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October 2007

There's a big difference between video and the video that can be used as evidence. Utica, NY Patrolman Greg Facciolo was all too familiar with that problem. As their department grew, Greg and his team found themselves cobbling together a "a really bad system", which required a lot of time and a lot of energy.

So when Facciolo started asking other PD officials about the systems out there, he followed a recommendation straight to VideoFOCUS.

He saw the answer to practically all his frustrations - the endless hours spent, the video tape pile up, the useable evidence problems, and most especially, the costs of getting a system. "It was obvious that other video forensics systems were built by movie companies that converted their editing systems into something that could possibly be seen as effective for law enforcement and crime scene investigations.

With VideoFOCUS, Greg and his team use the system everyday, especially impressed by the de-multiplexing feature that lets them separate several video feeds and review the best crime scene footage for usable, digital still images.

Whereas the Utica PD used to operate their old video forensics through trial and error, hoping to get some images when they couldn't separate out the videos, now VideoFOCUS separates them nearly instantly and automatically.

He's used the system to examine video evidence from several homicides. Like the time a suspect had committed a murder and left the scene for a nearby parking lot. That lot was under video watch. The parking lot cameras captured the video of the suspect stealing a vehicle before fleeing the state. At trial, the video produced via VideoFOCUS was used to place him in the stolen car, back to the crime scenes and the murder. This evidence led to conviction.

The department has dramatically improved its ability to capture and export digital video from a variety of file types, work with proprietary video data formats from security systems and print still images directly. They can export into .MOV,.AVI and .WMF files for playback through Windows Media Player and Apple QuickTime.

There is simply no faster, more reliable, more affordable video forensics system out there. "I like working with Salient Stills', Greg says. "They're good to us."

"When I have a suggestion for something new, like capturing audio, or an improvement, they listen and work toward getting the feature added. Plus, for the cost of the system, we get a lot of bang for the buck."

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