Sunbelt Blog

Video Formats for Legal Video

When video first burst onto the consumer scene, the video format wars were limited to VHS vs. Beta. Fast forward a few decades and you’ll find an alphabet soup of video formats including: MPEG, Flash, H.264, AVI, MOV, QT, MKV, and more. While dozens of video formats exist, many of which deliver crystal clear, high definition images, when it comes to legal video, you are limited to the formats compatible with the trial presentation software that you are using.

The legal market has been slow to embrace the new and improved video formats such as H.264. Instead, nearly every trial presentation software product depends on the MPEG-1 format. Because compatibility is important for all users of the trial presentation software, support for newer formats has not been implemented. After all, if the legal video cannot be viewed by some parties involved in the case, it is not serving its purpose.

For now, MPEG-1 is the video format of choice for legal video. It is a universal format with widespread compatibility. However, it does have its pros and cons.

The advantages of MPEG-1 are:
•    Compatibility: This is a universal video format supported by all of the major trial presentation software products including Sanction, Trial Director, and Visionary.
•    Compression: The MPEG-1 format is a compressed video format. Up to two hours of legal video can fit on a CD
•    Conversion: Most video editing packages can easily convert raw video formats to the MPEG-1 format. For example, if you have a video camera that records video onto Digital8 or another tape-based format, the video can be imported from the camera and converted to the MPEG-1 format.
•    Editing: Once you’ve converted your footage to MPEG-1, software video editing tools make it easy to work with the footage.  

The disadvantages of MPEG-1 are:
•    Image quality: Video has grown up tremendously since MPEG-1 was first introduced. With today’s televisions and Internet video sites now featuring stunning, high definition video, the lesser quality of MPEG-1is noticeable and detracts from the message.
•    Sound editing: The audio track is mixed with the video track which makes sound editing a problem. Since the two tracks are mixed audio and video cannot be edited separately, making it difficult to enhance legal videos with poor audio qualities such as background noise or low volume.
•    Video CD/DVD compatibility issues: While most modern CD/DVD drives can handled MPEG-1 discs, older CD and DVD players may not be compatible with the MPEG-1 format.

Despite the poor video quality, difficulty in editing sound, and potential for hardware incompatibility, if you are working with legal video in conjunction with legal trial presentation software, you may have no other choice but to convert your video to the MPEG-1 format. If you are starting with raw footage and sound is an issue, you may be able to address the sound issues before converting the footage to the MPEG-1 format. On the other hand, if your source material originates as an MPEG-1 file, the audio is already mixed with the video, making isolation nearly impossible.

With so many video formats, choosing a format for your legal videos is relatively easy due to the industry’s lack of progress in this area. The compatible choice is MPEG-1.