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LEVA wrapped up their weeklong video evidence symposium and 2008 annual training conference in Orlando yesterday, and they've announced four newly certified analysts. Michael Klein, Lorraine Nagy, Michael Ornelas and Michael Plaxton are now among those who are LEVA Certified Forensic Video Analysts.

Recently I received the official announcement from Avid that the Liquid line has reached End-of-Life, and Avid is offering all Liquid customers an upgrade discount to Media Composer.  Certainly not a surprise, as there haven't been any major releases of Liquid since shortly after Avid acquired Pinnacle, but the official announcement made me a little sad just the same.  I've really grown to love my Liquid Pro systems at home and they've served me well. 

Avid will provide phone support for the next two years and will replace hardware still under warranty for as long as supplies last(?).  View the official announcement via the link below:

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3D graphics have, for many years now, been based on the idea of polygons -- flat shapes fitted together to form three dimensional objects. There have been some experiments with other approaches -- volumetric 3D pixels or "voxels" became quite popular with some developers in the late 90s, but for the most part, polygons were seen as the way forward. New consoles and graphics cards were marketed based around how many polygons they could push around the screen at once, and it looked like the industry had settled on a good solution.

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I'm not forcing it, but I strongly recommend it for any site, app or service that contains any of your personal information; Two-factor Authentication (2FA).  

Digital video evidence is coming at law enforcement agencies hard and fast, and both the pace and quantity of digital video evidence continue to increase exponentially. There are so many digital video sources, each with unique challenges and issues when it comes to proper evidence collection, viewing, interpreting, presentation and management of the evidence. Training is critical for all of those involved in the entire chain of evidence, especially in a field or discipline that is constantly changing and evolving.

If you’re involved in the digital video evidence chain, below are a few training events that I’ll be at next month that you may find interesting. Hope to see you there!

May 13-15, DVR Assessment & Video Recovery, Burtonsville, MD

May 19-23, LEVA Level 1 – Forensic Video Analysis & The Law – University of Indianapolis, IN

by Lance Whitney

Adobe today announced the latest version of its Acrobat suite of products.

Set to hit the market in the next 30 days, the new Reader X and Acrobat X products are promising tighter security, better collaboration, and easier PDF reading.

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Bugs are a way of life in software--fortunately, so are bug fixes. Earlier this week, Adobe released Photoshop 12.0.1, which brings a number of stability enhancements to the professional image-editing software, including several specifically related to 64-bit operation on Mac OS X.
Though Adobe says that CS5 is more stable than its predecessor, CS4, there's always room for improvement. The 12.0.1 update addresses a number of issues that could cause slow performance, as well as several common crashing bugs, user interface and workspace issues, font-related crashes, and several painting-related issues, including problems with video layers.

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It's really fascinating to look back at how far our discipline has come in the last 20 years, and how many resources and solutions are out there these days for Forensic Digital & Multimedia Analysts. Even more exciting is knowing some of the new opportunities and solutions for DME professionals that will be coming in 2019, especially in regards to training!

As each day passes law enforcement and government agencies struggle with managing more sources of digital evidence and multimedia, like body worn cameras. The massive amounts of data storage required have led many to finally consider secure cloud-based storage solutions, but as some have found out, despite the minimal capital investment cloud storage costs can quickly exceed the LE & IT budgets of even the largest agencies. Let's break this down and talk specifically about digital evidence and archiving.

How are you archiving all of your digital evidence today? A tiered storage solution? Hybrid cloud solution? LTO tape? Hard drives? Optical discs (i.e. CD-R, DVD+/-R, BD-R)? Lots of questions and options, so lets talk specifically to the last group; those using optical discs.

A look behind H.264, the world's most popular video codec, including encoding parameters and royalty concerns.

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Today I am honored to report that we made a $2,390 donation to Marshall University's Cyber Forensics & Security program, thanks to the many generous donations we received earlier this year.

Thank you to all of those who donated earlier this year, then re-donated their original donation to support this gift in memory of my dad and brother.  You can view the contribution on Marshall University's Donar Wall.

Keep being great & doing great things, my friends...and have a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Kinesense, a Dublin, Ireland based company that provides forensic video analysis software solutions has develioped a new proprietary player management utility, PlayerManager v2. Find out more about Kinesense and PlayManager v2 by visiting their website at www.kinesense-vca.com

LEVA will be providing their Forensic Imaging Techniques course May 27th - 29th, 2009 at the LEVA DME Lab, which is located at the University of Indianapolis. Visit the LEVA training schedule for the latest on all of the LEVA's course offerings.