In this episode of Video Tip Tuesday, you will learn about the simple powerful features built into iNPUT-ACE for managing multiple pieces of video evidence where the DVR system clocks do not match in real-time.
Timestamps that do not match the actual time in video evidence is a common problem for investigators, especially when they are not on the scene to document the differences.
You will also learn some guidelines to provide your first responders so they can quickly gather the evidence you need to quickly correct time/date offsets. You’ll see how alerting the times in iNPUT-ACE helps you track suspects and build detailed reports with ease. Time/Date offsets can be corrected on single video files or done to an entire folder of videos, allowing you to focus on your case instead of the confusing differences in your timelines.
Watch now and see how you can save countless hours processing video evidence with the timing offset feature!
Video Tip Tuesday is a series of quick videos that help iNPUT-ACE users take full advantage of the video investigation software.
For more video tips, visit www.input-ace.com/video-tips
Video Transcript
“Hey everyone, Josh Guthrie here with iNPUT-ACE, bringing you another Video Tip Tuesday.
And in today’s tip, we’re gonna talk to you about the date and time offset. The date and time offset feature in iNPUT-ACE allows you to correct for differences between the actual DVR time and real-time. Now, this happens quite often when we are dealing with DVRs, where we see a difference in the time the DVR is displaying and what real-time is. And it happens for a number of reasons. You can have a drift, you can have daylight savings, we can have power outages all kinds of things can cause there to be an offset between DVR time and real-time. And it’s very important that when your first responders are going out to collect the video evidence that they’re looking for and documenting these offsets. If you don’t have the information, it can make it very difficult for you to track suspects, find things in the video. When, when investigators are telling you when things are happening in real-time and then you have an offset issue in your DVR, you can be scrubbing through video for hours and hours. So let’s go ahead we’re gonna take a look at a case today that I have over 90 videos or video sound clips that we’d have to look at but the investigators, in this case, it was a stabbing homicide in British Columbia that Grant worked. Maybe you’ve seen this before maybe not, but the investigators did a fantastic job of documenting the time offset. So let’s go ahead and take a look. So as you can see, I’ve imported the videos that I have. I have three locations. I have a rooftop camera, I have an entranceway camera and I have a driveway camera. And each of these contains a bunch of video files.
The rooftop has four, the entranceway there’s 23 and in the driveway, there are 66 different pieces of video footage that we’d have to go through. But as I said, the investigators did a fantastic job of getting the date-time offset information. Real quick for your first responders as a simple quick way to do that is to take a snapshot with a cell phone and the screen. And then you have the time, the DVR in that photo. And you can go to the metadata in the photo that you took with your phone and see when you took that photo and you can compare times that way. So that’s kind of a simple way for them to do that. So we have our notes here that I’ll show you. We see that our rooftop camera, the DVR is actually set to real-time. So that’s fantastic when that happens we love that, right? There’s no need to do any kind of offsets. And we see that our concern occurs at 4:48:18. Our driveway camera is two hours behind and then our keys at the entranceway camera are 59 minutes and 40 seconds behind. So we have two cameras within the same system here and they have two different offsets. So let’s go ahead and have a look at our rooftop. And it said 4:48:18. Now those of you, you know, you work with video all the time. You know that the video files that you get they’re there, the naming convention it’ll take the shape of sort of some date and time for the file. So this one we see 2014 07 25 to July 25th. And then the time, well, this says 4:48:18. So I’m gonna try to get close to that. And it looks like this here is 04:47.
So let’s try that. And we bring that up. And our incident happens at 4:48:18. So we see from our metadata here, we have the date and the time that is matching up here, in the on-screen timer from the DVR. So we’re just going to scrub ahead here to 4:48:18. And we’re going to, we’re going to look over here in the corner here by the fence and we’re gonna see our victim. Our victim is going to, fall into the fence. So we’ll get the 4:48:18. And there he is in the fence. I can use my forward and back keys to strapes that and I see him falling into the fence. So I can go ahead and mark that just by hitting my M key. And I’m just gonna call this stabbing incident. And we see that our metadata that’s in here for this mark frame that we have, we have our date and time and it’s showing 7 25 of 4:48:18. Again, this camera was correct. It would be correct with the real-time and the DVR time were the same. So nothing to do here. We have our date and time and our images marked for the incident. So now we want to move on. We have some information in our notes here that the witnesses say they saw the suspect an hour and a half earlier in the building. And he swiped his car at 3:12:47 to enter the building. So we’re gonna go out here next. And we’re going to look at the keys driveway video here because that’s where that information is from. So we go to the keys driveway. And what we know is that this particular camera is two hours behind. So we have 66 files here and we could go down through and in my clicking the settings, we could come in here and we could hit edit for our date and time offset right here. And we could go ahead and do two hours and we’d have to do that for all of these. And that will take a very long time.
