Turns out I may just know a thing or two about Mass Video Evidence Collection & Processing.  Who knew?

I have worked several cases that were comprised of thousands of hours of video evidence collected from dozens of sources, including the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots.

Forensic Video Analysts from around the world were brought to Indianapolis to work together, and although I wasn't there, I was responsible for supporting the infrastructure and solving the DME workflow issues that couldn't be resolved efficiently on-site.

Let me start by saying that I am by no means trying to imply that DVR, NVR or any other digital or IP based video system cannot produce good quality video evidence. There are even 2 or 3 high-end, mega-pixel quality digital surveillance cameras and systems on the market today whose capabilities far exceed those of a traditional analog based system. However, to my point, it seems more often than not digital based systems are producing very poor quality video evidence regardless of the system's actual capabilities.

So why do DVRs typically provide poor quality video evidence? Here are a few of the common reasons:

A brief video discussing the basics of multimedia metadata analysis & some of the Open Source and/or Freeware solutions that can help. Solutions discussed include:

• Exiftools, by Phil Harvey - https://exiftool.org/
• MediaInfo & MediaInfoOnline - https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo​
• FFprobe & FFmpeg - https://www.ffmpeg.org