Validated Hours vs Raw Capture Hours

A validated hour is footage that has been checked against the sync-error ceiling and the capture spec before it counts toward a delivered dataset. That check covers sync within the measured ceiling, calibration solved and within drift tolerance, coverage cells filled against the spec, and consent documented for every participant in frame.

A raw hour is simply 60 minutes of recording time, before any of those checks run. It says nothing about whether the footage is in sync, whether calibration held, whether it covers a condition your spec actually needs, or whether consent was documented — only that a camera was rolling.

Raw-hour billing or reporting pays for, or counts, footage a team cannot necessarily use. Teams routinely discard most bulk egocentric footage as unfit for manipulation once it is checked against a real spec. A volume or coverage number reported in raw hours can therefore overstate what is actually usable; the same number reported in validated hours means the footage already cleared the bar.

Budget and evaluate in validated hours, not raw hours. A practical starting point is 50–100 validated hours per skill, concentrated on the conditions the policy will actually meet, then scaled further only where held-out evaluation shows it is still thin. Reporting the raw-hour number instead just measures how long a camera ran.