In early June, Joshua and I attended a digital symposium put on by the creators of iNPUT-ACE. The ten sessions covered many of the nitty gritty details about the video analysis process, and highlighted some ways that iNPUT-ACE's software is tackling these issues. It's great to have another tool that helps us be more effective and efficient in our drive to turn raw evidence into compelling visual stories.
What is iNPUT-ACE?
iNPUT-ACE is a video investigation software tool that is becoming a one stop shop for all things video analysis and compositions.
How does it help Fat Pencil Studio?
- Efficiency. The biggest thing that iNPUT-ACE helps us with is being more efficient with our time. Most surveillance video is stored in a proprietary format that only a very specific software can open. There are over 1,000 proprietary formats and their corresponding software does not always work well. There can be software compatibility, display, or playback problems (ie. incorrect aspect ratio / frame dropping). It takes time to process through these issues to get to something usable that will be helpful for the client. iNPUT-ACE makes bypassing these proprietary format possible.
- Metadata. iNPUT-ACE does a great job preserving information about the raw video file. Knowing the proper aspect ratio of a video can help determine is a video is being squashed or stretched, and knowing exactly what the frame rate should be helps be more certain about timing. When we are able to get this information it's easier to understand how what we see in the video matches with reality. Analyzing the metadata is also helpful in cases where we suspect the video footage is not original, because DVR playback has been recorded with another camera.
Interesting things discussed at the seminar
- Infrared cameras affect color and race perception. Often when video is taken at night, it is infrared. This makes it possible to make out details in darkness. The downside to this is that it is not able to detect much color information. So it can be unreliable when trying to determine the color of clothing or other objects, this deficiency also can effect the appearance of race. Below is an example of the stark difference in the view of the same object under normal lighting conditions vs seen with infrared light.