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Review: Video Focus 2.0
October 24, 2006
Specifications on our test system, for those that are interested in such things:
Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop
Windows XP Home edition
1.5 Ghz Pentium M processor
2 Gb system RAM
128 Mb dedicated video memory (ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Turbo)
100 Gb 7200 Rpm Hitachi hard drive
I have to say right from the start that I really liked this software. It's fast, straightforward and easy to use. It's not completely bug free, but few things are. And, the bugs are fairly minor, and easy enough to work around. I've included discussion of the issues I had just to be thorough, but they in no way keep me from recommending the product.
Installation: The product ships on a single CD, and includes installers for VideoFocus, Java Runtime Environment and Apple QuickTime. Installation of the product is smooth, as long as you read the manual and "Read Me" files first. In the "Read Me" file on the disk you will find a warning that the Java installer asks you to restart your computer, and that you should not do this as it will result in an install failure. Ok, easy enough, just click "restart later" and continue. Then you come to the QuickTime installer. If, like me, you have a more current version of QuickTime installed than the one on the install CD you are required to uninstall QuickTime, and install the out-of-date version instead. Once you have VideoFocus up and running you can re-upgrade to the current version of QuickTime.
The machine used for testing does not have a capture card installed, so the capture portion of the software was not tested. One would assume that it works best when working with files captured directly into the program.
Once you have the software up and running you find a streamlined, easy to use video forensic interface. When used to capture still frames from a decent quality capture file, it really is insanely easy to use. Basically, you import your source video and tell VideoFocus how many frames to thumbnail. The thumbnail views then allow you to quickly zero in on the frames you want to print (or export), highlight them and print them either individually or as a "contact sheet" with all of the images on one page.
The software opens in the Browse Video window, which shows your captured video clips along the left side, and thumbnail images of the selected video on the right. You can set the thumbnails to show one thumbnail for every minute of video, down to one thumbnail for each frame of video. You can also set the thumbnail size from 80x60 pixels up to 160x120 pixels. You can also open a video player in this view. As the video plays the thumbnails will update to indicate the current frame displayed in the player. Once you have located one or more frames of interest, you can Mark them to make them easier to find again later. Marking them also allows you to change the view to All Marked Frames to see only the frames of interest. Doing so, and selecting File-Print Window will get you a "contact sheet" of the images of interest. Selecting a frame and then File-Print Frame will print a full size image of the selected frame.
You can additionally enhance selected frames by Previewing and then Exporting them. Basically you use the Preview command to fine tune the enhancement settings before exporting the final still image. The enhancement process uses information from surrounding frames to boost the resolution of the image. This requires that your subject appear in more than one frame. The more frames you can work with the better the results will be. In my test video, a very jittery, multiplexed, time lapse surveillance video it was difficult to find anyone who appeared in more than one frame. In the same relative position anyway. I'd get one frame with a profile, one face on and one with the back of their head as they left. Enhancing these images produced only minor improvement. Much more interesting was one of the sample videos provided in the tutorial, which included a clip of a moving car. Properly masking the image when creating the preview allowed VideoFocus to stabilize the image rendering the vehicle's license plate readable.
VideoFocus also offers a variety of tools to crop, split and demultiplex video. A multiplexed video is a collection of views from multiple cameras on one tape, switching from one to the next in a loop. Anyone who's worked with one knows what a pain it is to find anything with the view changing all the time. VideoFocus can demultiplex automatically creating a single video for each camera view. Noisy video may result in additional "views" being created which consist of only a few frames. My test video was so noisy the original six cameras produced about 120 "views". Most of these were one or two frames of static. This may seem like a problem, until you realize that those extra views aren't good for anything anyway and that you can just ignore them and concentrate on the views that contain several hundred (or more) frames. Those are the ones where the useful images are going to end up. Depending on the source of the noise it may be possible to tell VideoFocus to ignore areas of the image to produce better results. You can also manually reassign frames later if necessary.
In addition to supporting video capture via a variety of cards, VideoFocus has the ability to "screen capture" video from proprietary players. These are increasingly common with the newer digital based video surveillance systems. Basically if it plays on the screen, VideoFocus can capture it. I tested it using a proprietary file playing in a QuickTime window. It's very easy to set up the capture, the only thing you can't do is resize the player window once the capture starts. The software captures the entire window, to include the player and it's controls along with the video, but these are easily cropped out later. (In fact you can set the crop either before or after capturing the video). Once captured, the file is available for still export or enhancement just like any other capture file.
VideoFocus crashed when I asked it to open an .avi file captured on another machine using an ATI All-in-Wonder card. Not a graceful fail either, no warning, it just stopped responding. QuickTime couldn't play the file either, but would at least report that it was unable to open it. The file played fine in Windows Media Player, and opened easily in Sony Vegas. Once converted to QuickTime (.mov) format in Vegas, VideoFocus opened the file without any problem. In my discussions with the company, they tell me that they are working to add support for additional video Codecs on an ongoing basis. In fact an update to the product with additional file support has already been released. So, this sort of thing may or may not be an issue for you. And again, if you are using VideoFocus as your capture tool, you will avoid any potential for incompatibility issues.
One thing that you can't do with VideoFocus, that I'd really like to see in a future release is a "one-click" back up option. It would be really nice to be able to bundle up all of the video sessions and related stills and previews and save the whole thing onto a network storage drive or CD/DVD backup.
Pros:
Fast
Very easy to zero in on frames of interest
Automatic Demultiplexing
Full set of tools to Crop, Mask and De-interlace
Designed specifically for creating still images from video, no extraneous video editing features
Cons:
Occasional file incompatibility
No "one-click" backup
A smarter installer would be nice
Conclusion. If you are in the market for a forensic video tool, VideoFocus should be on your short list. Combining fast processing times with ease of use and a clear interface, Salient Stills offers an excellent product.
For more product information or to contact Salient Stills visit their website at: http://www.salientstills.com