in the case folder on your own disk, and they no longer need the original to exist. Archive the drive, shelve it, or wipe it.
And you can bring it back
Footage that has gone offline is marked as such rather than lost. Plug the drive back in, or point the case at wherever the file moved to, and it reconnects — matched on a fingerprint of the file itself, so a rename or a different folder doesn’t break it. How often you purge, and whether you ever do, stays your decision.
Measured across two real cases: the analyzed output came to under 4% of the original footage — 35 GB of video reduced to 1.4 GB of clips, stills and records. At fifteen cameras that is the difference between five terabytes a month and about a hundred and eighty gigabytes.
See it run, then try it on a case of your own.
Thirty minutes on a call and you will have watched the whole thing work, start to finish, on real footage — nothing to prepare, nothing to bring. Then the real test: a pack, a case you have already reviewed, and a comparison between what it found and what you found.