Lab Notes: Audio Transcription Tools

By Nakiyyah Adams

How do you review hundreds of jail calls? What about 3 months of 24-hour video surveillance on a house? Twenty bodycameras covering  1-2 hours each of a multi-jurisdictional car chase and stop?

Audio transcription tools are one potential answer. These tools can analyze audio and video files and create text searchable transcripts. You can imagine the huge time-saving benefit here—instead of trying to watch or listen to hours and hours of recordings, only some of which might be relevant, a text searchable transcript could be searched using keywords, or even just read quickly in less time than experiencing the recording in real-time.

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Guide: Creating Automatic Batch Video Snapshots

By Nelson Garcia and Carl Adams

Have you ever had the need to automatically create multiple snapshots\still images of a video to later use in court or perhaps to analyze the image from that video? We know programs such as VLC can take single snapshots of a video while the video is playing but what if I want to take a snapshot every 10 or 30 frames or even every 10 or 30 seconds of a particular video? Here are three programs that you can use to automatically save multiple snapshots from a single video.

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Microsoft Clipchamp

By Nelson Garcia

Microsoft Clipchamp is a user-friendly video editing tool that allows you to create and edit videos with ease. It’s designed for those who may not have advanced technical skills, offering simple features like trimming, adding text, and applying filters to enhance your videos. Clipchamp is available on Windows 10 and Windows 11 through the Microsoft Store, or you can also run it from https://clipchamp.com (Chrome or Microsoft Edge only). Note: You will need a Microsoft or Google email address to use Clipchamp.  However, for FDO users, your fd.org address will NOT work due to our enterprise license with Microsoft. You will have to use a personal Microsoft email address such as a @hotmail.com or @Outlook.com.  Both the app version and the online version look the same and offers the same features.

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Shutter Encoder

Shutter Encoder

We are constantly on the lookout for new tools to keep in our litigation support toolbox and Shutter Encoder is quickly becoming one of our new favorites. It’s a publicly available (a.k.a. “free”) media converter program that is based on standards and functions within the open-source FFmpeg software project. Currently there are both PC and Mac versions available for download from their website: https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/

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