Dear loyal summer readers welcome to this week’s tip! As investigators, one of the questions we should always ask ourselves is: “am I using the best possible evidence?”. This is vital to ensure that we can interpret the native data correctly and have the best chance to obtain visual information after any restoration and/or enhancement process. Today we’ll see how Amped FIVE can greatly help you compare two videos at the visual level to understand whether they’re exactly the same or quantify the difference between them. Keep reading!

Hello, Tip Tuesday friends! Here in Italy, it keeps getting warmer every day… if the trend doesn’t change, soon our thermometer will… saturate! Never heard of this term? It’s quite an important one in forensic video processing! Keep reading to find out its meaning and its implications when working with Amped FIVE.

Hi, dear readers! Here we are, ready for a new tip. Today we’re concluding our mini-series about Amped FIVE‘s Frame Averaging, Temporal Smoothing, and Motion Smoothing. They’re all ways to reduce the noise in videos by integrating the information from multiple frames, but they’re quite different in what they do. Keep reading to find out more!

Dear Tip Tuesday readers, welcome! Today we’re beginning a mini-series covering some of Amped FIVE‘s filters that are very useful when dealing with a noisy video (which, alas, happens so often): Frame Averaging, Temporal Smoothing and Motion Smoothing. We’ll see the advantages of each filter and when you should choose one over the other. Today we start with Frame Averaging… keep reading!

Welcome, dear friends! This week’s tip concludes the mini-series dedicated to Amped FIVE‘s Video Input filter. We’ll show how easy it is to process a live video feed on the fly, yielding the resulting frames on your computer’s screen just milliseconds after they’ve been captured by the camera. Keep reading to find out more!

This follows on very nicely from my previous post, ‘Where Is the Rest of the Video?’, where we had to analyze video metadata in order to answer questions about missing footage. In the case here, we have some discrepancies with the frame rate. Let us take a closer look.

The first thing to point out is that I have recently changed one of the Amped FIVE Program Options and I thought it was worthy of an initial mention.

I am coming across many more CCTV files with audio streams. Now, I am not saying that they all have noise, but they do have a stream. As such, I have changed my video engine default to FFMS with Audio.

This engine is now the default on new installations. However, if you have updated from a previous version, the old settings are retained.

Upon loading the video into Amped FIVE, I can see from the File Info tool that an audio stream has been detected, but the waveform envelope in the Player bar is empty.

Dear Tip Tuesday maniacs welcome to a brand new tip! Actually, we’re beginning a mini-series of tips, dedicated to an often overlooked feature of Amped FIVE, the Video Input filter. It lets you get a live video stream from an input device and process it “on the fly” with Amped FIVE filters, or record it to a file. There are three major video forensics applications that can greatly benefit from this filter: 1) documenting the acquisition from a DVR, 2) reverse projection, 3) live processing of frames. Today we introduce the filter and deal with point 1, while the rest will be addressed in the future. Keep reading to discover more!

Video investigators often receive files with little or no information surrounding the source, acquisition or handling. The files are often created by people with little knowledge of the legal requirements of data type and continuity. These issues, and quite a few others, all impact on the initial investigation as discrepancies can cause major problems further along in a case.

Let’s look at this file for example…

All images with sensitive data have been redacted.

Upon viewing in Windows, the thumbnail and extension are shown, and hovering over the thumbnail reveals further information.

I am being told that it’s a Windows Media Video, it’s just under 4Gb and has a length of just under 27hrs.

The CCTV request for footage did detail a time duration of 27hrs so it all looks good so far.

As the title of this blog post is, “Where Is the Rest of the Video?”, you just know that things are going to go wrong!