October 19, 2010

 

“I’m picky about starting out with the best raw video I can acquire. I’m also on the road a lot and very impressed with the experiences I’ve had with this gear especially when I’ve got only one shot at it. From the most comprehensive capturing available, including DVI hardware and a process which virtually guarantees I will get those impossible video overlays, to the always reliable USB mobile capture card with built-in time base correction, I’m confident in my ability to gather raw evidence accurately and quickly. As for capturing hours of footage, which I do often, the .cog file format is amazing and very economical. Hands down, it is the least data intensive uncompressed format available.

 

Cognitech just shipped me a fully configured killer laptop with the Total Station DVI card and let me tell you this is one powerful mobile system.  I need to reproduce highly accurate detail and so I appreciate Video Investigator’s new Active Interface which sports real time, frame by frame analysis to tweak my velocity, enhancement and reconstruction filter settings. The techniques developed at Cognitech are in a class by themselves. The gear is effective and highly configurable. This dedication to the science and application of video analysis is quite astonishing.

 

Due to different compression schemes in DVR’s, cell phones and webcams, every video is different with respect to how a filter acts on it. One thing which I find very useful and important in Video Investigator is the ability to choose different methods of rescaling, velocity estimation and deblurring and compare the results as I process. Different methods, when tested and combined in the workflow, become a finely tuned processing strategy and thus can yield more accurate results than oversimplified approaches.”

 

No matter what system one uses there will always be times that, for whatever reason, the system doesn’t work.  Inevitably this will happen when you can least afford to be down. My experience has been when I’m on the road and absolutely had to get back up and running ASAP, Cognitech was there for me. Nights, weekends whatever. I’ve saved countless dollars in delays not to mention avoiding what might have affected results in a case. This is a level of assurance I rarely see with large corporations.”

 

–Robert Sanderson, Audio Video Forensic Lab, Inc.