With the new year comes a new update to Amped FIVE with some exciting new features and a couple of brand new filters!
Timeline
If one of your regular tasks is producing video for presentation purposes, you’ll be excited to know that there is now the option in Amped FIVE to combine multiple video chains together in our new Timeline filter, found under the Link group of filters.
Did you know the Amped FIVE interface can be customized to fit your preferences? Perhaps you have two monitors and want to adjust the panels, or prefer a darker application theme? No problem!
My personal preference is to use this layout, with the “darker” theme, as I tend to use only one monitor when using FIVE, but if you do want to re-organize the interface so it is more suited to your work style, each of the panels within the user interface can be moved or hidden from view.
The festive season is right around the corner and this is one of our busiest times of the year! Despite this, we’re here with another update to Amped Authenticate just in time for the holidays!
Smart Report
While we’ve included the ability to generate batch processing reports for a while, we’re now introducing an exciting new reporting method designed to make it quicker and easier to report relevant filters.
Yes, you heard correctly – we’re here with yet another update! We’ve added some highly sought-after features to Amped DVRConv, the fastest and easiest way to convert proprietary video formats.
Settings Lock Down Option
Sometimes system administrators need to lock down the settings of Amped DVRConv in order to avoid having users modify the settings accidentally, which could disrupt the workflow of the lab; for example setting a conversion to transcode instead of stream copy. Now it is possible to protect these settings, allowing only system administrators to modify them!
In our latest update to Amped FIVE, you’ll find two new filters that work together to stabilize and enhance video with an object that has some change in perspective as it moves: Perspective Stabilization and Perspective Super Resolution.
Let’s take a look at how they work!
You can also watch the two filters in action in our latest video found here:
The festive season is on its way, but Team Amped are here with an early gift! We have another update to Amped FIVE and this time it’s huge!
Perspective Stabilization and Perspective Super Resolution
We’ve now created two new filters that work together to stabilize and enhance video that includes an object with a change in perspective as it moves. The most common scenario for this is the need to enhance the license plate of a moving car filmed by a static CCTV. While it has been possible to correct perspective issues since early versions of Amped FIVE using Perspective Registration, this could often be very time consuming and not always easy. With the Perspective Stabilization this step has now been basically automated. Of course, Perspective Registration is still there for you for the extra-difficult cases and for manual selection.
We’ve dedicated an entire post to Perspective Stabilization and Perspective Super Resolution which will be published in the next few days.
Replace Channel
Another new filter! Replace Channel replaces one color channel with another. It’s found under the Channels filter set.
Replace Channel converts the image into another selected color space and replaces one of the channels with another. Let’s take this image, for instance:
We’ve released another update for Amped DVRConv, one of the fastest ways to cleanly convert video. It is also the simplest; a clean installation tool that allows anyone who works with digital video to drag and drop proprietary video evidence in order to achieve a standard playable file – cutting out the hours, or even days, it takes to locate a proprietary player. Drag and drop – it’s that easy! With DVRConv, alongside Amped FIVE and Amped Authenticate, your workflow from scene to laboratory is completely covered and together they provide great weapons in your forensic video and image analysis arsenal!
Let’s say you regularly process video evidence and, like a lot of technicians and analysts, you are tasked with retrieving video from a scene at a location other than your lab or office. Retrieving CCTV from DVRs at scene can often be laborious, fraught with difficulty and a lot of the time the scenes are a fair distance away from your usual office. One of the most important steps during the recovery of CCTV evidence is checking to see if the download has been successful, which means playback of what is more likely to be proprietary video at scene using only a laptop and your recovery tools.
Saving time at a video recovery scene is crucial and it’s a nightmare having to trawl through hundreds of proprietary players, some of which won’t work on your current operating system or might have different versions of the same type of player. The conversion engine in Amped FIVE would be ideal, but you want something more portable to add to the tools on your retrieval laptop. This is where DVRConv steps in to quickly convert and playback your downloaded files in an easily customisable and cleanly installed package!
Utilising exactly the same conversion engine as FIVE but with twice the portability, you can not only playback and confirm your video files at scene, but have them ready for clarification and enhancement in FIVE for when you return to the office or lab. Logs are provided for disclosure and the original files are left untouched, maintaining the continuity of your video evidence from the beginning.
Whilst it’s been a busy time for us here at Amped with the demand for training higher than ever, we have made sure our development is continuous and we’re here again with another huge update for Amped FIVE.
A Completely Revamped Conversion Engine
As you will know, one of the biggest struggles within the world of CCTV and video analysis is the ever-increasing number of proprietary formats. Our support and development team are constantly receiving requests for new format support and in our latest update, we have enabled conversion support for BVR, DVS, H64, PSF and SHV formats, along with some variations of other formats already supported in previous versions.
All these formats are multiplexed streams. This is when a manufacturer has placed all camera footage into a single time-based video stream.
The latest FIVE not only converts the files straight away, but demultiplexes each video stream, splitting them into their own individual chains within the software. Under the Convert DVR Advanced tab you will find the options to enable this time-saving function.
Files to Convert > All, one chain per file.
No more mixed streams, no more time wasted writing carving scripts. A few clicks will now save you hours!
Multiplexed single stream decoding is huge, so expect a dedicated blog post in the next few weeks looking more deeply into decoding files of this type.
But the new conversion engine does not stop there! There are a lot of benefits even on single stream video files. Standard conversion done with vanilla FFmpeg is often not enough – there may be the risk of losing video frames because of wrongly interpreted proprietary metadata. Our new engine not only cleans almost every proprietary video format, being in MPEG4, H263, H264 and H265, but for many of them also recovers the proprietary timestamp. We found more than 50 different variations of timestamp formats!
First of all, let me introduce myself. I’m Lucy Carey-Shields, the newest member of the Amped team! Originally from the UK I studied Computer Forensics at degree level and was a volunteer police officer with a UK police force for six years. I later went on to work for another UK police force for almost four years as a digital forensics technician, mostly working with CCTV and video whilst also providing forensic acquisition of mobile devices. Whilst working at Amped I’ll be providing support as well as putting the software through its paces, so I look forward to hearing from you all! Now let’s dive into my first Amped blog post!
When dealing with video, we often have to hide sensitive information or protect a person’s identity, particularly if the video is to be shared with a wider audience and we need to control the display of certain information. Amped FIVE has a filter for that!
Having used two or more different tools to load, process and then redact sensitive footage in the past, I know how time-saving having all these features in one piece of software can be (and how critical time can be in a law enforcement environment).
The Hide Selection filter allows you to pixelate, blur or blacken anything you want masked in a video quickly. In this instance, we’ll explore both dynamic tracking and manual tracking during the use of Hide Selection. Hide Selection can be found under the Presentation group of filters, typically used at the end of a workflow.
Redaction, whilst usually done towards the end of processing a video, is arguably one of the more critical steps in a workflow as revealing sensitive data or someone’s identity could have serious and potentially dangerous consequences. With this in mind, it’s important we ensure frame by frame accuracy so that the subjects we want to censor are completely disguised. FIVE allows you to apply the filter by selecting the necessary points – maintaining that important frame by frame accuracy. Continue reading