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I'm excited to announce that on July 1, 2013 I officially launched my own consulting business, and I will be transitioning to work full-time for the new business effective January 1, 2014. I will remain full-time with FVS throughout 2013, and I'm honored to say FVS has offered to keep me on board through a consulting and/or retainer arrangement thereafter.

For more information on my new endeavor please visit my LinkedIn profile.

I'd like to personally thank everybody here for your participation and support over the years. I'm excited about so many different possibilities of getting to assist you and/or you organization in the future! Stay tuned over the coming weeks for more. All the best! - LC

Adobe's primary tool for tweaking and organizing photos was always destined to be part of the Creative Cloud offering, but for whatever reason it didn't make it in time for launch. As of today though, Lightroom 4 is available to download on PC or 64-bit Mac (or both, since you're allowed multiple installations) as part of a CS6 monthly license.

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Microsoft has opened its C++ AMP specification so it can also be used by non-Microsoft compilers to harness the power of GPUs (graphics processing units).

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The Scientific Working Group on Digital Evidence (SWGDE)has released a DRAFT of version 3.0 of their "Best Practices for Computer Forensics" for public comment. As stated on their Web site, "The purpose of this document is to describe the best practices for collecting, acquiring, analyzing and documenting the data found in computer forensic examinations."

Visit SWGDE

Assumptions can be dangerous things. Let’s say you assumed your software was displaying your AVI video file at the proper aspect ratio (ratio of width-to-height). Well, chances are pretty good you’d be wrong…no matter what software you’re using. What!? So the perp in my video evidence may be thinner and taller OR shorter and pudgy-er!? Yep.

Fact – the AVI file format does not provide a standardized way to report aspect ratio. Due to this shortcoming, applications cannot calculate the proper Display Aspect Ratio (DAR) if it is supposed to be different than the Storage/Sample Aspect Ratio (SAR). Therefore, applications "assume" a square Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR) and display the video at it's SAR, even if that's not correct...which is generally the case when dealing with DCCTV evidence.

Moral of this story? Don’t assume.

Grand Saline police officers and FBI investigators are searching for a man who held up a bank in Grand Saline this morning.

View video from this morning's robbery on our home page and visit KMOO.com for the complete story.

P.S. - The Police Chief is a different Larry Compton. ;-)

With faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs, 2.0 is a major upgrade for VLC.

Visit the VideoLAN website for details.

"TUKWILA, Wash. – A person of interest in the shooting death of Seattle Police Officer Timothy Brenton has been shot in the head by police this afternoon", reports www.King5.com.

Visit the King5.com Web site for the complete story and more recent updates.

Avid will be releasing a new version of Pro Tools soon that will be entirely free, called Pro Tools | First. It doesn't appear to be a severely stripped down version either, so I'm anxious to give a look first hand. If you are too, you can learn more and sign up to be notified at http://www.avid.com/ptfirst

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.

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Medical experts, accident reconstruction experts, and other types of experts are frequently asked to interpret data from images that were obtained from video evidence. When these experts have no training or background in processing multimedia evidence, and/or make no effort to consult someone who does, bad things generally happen. Really bad things, like having all of their evidence thrown out of court, for one.

I was out in Tacoma, WA last week to teach our DVR Assessment & Video Recovery course, and to provide a free seminar on Digital & Multimedia Evidence for area prosecutors, law enforcement and support staff. It was a really great class, and as always the group discussions during both the class and the seminar were really interesting and informative. Thank you to everyone who attended for their participation, and many thanks to Kim, Chris, and the entire Tacoma Police Department for being such amazing hosts.

If you missed the free seminar, we’ll be back out that way to provide it again on July 8th at the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Center, in cooperation with the Washington State Homicide Investigators Association (WHIA).

If you’re interested in our DVR Assessment & Video Recovery training course, check out our upcoming training dates and locations or contact us to inquire about hosting one of our training events.

Thanks again everyone. Be safe out there my friends!

Adobe’s award winning Presenter Video Creator has been enhanced with new tools designed to put interaction right into educational videos. Trainers and Educators alike are rapidly adopting Adobe Presenter thanks to it’s amazingly simple, show-and-tell video tool. Innovations in the video tool have been delighting users for more than a year now. Given the immediate popularity of the new learner intervention, tracking and collaboration tools were added to interactive projects, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Adobe has released an update that now provides users a tool that will let them embed learner tracking and collaboration right inside the videos.

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