The field of collision reconstruction is getting more and more sophisticated. I’ve long known that I had to pick a lane and rely on colleagues to fill in my voluminous gaps. There are certain fields you can get the 30,000-foot-view of and leave it to another expert. However, in my humble opinion, video is the new CDR.

If you’re experienced enough (read old), you’ll remember when CDR compatibility was on the rise and many in the community decided they weren’t going to get a kit or learn the skills. Instead, they were going to outsource imaging and interpretation to a specialist. Eventually, most of us realized that wasn’t reasonable, we needed to have a solid grasp of the basics and then rely on specialists when we ran into peculiar scenarios.

I think we might be in that same situation with video right now, where some are considering just outsourcing all video analysis to a specialist. However, video’s going to touch most of our cases in the near future (like CDR does now), requiring that we’re all video analysts, to some degree. We’ll still need those devoted specialists, who can help us tackle difficult issues and guide our methods, but we’ll all need to know the fundamentals. As such, I recommend seeking related education… dive down that rabbit hole.

An excellent video tool I’ve been continuing to explore as I tumble deeper down the rabbit hole is PFTrack. It’s a sophisticated camera tracking program with an excellent and logical interface. With some help from the creators of the software, YouTube, and Dusty Arrington, I’ve been able to learn some really useful methods for speed determination.

The software is exceptionally well-suited to dashcam analysis. Semi-automatically track some identifiable objects in the frame, QC it, tell PFTrack the 3D coordinates of the tracked points (based on scan or drone data), and boom… you’ve got the position of the camera for every frame. With some knowledge of frame timing, you’ve got speed too. All for £25/month.

If you’d like to learn more about using PFTrack, CAD programs, and PhotoModeler for video analysis (and the latter for modeling scene evidence and vehicular damage), I just launched two photogrammetry courses:

The classes haven't been launched outside of Lightpoint’s email list yet, but will be next week. As such, if you know you’d like to attend, please secure a spot soon.

Thanks for reading, keep exploring!

Lou Peck
​Lightpoint | Axiom