Security and investigation
One white van in five hundred hours of video
The scene
Monday morning. Over the weekend, material went missing from the loading area. The security manager has a description and little else: a white delivery van that came in at some point between Friday afternoon and Sunday night. Fifteen cameras cover those entrances. Between them they add up to some five hundred hours of footage.
Where it breaks
The only way to find it is for someone to look. Two operators are pulled off active monitoring and set to fast-forwarding video, camera by camera, hour by hour. After two hours of watching sped-up frames, anyone starts to miss things. And while those two are doing that, the site has two fewer pairs of eyes.
What happens
By mid-afternoon the van turns up: it came in on Saturday at 4:12 a.m. That cost a full day’s work from two qualified people. And they were lucky, because nobody knew for certain it was in there at all. If the description had been slightly different, they’d have had to start over.
With IRIS
IRIS doesn’t only keep the video: it keeps what it understood in it. So the manager can type what he is after in his own words — white van in the loading area, Friday to Sunday — and get back the moments that fit, each with its camera and its time. No timeline to drag, no hours to sit through. A person still decides which of those moments is the right one; what disappears is the whole day spent on the ones that weren’t.
Stop hunting for the minute. Search for what happened.