With a non-cellular trail camera, I exclusively record videos. Video clips, significantly longer video clips, give much more information than a picture. You can observe animal behavior over a more extended period, capturing multiple animals on the trail. For example, a pack of wolves on the track - with pictures, you get an image of the first animal and others right after the first, but you most likely will miss the last animal. Or miss a critical behavior longer into an interaction. I can easily recall three videos where I would have missed vital information or key behavior if I had only recorded short clips or photos.
Example 1: Common cranes singing. The singing happened about 45 seconds into the original clip.
Example 2: Wild boar piglets freeze when their mother alerts them. This happened around one minute into the recording.
Since I'm recording longer than usual video clips, I always look for trail cameras with the following options.
Support recording long video clips both day and night time. Minimum of 90-second clips.
Support larger memory cards. 64GB at least, 256 or greater preferred.
No Glow 940NM Infrared to avoid disturbing the animals.
And, of course, decent video and audio quality. A good audio in a video clip is equally essential.
Over the years, I have gone through 3 different trail camera models. Meanwhile, my current most used trail camera, the Chinese E2 trail camera (available at Amazon - https://amzn.to/3uzXBUQ), is a perfect and budget-friendly option. It has some room for improvement that I will not go into the details of now.
So, a year ago, I found the Zecre PH860 dual-lens trail camera from Alibaba. It ticked all the proper checkboxes - 10-minute video clips, 512GB SD-card support, 940NM IR. So, I ordered one for testing. After running it for almost a year in the field, this camera will be my go-to trail camera for video recording.
While Zecre PH860 does not use the more modern h264 or h265 video codecs, it uses older MJPEG codecs; it still will record up to 5 hours of video on a 128GB card. 512GB card will fit about 20 hours of video. I check my cameras every 2-4 months, and this amount of video is plenty for me.