By Scott M. Bruner
Police1 Product Editor
Salient Stills didn’t get started working their video capture systems for law enforcement, but it’s where they’ve been able to find a very lucrative – and appreciative – market. With their flagship program, VideoFOCUS now being used in 37 states and 18 countries, the company seems to have found their calling.
VideoFOCUS is a software package intended to combine every major video forensic application, able to manipulate and edit any type of video signal, and locate the most critical images from video and stills.
“With other systems, law enforcement might need 2-3 different packages to get to what we offer in one end-to-end package,” Laura Teodosio, CEO of Salient Stills said. “You can come in, bring in the video, search through, find the interesting sections, multiplex it, stabilize it, zoom in or out, run filters on it, lighten and darken images, and you can do all of these equivalent things with still images.”
The list of VideoFOCUS features is impressive. It’s able to cut, copy, paste, edit and compose new videos, and do the same with audio. It can accept every digital, analog, proprietry or non-proprietary format – from video cameras to cell phones.
It can drag and zoom for both stills and videos. It can handle object tracking and offers a wide range of image filters. It also features demultiplexing capability, it’s able to stabilize and smooth out jumpy or noisy images.
“Any kind of device, VideoFOCUS can work with it and it’s all done in the single application. The whole idea is that you can work with video no matter where it comes from,” Teodosio said. “It’s very simple to use. It’s powerful but we spend a lot of time working on the interaction design. We spend a lot of time asking ‘how do we make it obvious and intuitive to use?’”
It is the leading video import, screen capture, analog capture and conversion system for law enforcement. Among its users include the FBI.
“While other tools have been retrofit for law enforcement, ours is different because it’s been designed specifically for the community of users that are our customers. By and large, that’s law enforcement, the intelligence community, and security professionals,” Teodosio said.
The software alone costs $18,000, while a turnkey system with a fully-loaded PC system with VideoFOCUS installed is $21,000. There is also an optional maintenance and upgrade package, which makes sure the user has the latest software releases and costs an additional 10% of the software price.
For more information visit http://www.salientstills.com.