When Can a Video Technician be Qualified as an Expert Witness in Forensic Video Analysis?

A threshold issue when seeking to lead expert evidence at trial is whether the witness is sufficiently qualified to be designated as an expert. Many areas of expertise have express minimum qualifications – trauma surgeons must have gone to medical school, engineers must have a degree in engineering, etc. Forensic video analysis is not an area of expertise that lends itself to such clear demarcations. Assessments of expertise are based on a constellation of factors, where no one attribute is the tipping point. A good example of this assessment occurred in R. v. Drake, 2025 NSSC 204, a decision of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court.

The Case

In this murder prosecution, the defence objected to the Crown’s application to tender a 22 second video clip which had been prepared by a forensic digital media technician employed by the Halifax Regional Police and to qualify the technician as an expert witness. Specifically, the defence argued that the video clip should not be admitted because the technician was not a qualified expert and because the video had been altered to such an extent that it was no longer accurate. A voir dire was conducted wherein the proposed expert underwent direct and cross examination.

The Crown tendered the technician as an ‘expert in forensic video analysis capable of giving opinion evidence about the enhancement of video surveillance’. In the voir dire, the technician testified that using Amped FIVE software, she used crop and resize tools to isolate the relevant video segment from a larger CCTV recording. She then used ‘Contrast Stretch’ and ‘Parametric Curves’ to improve the contrast of the video. The Amped FIVE report showing all the work done on the video was tendered as an exhibit. She summarized her work by saying that she enlarged the area of interest and made brightness and contrast adjustments to provide more depth to the images. She [wrongly] testified that by doing so, she made no changes to the video when compared to the original. In cross examination, she acknowledged that there is an element of subjectivity involved in image enhancement, that she lacked certain information about the original video, that she did not know the frames per second rate of the original video, and agreed that there were a lot of predictive frames in the video clip.

The Law and its Application

In Canada, the admissibility of expert evidence is governed by a test set out in R. v. Mohan (SCC, 1994). It must be shown by the tendering party that the proposed expert evidence is relevant, necessary, not subject to an exclusionary rule, and that the witness is suitably qualified. This four-part test is used in many jurisdictions. In this case, the defence focused on the fourth element, whether the technician was suitably qualified. According to the judge’s case commentary, the technician attended annual training events put on by the Ontario FVA Association in 2022-2024. She also attended Amped User Days in 2022. It was noted that she had no formal certification from her training and did not have training that would allow her to explain how Amped FIVE worked. There is no reference to her having been trained on Amped FIVE beyond attending the User Day event. Her training may have been more robust than reported but we can only go by what the Court noted.

After evaluating the evidence on qualifications and the arguments of counsel, the Court noted:

26 With respect, although Ms. Fox has not been independently tested or certified, I am satisfied from the evidence that she has received systematic learning that goes beyond mere anecdotal observation, transient personal experience or modest study… She has demonstrated through training and experience a sufficient expertise to explain to the jury what steps she took in using the software to produce the impugned video. No evidence was led to critique her use of the Amped FIVE program in producing the impugned video.

The Court noted that ‘…any alleged deficiencies in her expertise are matters of the weight of her expert evidence, not its admissibility.’ Accordingly, the technician was qualified ‘as a forensic video analyst capable of giving opinion evidence about the use of Amped FIVE software to enhance surveillance video and to show how it was used to produce the video marked Exhibit VD4-2 titled “Contrast Stretch”.’

A supplemental issue raised by defence counsel was that the enhanced images should not be admitted because the forensic processing rendered them inaccurate. The Court reviewed the enhanced video clip and compared it to the original. The Court noted no evidence of distortion, editing, alteration, or any other factor that would impact the accuracy of the video clip. Notably, even though the defence had their own expert, they did not call their expert to testify, nor did they point out any actual concerns about the video clip. Given that the jury would have access to both the original recording and the enhanced clip, it was proper for the jury to make their own assessment.

Analysis

No new law is espoused in this case. The Court merely applied the existing legal test to the facts before it. This case is of value though because it shows that the bar for the admission of expert evidence is rather low. The test is whether the proposed witness, through her education, training, skill, and experience, knows more about the subject matter than the trier of fact. Even though the technician was not a certified forensic video technician or analyst and may not have taken the Amped FIVE training course, she still knew more about the enhancement process than the jury. It was therefore proper to admit her testimony in an expert capacity.

A telling feature in this case is that the defence had their own expert present. The input from that expert would have given the defence the ability to ask more technical questions in cross examination and put the technician through her paces. As is often the case, the defence did not call their witness to testify, nor did they point out anything wrong with the work that the technician undertook. One can reasonably infer that had the defence expert been called to testify, that expert would likely have largely or wholly accepted the work of the expert called by the Crown.

The expert in this case was minimally qualified but that must be evaluated in the context of what she was asked to do with the video clip. She was only asked to testify about the enhancement processes that she undertook using Amped FIVE. It would be preferable for an expert witness in forensic video analysis to have formalized training that leads to certification following examinations. Such training is available. That said, the expert did not undertake detailed analysis of the images and so the burden upon her to testify on technical matters was not that heavy. More advanced analytical topics such as image comparison, reverse projection, photogrammetry, speed determination, image authentication, etc. would require substantially more training.

One final comment. The technician was wrong when she stated that she did not make changes to the video clip when compared to the original. If that was the case, her services would not have been required. A simple hash verification would confirm that the files were no longer the same after enhancement. The whole point in enhancing a video recording is to make changes – to draw out existing detail and to make it easier to see certain aspects of the video. Enhancement and clarification are not undesirable words. The key is to emphasize that no new content was introduced that was not already part of the original video.