Free DME & DFIR Resources

The Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association is providing a free course — Video Essentials for First Responders — for attendees of its 2013 LEVA Digital Multimedia Evidence Training Symposium, which runs Sept. 9-13 in Asheville, N.C

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The AFMA Board of Directors has recently completed a draft of the Bylaws for the organization. This is available on the AFMA network at http://theafma.ning.com/forum/topics/bylaws-for-the-afma for comment. This draft document will be available for comment for 30 days - any suggestions for updates or additions must be submitted within this timeframe. We ask that if you do submit changes or additions please write them in a form that can be easily amended to the document. For example, a change or addition should be submitted as: “Section 15.2 Any changes or additions will be written in the form of the document.”

LEVA recently announced that the New York State Police will be hosting their Photographic/Video Comparison course in Albany, NY April 4th through the 8th.

Photographic/Video Comparisons focuses on the science of comparing known objects, vehicles, clothing and humans with CCTV images of questioned objects, vehicles, clothing and humans. The process of cataloguing class characteristics and unique characteristics found in questioned evidence is examined in detail. Using Adobe Photoshop and other generally accepted scientific tools for imaging comparison work,analysts/examiners develop a scientific workflow involving the hands-on analysis of video evidence, criminal-case report writing and courtroom presentation.

Complete details and application forms are available via the LEVA website.

Free broadband Internet connectivity is definitely a good thing, but at the cost of others, not so much. Even though the issue of "stealing" bandwidth from unsecure Wi-Fi networks is still a grey area legally in most places, here are a few helpful tips on how help make sure your home wireless network isn't being used by the neighbors:

AMD has finally launched the long-anticipated followup to its Radeon HD 5970, its dual-GPU monster graphics card. Like its predecessor, the new Radeon HD 6990, code-named Antilles, combines two GPUs in a single package, and the result is the fastest graphics card you can buy.

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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:

By Nate Anderson

The Britain of today is watched constantly by CCTV cameras, is preparing for a national ID card, slaps a "crown copyright" on most government data, and can now censor websites and eventually boot people off the Internet.

According to the new Liberal Democrat/Tory coalition government, that's all about to change.

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Video technology combines footage from different cameras to allow people to see the same event from multiple angles.

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Hard to believe that next week's 2011 LEVA Training Conference is already upon us. I'll be out in Coeur d'Alene all next week, and I'll be giving a presentation on the AVI file format and VirtualDub at the conference late Thursday afternoon. There are tons of great training sessions going all week long. Hope to see you there!

Hewlett-Packard has recalled about 162,000 lithium-ion batteries used in its HP and Compaq laptop computers. The announcement, made late last week by HP and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), adds additional battery packs to a recall program announced just a week earlier.

Full story:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/229105/hp_recalls_laptop_batteries.html

Just a quick note to let prospective members know we haven't forgotten you over the last few weeks, we've just been busy upgrading and migrating our platform.  We'll begin processing the dozens of applications from the last few weeks soon.  Thanks for your patience and interest!

One thing I really stress when training video evidence Technicians & Analysts is to stay in your lane. Don't go beyond your training & experience levels on any topic/tool/etc., no matter who is asking you to.

A related one is that an expert's job at trial is to leverage their expertise to make sure the Trier of Fact has accurate evidence & information, not to be an advocate for one party or the other.

I've had several students over the years tell me that my passionate articulation of one or the other has saved their case or even their career. Two rather recently.

Honored & proud, of course, but I always like to point out to them that they are the ones that did all the hard work and stood their ground.

Keep being great & doing great things my friends! 😎

On vacation, but thought I'd comment on this topic before getting on the Harley to go run some errands in the cold Pacific Northwest. As pointed out in someone else's recent blog post, MPEG-4 can leverage what is referred to as a Sample Aspect Ratio (SAR)...not to be confused with Storage Aspect Ratio (SAR) or Signal Aspect Ratio (SAR). It's important to note that in the case of MPEG-4, the Sample Aspect Ratio is the Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR); they are one and the same.

It's also important to note, again, that regarless of any of these numbers, the shape of the samples from an analog source ARE NOT DEFINED BY THE NUMBER OF LINES.

Oh, one more thing...most multimedia NLE and encoding applications provide precise control of all of these settings.  Just an FYI.  All the best my friends.