A Written Record is Key to New Technology

by Brian Clune, CLVS

A video deposition is a record of much more than the spoken word. When videotape is brought into the deposition process additional communication of inflection and demeanor are captured along with the testimony. This, in part, is why attorneys are turning to videotape more often than ever before.

In the twenty-year history of the use of video in our industry we have seen it grow from curiosity to commonplace. Court reporting agencies have either, embraced the technology and incorporated it into their business plan or fallen behind in the marketplace.

Many reporters still see videotape as a threat to their livelihood. Due in part to the fact that some jurisdictions have attempted to grant the "official record" status to videotape. After all videotape is an accurate record, when done properly, but is it an adequate record?

Without a transcript videotape is just a jumbled stream of magnetic particles on plastic. There are various ways to search and edit the synch pulses and images that are the videotape signal. Many of the more sophisticated edit facilities can re-sequence the testimony by electronic transfer to a new tape. In this type of editing it is possible to enjoy accuracy of up to 1/60 of a second which can literally take the "s" off a plural word. It is even possible in the "insert mode" that spoken words can be transferred to replace other testimony without any visual indication that the change has occurred. Of course that would be unethical and improper, but the technology is there.

This magnetic stream, called video tape, can be searched either through manual labor, by visually looking to the time/day stamp on screen or through the use of embedded time code on the address track. While this may be sufficient in some cases, what our clients are most often trying to accomplish in the legal arena, is to find spoken sections that communicate an edited record.

CLVS forum attendee's were introduced to technology that enjoys the ability to use all of the word search functionality that has already been developed for transcript searches and apply it to the video record.

At the CLVS forum, demonstrations showed that synchronizing an accurate written record to the video signal provides an amazing functionality. What was not lost on the attendee's is this new functionality is unavailable without that written record.

The demonstration highlighted new affordable software that performs all the functions that just a few years ago would have cost 25,000 to 80,000 dollars per license. The new product as demonstrated is available for well under five hundred dollars. This software takes a video converted to the MPEG1 digital format and makes it as easy to use as the written record.

During the afternoon session Dan Bowen, of Verdict Systems, built a test case from the scratch. During the brief demonstration, a piece of video was synchronized to the ASCII transcript and added to the case. In addition scanned documents and pictures were added by the use of "drag and drop" windows functionality. The case material was displayed and associated in a powerful presentation that was much more persuasive that any of the elements individually. Multiple significant portions of the video testimony were as easy to edit together as using a word processor.

It has taken millions of years to advance from cave drawings to written words and on to captured moving images. It has taken only a few decades to combine these communication tools into one functional delivery system. What made this marriage of technology possible are three things, the advanced functionality that is available to every Windows user, a low cost software package and most important of all the written record.

 

 

 

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