Dear friends, ready for this week’s Video Evidence Pitfall? Today we’re talking about infrared (IR) images, how they could be misleading, and some potential IR-related issues that may involve even “normal” videos. Keep reading!
Issue: you can’t trust any color in infrared images
How many times have you seen this kind of “washed out” image?
These are typical infrared images, and, as we will see, you should not use them to get any color information. To convince you, let me show you a couple of pictures. On the left, you have the visible light version of a shirt, on the right the IR version of the same shirt in the same scene and same everything.
Dear friends, I’m so glad to introduce this new blog series! Every Tuesday, for several weeks, we’ll walk together to discover some delicate or even dangerous aspects that you may easily encounter when dealing with images and videos during investigations. And of course, we’re not belittling your skills when we write “because you don’t know what you don’t know”! It’s just something that comes from our experience: we talk with investigators on a daily basis, and we’ve noticed that, sometimes, there’s a tendency to treat images and videos as “something everyone knows about”. All in all, we have them on our smartphones, we share them on social media, perhaps we also edit them with some consumer app or software from time to time, and with nice results.
Alas, my friends, it’s not that simple, for many reasons:
Videos you deal with in forensics often come from CCTV surveillance systems. The acquisition and processing lifecycle of such videos is very different than what goes on in a smartphone. Smartphones have never dealt with analog video, while many CCTV systems still work with analog cameras connected to a DVR. And what about compression? One minute of video on my Google Pixel 3a is worth hundreds of megabytes, while it would probably be <10 MBs in a CCTV system.
Video encoding and playback is a complex topic, and this is especially true when it comes to proprietary video formats, that are used by most surveillance systems. Those working in the field know that most of the time, the original video extracted from a DVR just won’t play in standard computer players, it is normal. How do we “convert” it to a playable video? There’s a whole world inside, and investigators must at least know that such a world… exists!
Remember that a shallow interpretation could steer a whole investigation in the wrong direction. Want an example? Take a look at this infrared picture of a shirt.
Dear friends, it is with a bittersweet feeling that I’m announcing this will be the last Tip Tuesday. The bitter part is just because I’m a bit emotional and I got used to this weekly appointment… but the sweet part is that we’ll continue writing new posts in 2021, just a bit different… so the best is yet to come!
To say goodbye, I’ve prepared a list of the 52 tips that accompanied this difficult 2020, so you have them all here for quick reference. And if you want, you can also take a look at the list of 2019 tips.
Thanks to all our loyal followers, we’ll meet again next year (#bringon2021) ready for a new experience!
Dear friends welcome to this waiting-for-Santa tip! Less than a week has passed since the latest Amped Authenticate update (if you’ve missed it, take a look here!), and we’re already providing a tip to make the most of the new Video PRNU tool! In particular, today we’ll deal with a case where we need to check whether a video comes from a device, but we only have reference images of it. We’ll see that, with the latest Authenticate update, this is very easy to do!
Dear Amped friends, did you notice that small box under the tree? Santa brought a gift for you: a brand new update of Amped Authenticate! For the second time in a row, we’re adding something big to our software… keep reading to find out what!
Dear readers, welcome to our weekly tip! Today we continue exploring the features and powers of the Amped FIVEAssistant. We’ll see how you can customize and create your own scripts and, most importantly, why you may want to do it. So keep reading and walk with us!
Dear Amped friends, welcome! Today we’re sharing a tip that’s been waiting for too long: it’s about Amped FIVE‘s Assistant! It’s a very powerful and handy tool, but many users tend to forget about it… just because they’ve never tried it! We’re thus dedicating a mini-series to the Assistant. Take a breath and dive with us!
Dear friends, welcome to this week’s tip! Today we’re showing the difference between two Amped FIVE filters that often get confused: Convert Frame Rate and Change Frame Rate. We’ll see that they’re similar in the name, but they do something quite different. Keep reading to find out more!
Dear tip crunchers, welcome to this week’s tip! Today we’ll finish the mini-series on exporting formats. Last week, we discussed the case of images: we saw some criteria to choose the proper kind of compression, and we reviewed the range of options offered by Amped products. Today it’s about video, so… keep reading!
Dear friends welcome to this week’s tip! A question we get very often from our users is: which format should I choose to write my enhanced video/image once I’m done? We’re thus happy to introduce a mini-series of two tips on this subject! Today we’ll introduce the topic and discuss the case where your final output is an image, next week we’ll deal with videos. So, keep reading! And see you back here next week for part 2!
