Technical research can clarify the details of your evidence

Understanding the unique and specific technical details of your recorded video or audio evidence is crucial. Sometimes security surveillance footage will be recorded at only one or two frames per second. In comparison, the video that you see while watching TV is thirty frames a second. So thirty frames a second versus maybe one or two frames a second is a huge difference, and the attorney needs to be clear about this in order to properly argue the digital media evidence to a jury.

How these details are handled in court can often result in drastically different court decision outcomes. In some cases, older security surveillance systems record as low as one frame every three seconds! What that means is — if one video frame lasts three seconds, a lot of movement can go unrecorded and unseen, and there is potentially a lot more happening than we as a viewer are aware of. Knowing about what transpired during those three seconds might make or break your case.

So, how do these image-freezes in video surveillance occur? There are a number of possibilities. DVRs are often purposely set up to record at this low frame rate. Remember, video files are fairly large in comparison to audio files, and the lower the frame rate, the more material a DVR system can store in its hard drive, giving owners more space for potential footage regardless of the quality of the footage. Another reason is that surveillance security camera systems can often get overloaded. For instance, in jails, cameras are usually set to detect motion. This is so DVRs don’t continuously record video footage of empty rooms and waste hard drive storage space when nothing is happening. However, when there is any movement in the jail, especially when a DVR system is outdated, the surveillance system can be temporarily overloaded, causing the video frame rate to slow for each camera during that first moment.