How to Transcribe Body-Worn Cam Footage
August 2024
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4 min read
Body-worn camera (BWC) footage often comes in massive volumes during e-discovery. It's nearly impossible for attorneys to rely solely on human transcribers—it’s just too slow and costly.
The rapid improvement of AI technologies in the past few years has created an opportunity for defense counsel where they can now transcribe hours and hours of footage quickly and start reviewing cases in minutes.
Here's how lawyers, investigators and paralegals are using Reduct.Video's best-in-class body-worn cam transcription feature to quickly review video discovery.
How to transcribe body-worn cam footage with Reduct
Step 1: Upload everything to Reduct
Immediately after uploading your footage to Reduct, its AI starts transcribing your body cam footage to text almost instantly.
The generated transcript is synced to the video– you can move to any part of the recording just by clicking on a word in the transcription and it takes you right to your key moment where the police officer or the accused might have said something that can sway the case.
Reduct also automatically embeds captions, so you can review hours of body cam with your sound off and without leaning in to make sense of every word.
Step 2: Correct the transcript or send it for human transcription
Reduct allows you to refine your AI transcription by easily editing words the AI may have mistranscribed.
By editing your AI transcript, you can fix errors in names of people, companies, and other key details that could make your transcript appear unprofessional.
If your footage has a lot of crosstalk and background noise, and you want to skip the editing hassle, you can opt for Reduct’s human transcription and get a cleaner, more accurate transcript within 24 hours.
Reduct's AI transcription supports over 90 languages, whereas with our human transcription, you can expect 99% accuracy; that's almost near-zero errors.
Step 3: Export a printable transcript with speaker labels and timestamps
With Reduct, you can export the bodycam transcript with speaker labels, line numbers and exact timestamps. You can download your transcripts as Word documents, PDF, or even ASCII TXT format.
Reduct’s accurate speaker labels help you see who said what at a glance as lawyers often send copies of important sections to the opposing counsel to let them know that they have strong evidence caught in some section of the body cam video.
Oh wait, there’s more
Reduct isn't just a transcription product, it is an AI powered machine. Here's what you can do with the transcriptions right within Reduct once you've received it.
1. Search through body-worn cam footage and highlight key evidence
By using Reduct’s transcript search, you can find exactly what you are looking for in hours of footage within seconds.
With Reduct’s powerful ‘Fuzzy Search’, you can start your body cam footage review by searching for concepts, even if you can’t recall the exact words. Our fuzzy search engine suggests you with related terms to guide your search.
For example, with fuzzy search, searching for alcohol in your transcript will show parts of the videos that also talk about ‘drink’, ‘wine' or ‘drunk’.
After searching for specific words or phrases from the transcript of your body-worn cam footage, you can highlight your key evidence. With Reduct, you can color code your highlighted paragraph.
2. Summarize
Reduct’s summarizer extracts key ideas from your video and audio footage so you don't need to listen to the entire footage. These summaries are time stamped so you can jump directly to an interesting part of the video by clicking on the timestamp.
3. Create video exhibits
Reduct offers the ability to transform hour-long BWC footage into concise reels of digital evidence that are admissible in court.
By selecting key segments from the transcription, you can effortlessly create a compelling reel and bolster the evidentiary impact of your case.
In the transcript, identify sections you want to use as video exhibits. Then select the ‘add to reel’ option to add different clips to a reel, and craft your exhibit.
You can drag and drop the relevant reels into Reduct’s reel builder and reorder them if necessary.
4. Multicam sync
When multiple officers arrive at a crime scene and move between different tasks, it’s hard to piece together the timeline and make sense of all the recorded footage. It’s a challenge to view and integrate multiple body-worn camera angles after the fact.
But with Reduct’s multicam sync, you can see multiple body-worn cameras and its transcript side-by-side.
Reduct offers transcript-based video synchronization which creates both a timeline view, as well as a multi-camera view for different cams recorded at the same time.
This feature helps to illustrate key evidence that is hard to discern in one body-worn camera view but not the other.
Reduct's platform abides by very high standards of privacy and security
Reduct is built with security and privacy at its core, offering a secure repository to keep your discovery video.
Reduct has SOC II Type 2 certification and offers HIPAA compliant services.
To maintain more confidentiality, you can give access to team members on a case by case basis, just like inviting someone to view or edit a Google Doc.
This prevents unauthorized access and potential tampering of your BWC footage, safeguarding the integrity of sensitive information and maintaining control over who can view or modify critical data.
Transcribe body-worn cam footage accurately and speed up your case preparation with Reduct.Video
As body-worn camera footage grows, human transcription struggles to keep up the pace.
But with Reduct’s accurate AI transcription feature, defense teams and lawyers can efficiently handle and review extensive footage with less turnaround time.
If you need to handle large volumes of e-discovery, Reduct handles all your body-worn camera footage securely and gives you accurate transcripts to review, search, create impactful video exhibits, and prepare your case more efficiently.
