Dear Amped fellows, welcome to this week’s post of the “How do I do this?” series! Today we’ll show you how Amped Replay can deal with a not so common yet very annoying artifact: stretched videos due to field-based recording. If the last words mean nothing to you, don’t miss this opportunity to learn something new!
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Welcome, dear friends, to one more post of the “How do I do this?” series! Today we’ll be dealing with a very common and annoying issue, that is, interlaced videos. It manifests with a “jagged edges” phenomenon that makes things much harder to see. No worries, though: Amped Replay is here to assist, so keep reading!
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Dear friends, welcome to the weekly appointment with the “How do I do this?” series! Browsing a video frame-by-frame is an essential yet invaluable feature for video forensics. And when you spot something interesting, you’ll want to save that position and possibly add a comment. We’ll see how all of this can be done with Amped Replay in a moment. Keep reading!
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Dear friends, welcome to this week’s “How do I do this?” post! Today we’ll show you how to adjust the speed (playback framerate) of your video, and how you can use this feature to export a slowed-down or accelerated version of the video. Keep reading!
Spoiler of the day: within Amped Replay, you can change the playback speed by moving the FPS slider. If you then use Export Processed Video as MP4, it will retain the set speed.
Dear friends, here we are with a new post of the “How do I do this” series! Have you ever found yourself dealing with a 1-hour long video where the only thing of interest happens for 5 seconds? As long as the file is sitting on a local drive, that’s usually not an issue. But what if you need to send the file to a colleague? Is it possible to trim only the relevant part without lowering the quality? Keep reading to find out how Amped Replay lets you do this quickly!
Use the “square brackets” buttons in Amped Replay‘s player bar to set the start and end of the range. Then, go to Export and choose Export Original Video as AVI. Done!
Compactness is definitely not among the merits of digital video. Depending on framerate, resolution, and compression, a single minute of video can eat up hundreds of MBs. When everything is stored locally or accessible through a fast local area network, this could seem less than an issue. However, there are times when your video needs to travel or when it is appropriate to trim only the part of footage where the incident happens to avoid maintaining superfluous sensitive information.
Trimming a video is something any video editing software lets you do easily. However, in most cases, you’ll go through a recompression process: pixels will be decoded and re-encoded after the trim, thus leading to a quality loss. You may try and reduce the amount of compression, but then find that your clip is actually larger in file size than the original! Recompression (known as transcoding) is therefore something you definitely want to avoid – unless you think changing the encoding algorithm is useful for the sake of better compatibility, as we discussed two weeks ago.
When dealing with video for forensic purposes, preserving the best possible evidence is of paramount importance. Failing in doing so may invalidate your whole work, especially since lawyers are getting tech-savvy, and they’ll question everything you did.
Now, we know there are cases where carrying out enhancement and analysis on the originally recorded pixels is unfeasible; in such cases, you are allowed to pick up the pixels in some other way, trying to minimize the quality loss. But if all you need to do is trimming part of the video, then that’s not a good reason for losing pixel originality!
Luckily, Amped Replay has you covered! Let’s say we have this beefy 30 minutes video (54k frames), which is 1.5GBs large, and we need only from frame 11.400 to frame 12.300.
Using the mouse, we drag the player head close to frame 11.400, then we can navigate frame by frame using the dedicated buttons or hitting the J (previous frame) and L (next frame) shortcuts. Once we reached frame 11.400, we click the Start range button:
Then, we move to frame 12.300 and click the End range button.
As you can see, after this process, the player bar shows the selected range in light gray, while the excluded range is marked in dark gray. You can toggle the player bar to display only the narrowed range or the full video by clicking on the button between the Start range and End range. If you instead want to clear a start or end range assignment, just click again on the same start (or end) range button.
Once you’ve selected the part you want to extract, it’s time to move to the Export tab. If we care about preserving the original pixels, we’ll go for the Export Original Video as AVI button. If instead, we prefer transcoding the video to H.264 and put it in an MP4 container (which means: extremely wide compatibility), we’ll rather choose the Export Original Video as MP4.
What’s the difference? When you use Export Original Video as AVI, Replay will do what we call a “lossless trim”: it will extract the frames you wanted without re-encoding them. To do so, we need that the exported range starts with an intra-coded frame (keyframe). If your selection does not start from a keyframe, Replay will automatically include some extra frames at the beginning, going backward until a keyframe is found. Let’s now load the exported video and see what we have:
First of all, it’s just 13 MBs! Instead of the expected 900 frames, you see we have 1122 frames. This is expected for the reasons explained above: you can’t do a lossless trim starting from an arbitrary frame, it must be a keyframe, so Replay included some extra frames at the beginning. If you’re trimming to remove disturbing content, remember to check that the trimmed video is actually OK. This way of exporting is extremely fast since it only copies data without any pixel processing. The most important issue here is that the visual information within your range of selected frames has retained integrity. The pixels have not changed from the original video file to the trimmed clip.
