We are thrilled to bring you a huge Amped Replay update today. It’s been in your wish list for a very long time and we can now proudly reveal that Audio Redaction is finally here!
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We are very excited to bring you yet another big Amped Replay update today! The number one player designed specifically for front line policing and investigating is back and packed with lots of new features and improvements, which we think you are going to love!
In line with our development strategy for 2022, we continue to bring performance improvements, as promised – this time adding CPU Multi-threading Support and Standard Rounding Chroma Up-sampling for the decoding and playback of video. You will now also be able, if you wish, to customize your interpolation method when resizing video clips.
Let’s go through the complete list of updates we have in store for you.
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Amped Replay, the video player designed specifically for modern policing has another big update today. After receiving feedback from front-line officers and detectives using Replay to speed up their CCTV caseload, we have developed a major new feature in the Annotate tab, as well as updated several other components.
Your time is important so let us get right to it.
More and more officers and detectives are using Amped Replay, the enhanced video player for policing, within their everyday duties. With immediate decoding of proprietary CCTV, quick and simple enhancements based on forensic methods, and full annotation and marking capabilities designed specifically for use within a legal setting, it is easy to understand why it has become so popular.
User feedback has directly led us to make several advancements so let’s take a look at the new updates available today within Replay.
We never stop here at Amped so here we are again with another software update. This time to the enhanced video player for everyday policing, Amped Replay.
Officers and police staff need to review and perform basic tasks with CCTV, dashcam footage, body-worn video, and footage from cell phones. However, they also need to do this quickly and, most importantly, adhere to forensic guidelines.
This is where Replay comes in. Using the powerful Amped Conversion Engine, allowing the lossless extraction of video from proprietary formats, and then utilizing an easy to use selection of forensic filters and annotation tools, users can expedite their video evidence, knowing that they are being protected with a science-based workflow acceptable within the criminal justice systems.
Let us see what’s new:
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Here we are again for another blog post update, this time for Amped Replay – the enhanced video player for frontline officers and investigators.
Before we get into what’s new, let us just look back for a moment. In the two years since Replay launched it has quickly become the go-to application for those early moments in a video investigation. Converting proprietary CCTV formats, finding an offender or incident, performing simple enhancements using science-based image processing filters, and then we have the easy annotation and tracking and magnifying. And we cannot forget the automated reporting.
Officers now have a powerful but easy to use tool that enables them to perform general video and image tasks, improve media releases and expedite case files.
If you deal with video in cases, but multimedia is not your sole responsibility then Replay is for you. With these latest updates, we have made it even easier to use!
Let us go through each stage, starting with the Import tab, and see what’s new.
IMPORT
As many of you will know, CCTV and imagery from Video Surveillance Systems are notoriously difficult to manage as every manufacturer can do what they want to their video. We have simplified this challenge by including the powerful Amped Conversion Engine directly into Amped Replay. When you import a proprietary file it is analyzed and made playable behind the scenes. This is a lossless process, conforming to international standards for forensic video processing, and ensures that you are seeing the actual pixels recorded with nothing changed by the conversion process or the player’s presentation.
In this update, we have added 6 new extensions including the .G64A and .EZVP formats. More format variants have also been added including one for the popular .H264 format.
A format variant is a change in structure to a format that we have supported in the past.
We have been working really hard on timestamps over the past few months and in this update, we have 7 new time formats.
If you want to learn more about the Amped Conversion Engine, why not take a look at this recent article on Forensic Focus.
PLAY
The first thing you will notice with the playback stage is some new information at the bottom.
We have added the pixel dimensions here, and this information will change if you alter the size of your video or image. So, if you start with a video of 944 x 1080, but you adjust the aspect ratio to 16:9, you will see the pixel dimensions change to 1920 x 1080. It will always display the size that you will export at, and this information will always be visible regardless of the stage that you are in. Being aware of the final pixel size of your video is important: for example, if you export a video with a resolution above 1920×1080, expect it to be downscaled when played on most devices to fit the display resolution.
Then we added two buttons next to the speed slider to help you either increase or decrease the Frames Per Second (FPS). You can now either drag the slider, hover over it and use your mouse or click the +/- buttons.
ENHANCE
This is where we have added Smart Processing. What is Smart Processing we hear you ask? Well, Replay will analyze what you are starting with and if that analysis identifies that certain filters should be applied then we automatically apply them for you. Nothing will be done without the user selecting an enhancement process though and you can still override them if required. It’s also worth noting that whatever is selected will be documented fully in the report.
You can see in the image below that we have a strange ‘squished’ video and we have our mouse over the Correct filter group.
As soon as Correct and Auto are selected, the new Smart Processing option will be applied.
Amped Replay has identified that the image must be line doubled to increase the vertical size. You will also notice that the image size at the bottom has also changed to the new size.
In this next example, we have lots of jagged edges in our video.
By selecting Correct, Replay will analyze the video and detect that it requires Deinterlacing.
The Correct filter group deals with analog to digital problems and the new Auto option does a great job in quickly identifying what the problem is and fixing it correctly for you.
We have also added an Auto option to the Aspect Ratio filter group. For this, let us go back to the 944 x 1080 video we looked at earlier.
Rather than squished wide, this is squished thin and it just doesn’t look right. Using the new Smart Processing within Aspect Ratio the image will be adjusted correctly.
