Incident files
A charge, an arrest, a shot: the same moment is often filmed by several people. An incident file gathers those sessions, places them on a common timeline, plays them together and exports them as a verifiable archive. It is how a scene can be reconstructed minute by minute, from several angles.
Creating a file and adding sessions
In Incident files, give a title, and if you want a description, a place, a date. All of it is encrypted in your browser: the server only sees which sessions are gathered.
Then add sessions: from the file (Add sessions) or from a session (Add to an incident file). You can gather your sessions, those shared with you and witness contributions. A file opens no access: it only holds what you can already read, and a session its owner has hidden from contacts disappears from it.
Each session gets a label ("square angle", "medic", "drone") and a colour.
The common timeline
Each take becomes a line, placed at server time. Phones do not all have the same time: ripoux.fr recalibrates each one on the server from the shortest upload delay observed. The result is accurate to a second or two.
To refine:
- by hand, with each session's −1 s, −0.1 s, +0.1 s, +1 s buttons;
- by sound: load two views, then Align by sound on the second. ripoux.fr compares the sound energy of both recordings (shouts, bangs, sirens) and proposes an offset with a correlation score. You accept it or not. If the sounds do not match closely enough, it says so and proposes nothing.
Offsets are saved, encrypted, with the file.
Watching together
Choose a working window (start and end), tick up to 4 takes, then Load views. The window's segments are decrypted in your browser and assembled. Play together plays every view at the same instant of the timeline; a click on the timeline moves the cursor. A take with nothing at that instant stays black.
The map of the file shows each phone's path and its position at the cursor time, when location was on.
Takes filmed in MP4 (iPhone) appear on the timeline but cannot be played in sync yet.
Exporting
Prepare the file archive produces, for each take that overlaps the window, a verifiable extract in extracts/<n>/, plus dossier.json: the window, the sessions, labels and offsets applied. Each extract can be checked on its own; the Verify a proof page also accepts the whole archive and checks every extract.
A session not closed yet has no signed root: it is listed in dossier.json but not extracted. Close it, then export again.
Offsets are a playback setting, not a proof: what is proven is each segment and its time of reception by the server.