Conversely, when you use Export Original Video as MP4, the video gets transcoded, which means you’ll get exactly the desired range, but you’ll necessarily end up with (slightly) different pixel values. As we can see below, the so-exported video has exactly 900 frames, and the size is also slightly decreased.
That’s all for today! We hope you’ve found this issue of the “Amped Replay Tutorials: How do I do this?” series interesting and useful! Stay tuned and don’t miss the next ones. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook: we’ll post a link to every new tutorial so you won’t miss any!
Dear friends, welcome! Today we’re dealing with a widespread and important issue: viewing the timestamps of a surveillance recording. Indeed, as much as “what” happened is important, “when” it happened is also crucial most of the time. Keep reading to find out how Amped Replay lets you see and present timestamps in two clicks!
Timestamps are automatically shown on the bottom left in Amped Replay. To render them over the video, go to Annotate, choose Text, and pick “Time” from the “Add Time and Name” list.
Surveillance videos are typically recorded by a Digital Video Recorder (DVR). A DVR is nothing but a computer dedicated to receiving video signals from connected cameras, converting them to digital, compressing and storing them. Like every computer, a DVR has an internal clock, and while recording videos, it writes down some date and time metadata (also known as “timestamp”), telling at which time each frame was captured.
As to how this “writing down” occurs, there’s enough to write a book about. Some DVRs will just literally “write over pixels” the date and time, which has the advantage that they will remain there regardless of how you export/acquire footage. But of course, you’re sacrificing the original pixel content there since they are replaced by the timestamp.
Most DVRs will, instead, write the timestamp separated from pixel data. Sometimes, they’ll be made available as a separate file, e.g., a .smi or .srt file. Alternatively, they will be saved inside the same file containing the video stream, according to some proprietary pattern. If you use the proprietary player, it will be able to decode and show the timestamps. However, if you want to import your video into a forensic video enhancement software, such as Amped Replay or Amped FIVE, these proprietary-encoded timestamps must be decoded.
The good news is that Amped products assist you with decoding and displaying both kinds of timestamps! If you’re using Amped Replay, all you need to do is, as usual, drag the file into the software or open it from the Import tab (which we described recently). For example, let’s say you’re given this file here:
We drag the .dv4 file into Amped Replay, and in a moment we are shown this:
As you can see, the timestamp associated with each frame is made visible on the bottom left, and it will update when you play or skim through the video.
All of the above is great if you just need to know each frame’s timestamp, but you may also need to show the timestamp over the frame you need to export. Of course, Amped Replay is here to assist!
Let’s move to the Annotate tab and click on the Text tool.
You can now check the pretty featured option list that appears below. In the bottom part of it, there’s a promising Add Time and Name dropdown list:
Just open the list and choose Timestamp.
You’ll see that the timestamp gets printed on the screen automatically.
We can move it around, and we can definitely adjust the text settings to make it look better. My personal taste is yellow text on black background, and position it bottom left:
Once done, remember that you have to set the annotation to remain in all frames! Otherwise, by default, it is only applied to the current frame you’re working on. Just right-click on it and choose Set for all frames.
One final thing: you can add some custom text together with the actual timestamp. A prevalent choice would be to write “Timestamp:” followed by the timestamp. If that’s what you’d like, then you can save time by clicking on the Add Label to Macros checkbox before selecting the desired option from the dropdown list.
This way, you’ll get this when choosing Timestamp from the list:
However, you can double-click on the text and type in whatever you like. The timestamp placeholder will be clearly visible ($TIMESTAMP) and will turn to the actual timestamp value as soon as you finish editing (click out of the text box).
Just a final note: always keep in mind that timestamps, like all other metadata, should not be blindly trusted. What you’re showing is obviously what the DVR wrote. If the clock was wrong, you’d be showing the wrong time.
That’s all for today! We hope you’ve found this issue of the “Amped Replay Tutorials: How do I do this?” series interesting and useful! Stay tuned and don’t miss the next ones. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook: we’ll post a link to every new tutorial so you won’t miss any!
Welcome, dear friends, to the weekly “How do I do this” appointment! As we discovered in the previous posts, most surveillance footage is normally available in proprietary formats that standard players won’t play. We’ve also seen that Amped Replay lets you play many of such formats, so you can view them. How though can you convert them, whilst maintaining quality to preserve their evidential worth, so that other colleagues can play them?
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Dear friends, welcome to this week’s “How do I do this?” pill to ease your video pain! As we said in the previous post, surveillance video files often come in rather odd extensions. So odd that you’ll hardly be able to tell apart video files from different stuff. But luckily, Amped Replay will identify potential video files for you! Keep reading to find out more.
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Dear friends, welcome back! As promised in the introductory post to this series, today we’ll face one of the most basic and common issues found by investigators in their daily job: playing surveillance video files. It seems the easiest thing, but it turns out to be often hard with standard players, so keep reading.
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Dear friends, welcome back! Last week we said farewell to the Video Evidence Pitfall blog series, but of course we’re not leaving you alone! And so, here we are with a brand new series called “Amped Replay Tutorials: How do I do this?“. We’ll try to address simple tasks that people working with video face almost daily. Keep reading for more info!
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