Joshua Cohen is a Principal at Fat Pencil Studio
I've always placed a lot of value on showing up at conferences and seminars to connect with existing and new customers. But now that live events are on hold and facing an uncertain future, a re-think seems in order. I held a brainstorm session with our team to consider new ways to “show up” virtually and share some details about how we do our work.
We settled on the idea of creating a series of short video tutorials focused on issues that come up frequently when developing visual stories for civil and criminal cases. Jazzy stepped up to film the first of these, about the importance of sourcing original video footage, rather than relying on a “video of a video”.
While it's true that some footage is better than no footage at all, there are many reasons that second-hand video footage is inferior. These include one or more of the following: glare, skew, shake, dirty/hazy cell phone lens, brightness of screen being recorded, room lighting, cropping, motion blur, and differing frame rates. So, next time you get cell phone footage of a video playing on another screen as part of the discovery in a case, feel free to share a link to this video when explaining why you need the original footage.