Video Depositions can be one of the most complex parts of trial presentation. The creation of testimony clips to play in lieu of a live witness or for impeachment purposes can be an arduous task. Here are a list of best practices to control costs for a trial team when providing video:

• Assess and report the type of media and format of video files in the collection of depositions as early as possible
• Provide a list of any non synched video, vhs tapes, or rare video formats to the trial technology consultant so they can arrange to have it converted and synched into a format suitable for trial presentation
• Provide DVDs or hard drives with the complete set of files provided. For more information see the information on synch files.
• Most courtroom presentation software suites can easily and quickly import designations from a text file list in the format of start page, start line, end page, end line i.e. (42, 12, 43, 8). Providing the trial technology consultant with this format of designations decreases time and costs.
• Providing the trial technology consultant with highlighted transcripts is also a common practice to supply designations for clip creation.

After designations have been provided to a trial technology consultant, transcript reports can be outputted from the trial presentation software to provide run times in an easy to review format. It is important to know that all synch files have some variation to the accuracy of the start and stop times of  each individual transcript line. Because of this, a time consuming process of fine tuning the beginning of each clip to trim excess sound/silence from the beginning, middle, and end of clips has to be undertaken. The most cost effective process is to wait until the designations are close to final before attempting to fine tune the clips. Because of this, early transcript reports can vary by a few seconds prior to tuning.