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May 2008

"I'm a detective with the Auto Theft division of the Corpus Christi Police Department." Michael Alanis is a part of a small, two man team that has the lion's share of the work to do in auto theft and no time to waste.

He and his partner were selected to try out different versions of video forensics software for the department. They tried a number - they went with VideoFOCUS. "We selected Salient Stills over the others because their system was so user friendly, so easy to train up on no matter how much of a computer guy you are; it gave us what we needed at a great price."

Michael needs to get usable video out to the media, fast. The faster the suspect's image gets out there, the faster they get their arrest. So the ease and simplicity of working with VFPro 3.0 has had its impact on his work. A simpler, more intuitive interface makes for a faster demultiplexing process, which in turn gets him the stills or movies he needs, when he needs it.

"Video forensics is not our full time job - we're not computer guys. We needed something that was efficient - easy for us to learn and easy to use on a daily/weekly basis. It's the reason we got VF Pro and the reason we really like VFPro 3.0."

He's especially fond of the demultiplexing feature, because a good amount of the footage he gets is fairly over run from stores with multiple cameras and old video. And VFPro 3.0's new Screen Capture capabilities are making him happy as well. As he puts it: "As long as you can get it on your computer screen, Video Focus is able to capture it".

"That screen capture is the best thing by far. You can break it down frame by frame, and you can get it to a nice resolution - one you can really work with." And he's finding himself using the new audio feature, as well as the audit tracking, which helps him note what he's done in court with ease.

"With technology comes digital images, right? With VFPro 3.0, we've been able to capture them, use them, wherever they come from - and get it done immediately. The faster we get those images out there, the faster we solve the crime. VFPro 3.0 helps us do that."

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