@Sinister if your hypothesis is correct every driver involved in a fatal would be imprisoned.
No it's the civil litigation lawyers we gotta worry about. The criminal justice system at least is designed so the burden of proof is on the accuser & they have to prove their case beyond a shadow of doubt & it requires a unanimous agreement by the jury.
The civil litigation system however, is more like a Salem Witch trial. While the burden of proof still lies with the accuser, they don't need "beyond a shadow of a doubt". All they have to do is confuse the jury with fancy words & technical mumbo-jumbo & they can take everything you own & garnish your wages forever, or at least until you fake your own death. And faking your own death is becoming more & more difficult now that the government has been doing everything they can to create fingerprint, DNA and photo databases of everyone in the entire world (not just US citizens).
Duck pointed out the obvious.... The only portions any lawyer would ever view would be the part that assists me.
No. If you give YOUR lawyer the memory card from the camera, there's a pre-trial hearing in which they decide which evidence is admissible. A judge may rule that it's all or nothing. The entire data card, which may have stuff from up to 8 hours prior to the crash. When big bucks are involved, like with somebody who carries a million dollar's liability coverage that's making the ambulance chaser drool, they're going to want to find ANYTHING they can use against you. If you drift onto the white line for a second 45 minutes before the crash, they'll say you're showing evidence of "distracted driving" or "fatigue" and should have parked it. Even if the actual crash was caused 100% by the other party, it will then become your fault (in the eyes of a jury full of idiots who watch too much Oprah) because you should've parked & went to sleep before the crash.
As far as timing and such....nah, way too many ways to disturb the only copy.
There is a field called "computer forensics". I've actually been considering going to college to learn this. Not so I can help ambulance chasers ruin innocent people's lives, but so I can work with the FBI to track down sexual predators who lure children out into vulnerable places by pretending to be someone their age. I know a guy who does that. In addition to the computer geek stuff, he's also a cop so he gets to participate in the sting operations that catch them physically too.
Anyway, with computer forensics, ... let's just put it this way. I have ZERO education in this field. Yet just from stuff I've learned on my own, I bet I can already tell if a video has been edited. Somebody would have to be pretty damn good to fool me, and in order to fool an actual computer forensics expert, .. I bet Hollywood can't even do that. But even if the authenticity of the video clip isn't called into question, it's still a "computer forensics" task, a very simple one actually that even I can do, to simply put the video in an editor program that allows you to play it slowly, frame by frame, with measuring marks on the screen to measure the passage of the dashed lines on the pavement.
The dashed lines are 10 feet long and they're 30 feet apart. Once the experts have established that the video hasn't been slowed down, (which is easy to do and I'll explain that in a minute) all you have to do to determine the speed you're going in the video is to open it up in a program like Adobe ImageReady and put horizontal measuring lines overlaying the screen, and count how many video frames it takes for the beginning of one ten-foot line to pass those measuring lines, to the beginning of the next one which is 40 feet of travel. For more accuracy you can go with ten lines which would be 400 feet. Then you look at either the frame delay which is the amount of milliseconds each frame is displayed, or just count the frames & divide by the camera's frame rate. (notice I said the camera's frame rate, not the video's frame rate. More on that in a minute) Then all you need is some simple third grade math to determine your speed, accurate to within a tenth of a MPH.
As far as telling if the video speed has been altered.
The make & model of the camera can be subpoenaed. Sometimes it's embedded in the video file and isn't hard to find. Or they can subpoena the camera itself. The frame rate of the camera is noted. You mentioned 29.9 frames per second. It's actually 29.97. There are no cameras that record at 29.90 fps but it can be achieved with video editing software. If the frame rate is not the same as what the camera records at, it's been slowed down or sped up.
I can check a video's frame rate two ways. I can simply use the "video inspector" function in Apple Quicktime Pro or if it's an AVI or MOV format I can open it in ImageReady and look at the individual frame delay times. If the frame delay times are anything other than 0.2997 seconds, it's been sped up or slowed down.
That's all just stuff I had to figure out on my own when I was trying to synchronize Skateboard's cartoon mouth with the words spoken by the Smurfs in that cartoon in those couple of scenes. So imagine what somebody who's actually gone to college for this stuff would be able to do to verify the authenticity of the video.
There's the scenes with his truck driving down the road. I paid no attention the the length of the lines, the spacing between them, or the rate they move when I made the cartoon, but now I'm kind of curious about it. I only animated those lines once & re-used it on a loop for those scenes so if I wanted to I could open the original clip & figure out his road speed in those clips, even though it's a freakin' cartoon.
In addition to examining the frame rate, every video file has other aspects that can be looked at such as the codec used to compress & write the digital video file, or the audio track. If the camera itself is subpoenaed, a video can be recorded with it, and it's codec & data rates can be compared to the crash scene clip to see if they're the same.
I have the GoPro. Had it for a few years now and it's the cats meow. Mine records for 14 hours then writes over the old video in a continuous loop. It's also I think it's like 170 degrees so it sees both sides of the truck not just straight ahead.
Aint no way that's 170 degrees. You'd need a fisheye lens or multiple video feeds in order to capture 170 degrees of view. I'm guessing that's roughly 90 degrees, give or take.
Thank you, hey? (Remember us Youpers or UPers) have the right to use the "hey" suffix to sentences.)
People in Fargo who aren't transplants to the area have a little bit of Canadian in their accent. They sound normal except they put slightly more emphasis than normal on the long "O" when they say words like "load" or "road". They don't do the "eh" thing though.