DVR Examiner – Features – Clip Attributes

What units does the Duration Slider use?

I was recently asked by a user of the software what units the Duration Slider in the Clip Attributes panel uses. So to answer their question I thought I would write this blog post. (If you can’t wait for the answer it is…………… minutes, but see below for more info.)

With the introduction of V2.x the developers at DME Forensics have introduced many new features and expanded the capabilities of some of the existing ones too so this post answers the above question but also introduces users to some of the other features of the Clip Filters panel. You can also pre filter the clip results prior to initiating the scan function see the paragraph at the end of this post.

The following (mostly taken from the help file)  applies to V2.0.4.0;

Clip Filters

Once you have scanned the hard drive and been presented with the results in the clip list you can filter the results for faster review.

At the moment the panel is split into three headings, more detail regarding the first two headings is available in the software’s help file;

Date/Time Configuration

Will allow you to adjust for any difference between the actual time and the time set on the DVR.

Date/Time Filtering

You can set the date/time of interest, defaults to first and last found on the DVR hard drive.

Clip Attributes

Size Slider – Filter clips based on size in MB. The left slider can be used to designate a minimum size and the right slider can be used to designate a maximum size.
Duration Slider – Like the Size Slider, the Duration Slider can be used to designate the minimum and maximum clip durations displayed in the clip grid. The original question prompting this blog was “What units does the slider use?”
The answer is minutes BUT be aware that at the moment the indicator  reports only full minutes so as you move the sliders only the minute is reported but the position of the slider actually relates to the fraction of that second.
Using the example depicted in the image above, if you positioned the minimum slider as far to the right so that the indicator displays 2 but just before it changes to 3 and select “Apply” none of the clips would be shown.

So why might you want the ability to filter on size or duration?

In general, I suspect both of these would be used primarily in situations where the DVR is recording motion. In those situations, DVR Examiner will recover a lot of clips of smaller size and/or duration. So, if you are reviewing video looking for an event that would likely take some time to commit, you could start by filtering out all of the really short/small clips and focus on the larger ones. On the reverse side, the DVR may be mostly recording continuously, so you are left with thousands of 200MB clips of 1 hour each. You could set a max size or duration filter less than those to find any motion events that were recording.
The size filter could also apply for some of the DVRs that record a high quality stream and a lower quality stream. The duration and time stamp will likely be the same, but one clip would be smaller than the other. That being said those DVRs typically tag the secondary stream as a different channel which could be filtered as well.

For completeness here are the other options under the Clip Attributes heading (more details in the help file);

Status – The Status dropdown will display all options available for the filesystem scanned.

Channel – The Channel dropdown will display all channels recovered from the DVR, not all channels available on the DVR.

Has Tags (not shown in the image) – Find clips with or without tags.

Has Notes – Find clips with or without notes.

Pre Filter Results

If you have a current DVR Examiner subscription please download the latest version from the support portal here

If you are involved in the recovery of video from CCTV DVRs and you are not yet a user of DVR Examiner you can obtain a free trial here and discover how much easier it is with a tool specifically built for the task.