Scheduled capture
Also known as: timed recording, unattended capture
Setting a camera to start recording at a chosen time without anybody present, used for events that happen on a known schedule.
Updated
What it means
Scheduled capture lets a camera be left in position and start on its own. The appeal is obvious for anything that happens at a predictable moment and in a place nobody wants to stand waiting.
It differs from a timer in that the camera is genuinely unattended. Nobody confirms the frame, nobody notices a warning, and nobody intervenes when something goes wrong partway through.
Standard consumer firmware rarely offers it, which is why it is associated with experimental releases such as GoPro Labs rather than with the shipping feature set.
How it works in practice
Power is the first consideration rather than the schedule. A camera on external power can wait indefinitely, while one on a battery is already losing capacity before it starts recording anything.
Framing generously is the insurance. With nobody present to adjust the aim, a wider shot that can be cropped later is far safer than a tight one that misses, and a Wide lens is the obvious choice for it.
Testing the whole sequence once, including the start, the duration and what the files look like afterwards, is the only way to find out whether it works at all. Assuming it does is how an event goes unrecorded.
What to watch out for
Thermal shutdown is the standard failure of unattended recording. A camera in still air stops partway through and nobody is there to restart it, so Camera overheating takes the moment with it.
Power loss produces the other failure, leaving an unfinalised recording rather than a short one, and a Camera crash file discovered days later is a poor substitute for the event.
Weather and interference are equally unglamorous. A lens with rain on it or a mount that shifted produces hours of unusable footage that looked fine when it was set up.
How RawClip handles it
Unattended recordings arrive like any others and are analysed the same way, including the long empty stretches they usually contain. Clips where nothing happens are weighted down rather than rejected, so a scheduled capture that caught one moment still yields it.