So what we’ve done here in 2.6 is they added a settings for the group which we can now edit the date and time offset for that whole group of videos for that particular camera. So we wanna make it later, we could set it for two hours behind hit OK. Okay, and what that did was that just updated all of the timing information that we would see out here in a timeline for all of those videos. So now they saw the suspect an hour and a half earlier, he enters the building. So we wanna try to find a time again, by going through and looking and seeing about an hour and a half before 3:12:47. So that puts us, you know, at about 1:12:47. So we’re gonna go up here and look, and this looks like it’s pretty close. So let’s see we’re at 1:10:54. And you notice that, because I changed my offset, that here in my metadata and my, my clock is showing 3:11. So it’s actually two hours ahead. This was two hours behind. So now we’ve moved it two hours ahead. And it says 3:12:47 so we can simply scroll now to 3:12:47 in our timeline. And there is our guy right here swiping his key card and I can advance forward and see that he enters the building. And that looks like it’s at about 3:12:49. Again, if I wanted to mark that image, you see that my metadata is all updated again with my, my offset that was put in it’s two hours and that’s right here.
So we can say suspect and type today and suspect enters the building and hit OK. And we’ve marked that image. So that would have him entering the building. Now we wanna take a look at the entrance. He gets inside the building. We said it was about 3:12:49. So we go to our entranceway videos. And if we didn’t have the offset, let’s just say we didn’t have the offset. And we tried to go down here and look for this, this information 12 03:12:49 we’re looking for, well here is 03:12:42. And if we go in here and look at this, and when we get to 3:12:49, that we said you should be entering the building, we see that he’s not there. Yet, if we didn’t have that offset, we’d be scrubbing through all of this video. And that will take time. And you can imagine if you had even more video, it would take you weeks just scrubbing through trying to find the suspect. So again, getting that date-time offset information is, is critical to being able to do a, a good investigation but doing it in a, in a more rapid manner a quick manner, if you need to get information out there. So we’ll make sure we’re getting those date-time offsets. So what we did see was that the entranceway was 59 minutes and 40 seconds behind. So again, what we can do is we can go to our group here, okay, we can go to our group and we hit edit and we would hit later again because it’s behind. So we wanna make it later. And we see 59 minutes, 40 seconds. I had already had these entered in for 59 minutes and 40 seconds is where we’re gonna set our offset.
If you did, in fact, have a situation where you actually knew the DVR date and time you could enter here. And then the actual date and time you could hit calculate would calculate for you. That’s just another way to figure it out. But here we enter 59 minutes and 40 seconds. We’re gonna hit OK. We hit OK again and what that did was just updated that. So we’re about an hour behind in this video and we’re looking at 3:12:47. So we need to go about an hour earlier to about 2:12:47. And we’re gonna go up here and look and we see right around here is about 2:08. The next one’s 2:15. So we’ll try 2:08 and because we set that offset, we notice again, our metadata in our timeline here, we see it’s actually at 3:08, we set 3:12:49. So we can scroll through here quickly. And we can find out where 3:12:49. And we’re gonna scroll here. And here comes our guy right here, the guy that was going in the door. So because we had that offset information we were able to, to change the date-time offset there. And that enables us to go ahead and, and more quickly find and track our suspects. Again, we could mark this by hitting M, can you see our metadata here we could give it another name we’ll just call it, I will just call him suspect in the doorway. And again our date and time information is all updated at 3:12:51.
So you can kinda see how we’re building this order in chronological order now. And our metadata is proper and updated because we had the date and time offset and hit OK. So again, the nice feature about this is we can actually update our, our date time offsets for a whole group by hitting the group settings in any one of these, we hit edit here and our date time offset and we can then go ahead and enter what that offset is. So a very powerful tool because that applies it to all those videos in that group. You can do the same thing. If, if you had to do one video, you could just click on its settings. And again, you see you have the date and time offset. You could just set for one video of your own working one video. So again, a very powerful tool to have, but more importantly you need to have that date and time offset information. So encourage your first responders out there going out to get this information in this video that they’re actually and they’re documenting these date and time offsets as well. So I hope it’s helped you.
Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next time.”
