Welcome to this week’s Tip, dear friends! Today we’re sharing with you some useful hints to create compelling reports with Amped FIVE. We’ll see the advantages of using bookmarks, grouping them into folders, and how you can insert your own comments right in the first section of the report.
As forensic practitioners know very well, even the most clever technical work may prove useless if it’s not supported by a properly written, convincing report. Just showing an enhanced face or license plate will not be enough to convince your interlocutor in a forensic scenario: you also have to explain how you reached your results, why you acted in one way and not another and, finally, draw your conclusions.
Here at Amped, we know how time-consuming the preparation of an excellent report can be. For this reason, since the beginning, Amped FIVE features the built-in Generate Report tool. It will take a few seconds to produce a high-quality report, composed of several parts:
The Report is great in that:
- It ensures the repeatability of the analysis and strongly favors its reproducibility (we’ll discuss the difference between these two concepts in a future Tip): every step in your processing chain is documented in details, down to the settings of the subtlest parameter. Just look at how precise the description for the simple Levels is:
- It includes bibliographic references for all the filters you used (see the example above), saving hours of your work and making it clear to the reader that you’re relying on science and not on a magic wand;
- It allows you to customize the report heading section with a name for the project and for the author, a case description, and a section called “Exported images” that is automatically created from Bookmarks, as shown below.
All these useful features come at a cost: Amped FIVE’s report is… long! You can easily reach 40 pages worth of report for a reasonably simple project. That is why we recommend making the most of Bookmarks: by bookmarking the most critical steps you can create highlights for your work and have them shown at the top of the report, leaving the full chain of filters and their details for later pages, for the sake of repeatability.
Since Release 12727, you can also group bookmarks into folders, thus organizing them in a hierarchical way that further improves readability.
As you can see in the example above, you can provide your description for both folders and single bookmarks. But there’s a nice feature, ignored by most users: Amped FIVE will not force you to fill a folder with bookmarks, you may create empty folders as well. Indeed, there’s an example of that shown on the left side of the image above: the “Conclusion” folder.
Why would you want to create a folder without bookmarks? Because that’s the best way to put comments in the report that are not related to a single (folder of) bookmarks.
Thus, using empty folders you can guide the reader through the various steps of your analysis without having to associate your comment to a bookmark every time.
