Hello, dear Amped blog followers! The inspiration for this week’s tip comes directly from our beloved users. Indeed, a few days ago, during the exciting Amped User Days in Denver, we met an Amped FIVE user who wasn’t aware of the Multiview filter. Because of this, they were wasting a lot of time combining several enhanced videos using external software. Hey, in FIVE it’s simple and fast to combine and sync multiple videos! Keep reading to find out more.
More often than not, you have more than one video depicting an investigated event. You may have multiple videos from the same CCTV system, or even videos coming from different stores on the same street, possibly with different resolution and aspect ratio. While each video will likely require a specific processing chain for improvement, it can be beneficial to sync multiple videos together. By displaying all relevant footage on the same screen simultaneously, you can achieve a more comprehensive reconstruction of what occurred. Can you do that in FIVE? Sure you can!
Sync Multiple Video in Amped FIVE with the Multiview Filter
Amped FIVE’s Multiview filter is there for you, it allows you to combine and sync multiple videos together. You can find it under the category Link. It links together multiple streams to create a single video through the so-called spatial multiplexing.
Spatial Syncing
Using the Multiview filter is very simple: first, process all your videos individually to get what you need from them. Then, go to the Link category and select the Multiview filter. You’ll see that a new chain will be created, containing the Multiview filter alone. Double click on that, and you’ll see its Filter Settings appear:
The Rows and Columns sliders are pretty simple to understand: they just determine the layout of the table. You then need to specify what to use as input for each table cell. You can choose from all the chains you have in your project. Then, pick the specific filter chain to be added. Usually, you’ll end up using the last filter of each chain as the input. By default, the Multiview filter fills all the available table entries with the last filter of each chain you have in your project. In the example above, we’ve set a 2×2 table and we had three chains only, so the fourth table entry remains empty.
You can always click on each line in the Inputs panel and change the chain/filter to be displayed in that location, picking it from the Input to Add dropdown menu as shown below:
Temporal Syncing
Okay, we’ve now placed videos one next to the other the way we like, so we can say the “spatial synching” is done. Let’s now focus on the temporal synching! We first need to choose one video as a reference, and then align the others to it. To temporally align a video, just click on its name in the Inputs list and click on the “Seek Selected” button. The video will be marked with a “play” symbol as shown below:
If we now press Amped FIVE’s play button, we’ll see that only that video plays and the others remain still. We can thus move to the proper frame to temporally align the currently sought video to the reference one. Once done, we’ll repeat the same for the second video and so on so forth. You’ll notice that the Multiview filter accounts for your temporal alignment in the Input Delay box, which tells by how many frames each video is delayed compared to the reference one (the one with “0”):
Once done, just use the Video Writer filter to save your final video to file, and voila! You’re done combining and syncing multiple videos together! No need for external software: Amped FIVE has got you covered once more.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen, Amped FIVE’s Multiview filter provides a streamlined and efficient workflow to combine and sync multiple videos, both spatially and temporally. By handling everything from layout configuration to precise frame alignment within the same environment, you can avoid the need for external tools. You maintain full control over your forensic video analysis. If you regularly work with multiple streams, mastering this feature will significantly enhance your ability to sync multiple videos with accuracy and ease.
