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The Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association (LEVA) is interested to know how the FVA community is handling law enforcement body worn video. One of their instructors, Keith Swanson, has compiled a brief survey on how the forensic video community is dealing with body worn video that addresses numbers of cameras, types of processing requests and whether or not community members are being asked to consult on an agancies' research and evaluation of this rapidly growing technology.

"VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images."

It's been three years since we first heard about DARPA's ARGUS-IS, but thanks to a PBS Nova special entitled "Rise of the Drones," we finally have more information about the 1.8-gigapixel camera that is supposedly the highest-resolution surveillance system in the world.

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http://media-geek.com/images/myblog/frontpage/ft-worth.jpg LEVA's 20th Anniversary Training Conference will be held in Ft. Worth, Texas November 18th- 20th.  As usual, LEVA is organizing some great pre-conference training as well as a vendor exhibit hall.  For more information or their official registration form click here.

An oldie but a goodie, IMHO.

Kind of like the frames of my glasses, which were referred to as "birth control" glasses when I was in the military. ?

Hope you have a great Friday. Be safe out there my friends. ?

Despite our efforts to educate everyone in the digital evidence chain on the proper way to label and care for CDs, DVDs, and BDs (see CD and DVD Care and Handling: Stop Destroying Your Evidence!), read errors still happen...a lot. Here are two of my favorite tools for repairing and recovering data from disc-based media.

The Minneapolis Police Department Crime Lab is seeking to hire a Forensic Video Analyst. Applications will be accepted from Monday, October 22, 2012 through Friday, November 9, 2012. Complete details can be found online at www.minneapolismn.gov. A direct link to the city's job listings is provided below for your convenience.

Minneapolis Career Opportunities

A peer recently shared this article, as he is one of the co-authors, and I personally feel it contains vital fundamental information for those who testify as Forensic Experts.  Hope you find it helpful.

"The following material was revised from an original article, “Survival Checklist for Medical Experts,” written by Deputy District Attorney Michele McKay-McCoy, Solano County District Attorney’s Office. With her permission, it was revised for forensic experts by Deputy District Attorney Michael S. Groch, San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, and Deputy Attorney General Robert M. Morgester, California Department of Justice."

Survival Checklist for Forensic Experts (PDF) 

If you believe what Apple is saying about the dying media format that is the CD/DVD (hence the lack of optical drives on the MacBook Air and the latest refresh of the Mac Mini), then you have to wonder why would a company still attempt to innovate the CD despite reports of its declining status. However, if you believe that optical media is still the best way to back up your data then perhaps the M-Disc might be something you could be interested in.

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Let’s talk a little more about aspect ratio. Always a lively topic everywhere I go, and regularly misunderstood by industry leading CCTV equipment manufacturers, engineers, and other video professionals. Should we correct, when do we correct, how do we correct, and of course the why. I’ve done a few short posts on the topic in the past (here's one), but this will be in a little more detail. Still writing on the fly, just going to break it down into a few posts over time.

Beaten paths are necessary, but so to are the paths we often walk alone. You know, those that are inundated with brush, bushes, thickets and unknown scary things.

If we all stayed on the same path, always, it would take forever for us to get anywhere we haven't been before.

"Who, me?" Yes, especially you.

Western Digital has announced what it said is a nanotechnology breakthrough that will allow the company to double data storage capacity on hard disk drives (HDD).

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