Free DME & DFIR Resources

The Media-Geek community is now well over 600 members strong and growing!  Although I was literally operating in a state of emergency for the entire month of April and on the road most of May, this morning I managed to finish a significant system upgrade for our site.  This upgrade provides better integration of the video posting capability, improves efficiency for many features and addresses a few other minor bugs.

It's after 4:00 am in the morning and I'm writing about codecs.  That isn't right.  Just curious what lossless video codecs others are using or have used and/or compared for forensic screen capture?  I'm sure the most common answer will be TechSmith's TSCC, but there are others out there that work quite nicely and are priced just right....FREE.

I posted a new member poll on the topic, which you'll find on the right-hand side of your profile page.  Also recently added the free LZO and GZIP based CamStudio codec to our files & downloads library and have been fiddling with some others.    Are you using something else, or do you prefer to keep all captures uncompressed?

If you have a Dropbox account, you have Dropbox Replay.  I've been so impressed with the implementation, and I keep thinking of more ways to use it.  Obviously, you can invite others to comment on and review videos in your Dropbox account (Frame-level review with comments & annotations), but you can do so much more. 

One of the coolest features is the live review capabilities, IMHO.  In any case, rather than regurgitating all of their marketing stuff about it, here's a short video from Dropbox. 😎

ForensicTV is trying to identify good instructors for our new website www.forensictv.net. What we're are looking for are respected and talented people that you could recommend for all disciplines in Law Enforcement and Public Safety. What I need is the following:

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--To ease the transition to next-generation video editing platforms for both professionals and entry-level editors, HP (NYSE:HPQ) today introduced desktop and mobile workstation configurations optimized for video editing.

Full Story

Recently I received the official announcement from Avid that the Liquid line has reached End-of-Life, and Avid is offering all Liquid customers an upgrade discount to Media Composer.  Certainly not a surprise, as there haven't been any major releases of Liquid since shortly after Avid acquired Pinnacle, but the official announcement made me a little sad just the same.  I've really grown to love my Liquid Pro systems at home and they've served me well. 

Avid will provide phone support for the next two years and will replace hardware still under warranty for as long as supplies last(?).  View the official announcement via the link below:

Full Story

It's really fascinating to look back at how far our discipline has come in the last 20 years, and how many resources and solutions are out there these days for Forensic Digital & Multimedia Analysts. Even more exciting is knowing some of the new opportunities and solutions for DME professionals that will be coming in 2019, especially in regards to training!

Photographers using the newer high-end flash memory format now have another supplier besides Sony for the cards. Also: a big, fast SDXC card for a big, fat price.

Full story

George Reis, President and owner of Imaging Forensics, Inc., has launched a new MeetUp group for those involved with technical and scientific imaging and photography.

For more information or to join the group please visit http://www.meetup.com/OC-Technical-Scientific-Photography-Imaging-Group/.

This year I helped Ocean Systems introduce a new 3-Day training class titled "Fundamentals of Video Evidence Recovery & Processing (FVRP)".  The course is designed for anyone who recovers, handles, processes or disseminates Digital & Multimedia Evidence (DME), regardless of prior video evidence training or experience. 

The course is based on industry Best Practices and focuses on obtaining the Best Evidence, and learning how to quickly get accurate images & video out for investigative leads.  It is predominantly hands-on, and will expose students to various Ocean Systems and Open Source solutions that can help.

Join me July 23rd through 25th at our offices in Burtonsville, MD or for one of our future training dates.  Hope to see you in class.  Have a great weekend my friends!

The last three or four weeks I have been absolutely swamped, and unfortunately have had little time to contribute to the Media-Geek community.  Despite my schedule others have kept things moving forward by adding articles and other content, and new members continue to join almost daily as the word spreads about our shared resource.  Although there are many things on my to-do list for Media-Geek regarding further development and maintenance, as well as several articles and blog posts I've been meaning to write, this weekend I spent some time doing a little Spring cleaning.

Initially I intended to spend a few hours addressing some maintenance tasks and reorganizing menus to simplify navigation.  Before it was all said and done I had spent nearly my entire weekend completely re-designing the site.  Go figure.  Anyway, along the way I made a few notable changes that are worth mentioning.

On Wednesday, March 9th at 10:00 AM PST (1:00 PM EST) I will be hosting a LIVE online tour of the members area.  This brief tour is to provide new and long-time members with a quick overview of navigating the members area and locating the multiple resources within.  The tour will last approximately 10-15 minutes and be followed by a short Q & A session, if necessary.  Seating is limited.  If you are an active member that is interested in participating, please register through our EVENTS calendar.

Atlantic Light Works and Reindeer Graphics announce the release of PercepTool 2.0.2 TM, a Photoshop add-on suite that performs High Dynamic Range (HDR), Tone Mapping and Perceptual Effect operations on digital photographs. Compatible with both Windows and Mac platforms in 32- and 64-bit processing, it operates in Photoshop CS4 and CS5 (Photoshop Extended required for 32-bits/channel). PercepTool 2.0.2TM works with both B&W and Color images in 8-bits, 16-bits and 32-bits.