You can now see that we have the correct image presentation size.
Video can be captured, encoded, and stored very differently from how it should be presented. Identifying differences in storage and presentation is the key to our new Auto functions. Presenting incorrect footage in the media or in court can cause recognition problems or raise challenging questions. This new functionality has been developed to help those users with limited video knowledge avoid these issues.
For those users that know a little bit about forensic image and video analysis, it is worth pointing out that we do not use the metadata to conduct these changes. Metadata can often be wrong. Analog to digital CCTV recordings are rarely tagged to be displayed at 4:3 aspect ratio. Interlaced video is often stored incorrectly.
The Smart Processing in Amped Replay has been built after analyzing hundreds of cases and is a major step forward in simplifying the decisions that investigators need to make in presenting visual evidence correctly.
ANNOTATE
A few small changes have been made to the Annotate tab after user feedback. We start with the Canvas Extension option.
This is now OFF by default. To better understand how this works, and why the behavior has been changed, look at this frame from a video where I have followed the track to outside of the frame. Tracking is one of the most used features in Amped Replay.
When I export the video or frame, I will not retain the part of the circle in the checkerboarded area. My video size will stay the same and the red circle will move outside of my video. This is what I want to happen.
There are times though that you will want to enable the Canvas Extension. Look at this image and note the size at the bottom.
Now, let us use Magnify:
Even though we have dragged our box out of the image area, the size of our image has not changed. It is still 632 x 940. If we exported this frame or video, half of the magnified area would be cut off. If you see the black and white checkerboard, and you want to keep the annotations, just remember to go to the options and select Extend Canvas. You can then select what color you want it to be.
Next, we have Padding within the Text Tool.
When using the text annotation, you now have the ability to pad the text borders. It is a very simple little change but really smartens up your overlays to ensure that the text is not right on the edge of your graphic.
EXPORT
Within the Export Actions, we have the addition of more options within the report.
You will now find a checkbox to Include Bookmarks in the Report.
Whenever you create a report, either on its own or while exporting processed multimedia, the bookmark thumbnails and any associated description will be included.
You will also notice that all annotations are now included.
The reporting options now make it easy for users to comply with multimedia processing regulations as everything is documented. What you watched, what you did, and what you have exported.
Last, and by no means least, we have the hidden admin file, used when Amped Replay is installed on a police network. This document gives a huge amount of customization power to IT Support Units.
We have now added admin controlled selection of the Hash algorithm used in Replay and documented it in the reports.
You can learn more about the admin-settings.ini file in this Tip Tuesday.
With all the automatic processing, the power of annotation, and now full detailed reporting, Amped Replay really does make it easy for the front line to deal with video and images.
Bug Fixes
Don’t Delay – Update Today
If you have an active support plan you can update straight away by going into the menu About > Check for Updates within Amped Replay. If you need to renew your SMS plan, please contact us or one of our authorized distributors. And remember that you can always manage your license and requests from the customer support portal.
Here we are again with another update to Amped Replay, the CCTV converter and video player designed for today’s investigators. Image and video annotation is one of Replay’s key features so we have concentrated our efforts here to increase the tools’ simplicity and speed.
Let’s take a closer look!
Keyframing
Giving users various tracking methods, from manual to assisted, allows full flexibility when moving objects around the video area to hide, spotlight, or mark a vehicle or person.
With this update, we have introduced full keyframing, with size and location interpolation. Those people who have used video editors before may be aware of keyframing, but for those who have not, I’ll explain.
Adding a keyframe to an annotation, like a circle or an arrow, stores the parameters for that object at that frame. The parameters stored are the size and the location. A user can then add another keyframe at another frame and the object will automatically interpolate between this and the previous keyframe.
The benefit of this is that a user may only have to add 3-4 keyframes to track an object instead of frame by frame.
Keyframes can be added by the right-click options on the annotation or by utilizing the shortcut key ‘U’.
When this is activated you will also visualize a keyframe marker in the top left of the annotation.
Hello Amped friends, we are back with another huge feature-packed update to our DVR/CCTV converter and player, Amped Replay. We continue to listen to our users when developing our software and today we bring to you one of the most sought after features – automatic tracking for all annotations, from spotlighting to redaction, to the many other tools available in Amped Replay.
In this post we will also delve deeper into Replay, looking under the hood at the powerful Amped conversion engine which continues to drive investigations worldwide.
Since its launch, Replay has allowed the user to easily track annotations, simply moving the selection while playing the video would record all the movements. This mode is still available but is now complemented with our new assisted tracking option that allows users to annotate their media in an even simpler and more intuitive way than ever before.
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Here we are yet again with another update to Amped Replay, our enhanced video player for police investigators to conduct a first-level analysis of their video evidence. With this update, investigators can now add a spotlight to areas of interest, import and export a project, and add a description to bookmarks.
Spotlight Tool
The Annotate tab continues to be essential when using Replay and so we continue to update and implement newly requested features.
We are excited to introduce the Spotlight tool that you can now find in the Annotation tab. Let’s see how it works.
It feels like it was only yesterday that we were releasing our first official update to Amped Replay, our enhanced video player for police investigators, and now we are thrilled to be showcasing our third update release! Let’s jump right in to what’s new in Replay.
