In today’s article, we get to share the story of one of our customers: The Visual Law Group.

You can read their story below, or you can download a pdf version of the story as well. If you are an iNPUT-ACE user and want to share your story, then please contact us. We’d love to hear from you!

And of course, if you want to experience the benefits of iNPUT-ACE yourself, then you can request a demo, trial, or quote today.

Now, let’s get to the Visual Law Group!

About Visual Law Group

Visual Law Group was founded in 1992 and provides 3D forensic visualization and animation services as well as photogrammetric reconstruction technologies. It also provides consulting services to attorneys, governmental agencies, and private companies handling litigation in both civil and criminal fields. They are based in San Jose, California.

The company’s work is data driven and equally useful to attorneys representing the plaintiff/prosecution or defense. Many of the firm’s cases have gained notoriety and its work has been featured on CBS 60 Minutes, NBC Dateline, Good Morning America and The Today Show to name a few.

Location: San Jose, CA
United States

Industry: 3D Scanning & Photogrammatry

Solution Overview

Full License iNPUT-ACE
Camera Match Overlay Tool

Business Benefits

Enhanced Efficiency
Confidence in the integrity of video evidence
Create clear reports for attorneys or for court
Validate 3D renderings and animations with the overlay tool

As an organization, Visual Law Group advocates for the use of advanced technologies in the courtroom and pushing the limits of innovation in litigation. Currently, the company is developing an interesting approach for presenting evidence as an immersive and interactive experience for jurors. Visual Law prides itself in its ability to tell stories in a way that is both admissible and accurate.

Background

Visual Law Group has worked with digital videos for decades and would constantly encounter proprietary video files that would not play correctly. Mark Johnson, the founder, and CEO, explained the problem this way:

“We wasted a lot of time looking for proprietary players, and once we found a player, we didn’t even know if was playing correctly. In a field where accuracy and precision means everything, close enough doesn’t cut it.”

Because Visual Law Group assures its clients that its 3D forensic visualizations and animations accurately match the real-world evidence, they needed to find a video evidence player that could be matched against the 3D visualizations with frame accuracy.

In the courtroom, it’s important to be able to prove your work, and Visual Law Group needed a solution that would enable its team to testify with confidence when it came to video evidence and visual overlays.

The Solution

In order to save time and improve confidence in their data, Visual Law Group selected the iNPUT-ACE Full License to support its video evidence services. The organization has used iNPUT-ACE for more than three years and iNPUT-ACE has proven its value time and time again.

Visual Law Group also uses the Camera Match Overlay Tool, which enables the team to place 3D renderings and animations over actual video evidence, providing a more complete picture of events. 3D programs use a theoretical perfect lens to render images while real world cameras always have distortion to some degree. The photogrammetric workflow absolutely requires correction of the real-world camera frames before any forensic analysis may be completed. Johnson says,

“iNPUT-ACE has the best built-in tools for lens correction we’ve found. Quite simply, our previous methods produced inferior results and took longer to achieve. iNPUT-ACE is elegant, fast, and it generates a report with error analysis that becomes invaluable for establishing foundation for our work in court.”

iNPUT-ACE Lens Correction Overlay tool

The Outcome

The iNPUT-ACE solution has proved to be immensely valuable for the Visual Law Group. Mr. Johnson said,

“It’s as pure a technology product as you can get…the interface is so well designed and intuitive, clients can watch us work and easily understand what’s happening.”

Mr. Johnson described the key features that have provided the most benefit to the organization:

The ability to convert and play video files correctly.
The camera match overlay tool provides true photogrammetric analysis admissible at trial.
The duplicate detection tool has proven especially useful in court on many occasions.
Attorneys love the narrative reports Visual Law Group can provide via iNPUT-ACE and commonly introduce them into evidence at trial.
It is well designed in the way it allows you to track the work you’ve done and prove the work.

In summary, Visual Law Group said,

“We can now be confident in the data because of iNPUT-ACE. I’ve worked with digital video for 30 years now, and I’m constantly astounded by the seamless ability to convert files, even obscure codecs, and maintain complete integrity with the original footage.”

Case Example

The Visual Law Group recently handled a case involving a worker injured in a warehouse while operating a forklift. The opposition hired an expert who enlarged security camera footage and made various claims about the forklift’s motion and velocity.

iNPUT-ACE macroblock tool

Using iNPUT-ACE’s analysis tools, Visual Law was able to invalidate the opposing expert’s calculations by showing the trier of fact how critical areas of the video frame were not being interpreted accurately.

iNPUT-ACE’s color-coded display of each frame’s pixels made it easy for the judge and jury to understand how video compression works and why simply enlarging a video frame does not tell the full story.