The High Resolution Pre-Event Record system is an innovative means for collecting audio, video, and meta-data in a mobile vehicle platform and continuously recording this information stream to a high-capacity storage device at different levels of data resolution based upon the status of a trigger event. The occurrence of a trigger event will cause the system to store higher resolution data to an on-board high-capacity storage device prepended by a configurable amount of high resolution data previously recorded into a pre-event data buffer. The data stream may later be downloaded to an external storage device for future review and analysis.