Dear loyal readers, welcome to this week’s “How Do I Do This?” blog post! When dealing with CCTV recordings, one rather common issue is that everything looks “slightly blurred”. It could be because of poor camera lenses, poor focusing, or it could even be a compression artifact, and the only sure thing we know is how annoying this is. Keep reading to find out how Amped Replay can help you in such situations!
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Welcome, loyal followers of this series! Some of the most common reasons that make a CCTV video apparently useless are that it’s just too dark (recorded at night?), too bright (infrared camera mounted just next to a floodlight?), or it’s grayish everywhere (fog, mist, etc.). In this post, we’ll see how Amped Replay can help you greatly in all of these situations!
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Dear friends, welcome to this week’s “How do I do this?” pill! Cropping a video is one of the basic things you need to do quite often. In the next few lines, we’ll show you how to do it, plus we’ll see why the benefits of cropping a video do not relate to just “purely aesthetic” reasons. So keep reading!
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Dear friends, welcome to this summer edition of the “How do I do this?” blog series! Today we’re looking at how you can rotate a video or image, an operation that is apparently trivial but may hide some pitfalls, keep reading!
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Welcome to this week’s post of the “How do I do this?” series! Today we’re dealing with a rather sneaky and common issue in video forensics: correcting the aspect ratio of videos. It’s a problem hardly encountered in most digital videos nowadays, but in the domain of CCTV recordings, it’s instead very frequent. So we ask ourselves: are we watching pixels in the correct way, or were they stretched somehow? And if so, how can we fix this? Keep reading to find out more!
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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!