Investigation at Your Fingertips

Don't have a lot of equipement yet? If you have a laptop computer, it can be your venue for conducting an investigation.Video and audio recording, compilation of files and evidence review, all at your fingertips.

Many of the newer ones have built in audio and video (designed for teleconferencing and instant messaging). The video quality on mostof these is not the best, and it is not as flexible to psition as a camera, but we are talking bare basics here. It is possible to capture some audio and video files this way.(None of the following options that I have listed here will perform in the dark, so light is important to the quality of the video. The investigations were in the afternoon, so there was plenty of light available.)

A step up from the built in options are some of the peripherals available for teleconferencing like the Microsoft Life Cam VX-6000. This camera has built in audio capture and the capability to record in lower light, (not dark), situations. It is small and easy to manage, with a generous USB chord for easy placement.

The best alternative that I have used is the capability of my digital camera to be set to "PC CAM" on the USB option menu. Like the other options here you can record video directly to your laptop and the amount of video you can capture is only limited by the available drive space. I used this type of camera setup and captured 4 hours of video, and it was very manageable, and did not take up an excessive amount of space.This produced a fairly good quality video. If your camera does not have built in audio capture you can hook up an external microphone. Before you begin your recording though, go into your menu options and turn off the auto-focus, this will give you a clearer picture and avoid focusing issues with any movement that does happen in front of the camera.

If you are going to try out using these options with your laptop, I highly reccomend Windows Movie Maker as the venue to facilitate your file capture.This program came standard with my Windows XP operating platform and the more I use it, the more I like it. Once you have your camara and microphone hooked up, open the Windows Movie Maker program and go to capture video, there you will be able to choose which devices you are using for video and audio capture and set custom options for quality levels, after that you simply start recording.You can start and stop as often as you need to to change the location of the camera, etc. The audio and video will load in a series of small files (clips) , because they are being saved to the hard-drive. This works out great, because you end up with a very editable format when you are ready to put them together. You have the capability to play the "clips" individually and/or then drop them into the movie timeline. Placed in the timeline in order, they play flawlessly. If there are portions that you want to edit out, you can simply remove them. When you are done you can create a movie file that can be saved on your computer or burned to a CD.There are also options to bundle the video for sending in email and posting to a web.

Since you can't have too many cameras or too much audio when it comes to investigating I plan on continuing to utilize the laptop for additional capture even though we now have the handycam and the audio recorders. If you try these techniques, I would love to hear how they work out for you-drop me a line at myminds_@att.net.

Sherry