Video Walk Throughs and Shop Footage

Behavior. A photograph shows a state and a video shows a process, and on these vehicles a great many faults only exist as a process.

• Slide motion. A room that binds partway, comes out unevenly or hesitates at the same point every cycle. None of that appears in a still image of an extended slide.
• Leveling behavior. A system hunting, cycling repeatedly or dropping a corner over time.
• Intermittent electrical faults. A display flickering, a converter cycling, a fault that appears only under a particular load. Capturing it when it happens is often the whole diagnosis.
• Panel alignment. A slow pass along the side under raking light shows waviness and blend boundaries that a straight on photograph flattens out.
• Water testing. Where water travels, how fast, and where it emerges, which is the point of the test and is invisible in a still.

Owners can help enormously here. If your complaint is intermittent, film it when it happens. A thirty second clip of a slide misbehaving is worth more diagnostically than a long description, and it may save an hour of the $285 diagnostic rate spent trying to reproduce the fault.

At three points, each for a different reason.

At intake on complex damage. A narrated walk around captures context that a set of stills does not: road position on a collision, the relationship between damage areas, and door and slide gaps as the camera moves past them. On claim work it also creates an unedited record with intact timing metadata, which occasionally settles a dispute about when damage occurred.

During diagnosis. Systems demonstration footage, particularly on faults that come and go. It is also how a technician shows an owner what is actually happening rather than describing it, which matters when the decision between a repair and a rebuild rests on the difference.

At delivery. A walk through of the completed work. What was replaced, what was sealed, what to watch, and how any new or serviced system operates. Owners forget most of a verbal handover within a week, which is why having it recorded is genuinely useful.

If the vehicle is not drivable or you want an opinion before towing it, a good video package saves a great deal of time on both sides.

1. A slow walk around the whole vehicle, narrating what you are seeing, in daylight.
2. Close range passes over each damage area, moving the camera so depth and deformation read properly.
3. The roof if it can be reached safely, particularly seams, terminations and around any penetration.
4. Any system that misbehaves, filmed while it misbehaves. Slides through a full cycle, leveling through a full sequence, and any warning display as it appears.
5. The interior, including anything that shifted, any staining, and the slide openings from inside.

Do not edit or crop the footage and keep the originals. On claim work the unmodified file is worth more than a tidied one. Send it with a description of what the vehicle is doing and we can tell you whether an evaluation, a systems estimate at $150 applied as a credit, or a full collision estimate at no charge is the right next step.

For the still photograph side of the record, see photo documentation. For how the whole sequence runs, see our process, or request a quote and attach what you have filmed.