Video enhancement filters now available in Magnet Witness

Video evidence plays a critical role in modern investigations, but it doesn’t always clearly show what examiners need to see.

Whether due to distance, lighting, or how footage was captured, important details can be difficult to interpret. Examiners often need to make careful adjustments to clarify those details and present videos in a way that supports accurate analysis, review, and reporting.

To help adjust footage efficiently while preserving original evidence, we’ve introduced new workflow capabilities in Magnet Witness.

The challenges with original video evidence today

Examiners often work with videos that don’t clearly show what needs to be seen. In many cases, footage may be:

• Difficult to interpret due to distance, lighting, or framing, making it harder to identify key details or subjects
• Captured in inconsistent formats or orientations, requiring adjustment before it can be properly reviewed
• Lacking visual context, such as date and time, even when that information exists in the source system

Many examiners have had to make some concessions when enhancing video evidence in practice:

• Enhancements are applied across multiple tools, with no single, consistent workflow
• Filters are applied iteratively, but the order and rationale are hard to track
• Explanations of what was done can be difficult, particularly when defending it later in reports or court

In many workflows today, video “enhancement” is fragmented. Documentation often becomes an afterthought, rather than an integrated part of the process.

Taken together, these challenges mean that raw video evidence doesn’t always communicate what happened as clearly as it should. Examiners often need to make careful, controlled adjustments to clarify details, restore context, and ensure the footage can be confidently reviewed and shared.

A more deliberate approach to video enhancement

To address these challenges, Magnet Witness introduces a dedicated video enhancement workflow. The goal is simple: provide a single, guided place to enhance video clips while keeping original evidence intact and the entire process transparent.

This approach is built around a few core principles:

• Original data remains untouched
• All enhancement activity is centralized
• Every adjustment is documented and repeatable

Rather than switching between tools or workflows, you now have a focused, purpose-built workspace designed specifically for enhancement tasks.

A dedicated Enhance workspace

At the center of this update is a new Enhance workspace in Magnet Witness — a focused environment for refining video clips. This new Enhance workspace brings together:

• Dedicated clip list
• Focused video player
• Filters panel
• Clear history of applied adjustments

This design helps you stay oriented throughout the enhancement process — clearly seeing what has been adjusted, in what order, and how each step contributes to the final result.

All adjustments are applied in a way that preserves the integrity of the original evidence.

Common video adjustments, built into the workflow

This release introduces the most requested video adjustment features, available directly within the Enhance workflow in Witness:

• Aspect ratio
• Brightness and contrast
• Crop
• Levels
• Mirror
• Resize
• Rotate

These adjustments can be applied to an individual clip or across multiple clips at once. With these capabilities, it’s now easier to process large volumes of footage efficiently and avoid repetitive, manual work, while saving significant time and reducing the risk of inconsistency.

Just as importantly, these adjustments are applied within a structured and repeatable workflow. Every change is tracked and can be reviewed, ensuring you can clearly demonstrate what was done and maintain confidence in the integrity of the original evidence.

Overlay: restoring critical context

In addition to visual adjustments, there is also an overlay capability designed to restore critical context to video evidence.

In many cases, date and time information may exist in the source system but is not visible once the video is exported. Overlay allows examiners to surface that information directly on the video — drawing from DVR metadata or user-provided inputs — so it can be clearly seen during review and reporting.

This helps examiners and reviewers more easily understand when events occurred and follow the sequence of actions, supporting clearer communication of findings and stronger evidentiary context.

Clearer exports and more transparent reporting

Adjusting video evidence doesn’t end after applying the filter itself; it extends into how that work is exported and documented. With this update, Magnet Witness supports a more transparent and defensible approach to video enhancement:

• Reporting explicitly captures the technical details of those changes
• Both enhanced clips and supporting documentation can be exported together

While the system captures the technical details of what was changed, you can supplement this with your own notes to explain why those changes were made. Once the final changes are made to the file, always export to retain the adjustments.

This ensures that video enhancement moves away from a “black box” process and toward one that is reviewable, repeatable, and grounded in evidence. As a result, work can be shared with examiners, prosecutors, and other stakeholders with greater confidence — knowing that both the outcome and the process behind it are clearly documented.

How does this help your investigation?

Taken together, these updates introduce a more deliberate and defensible way to enhance video evidence in Magnet Witness.

Now you can:

• Correct footage to better surface key details
• Restore important date and time context
• Apply adjustments across multiple clips at once, eliminating the need to adjust each file individually
• Clearly document and explain your work

This means less time spent manually adjusting clips and less reliance on external tools — keeping your workflow efficient and contained within Witness. You can apply consistent, controlled changes at scale, while maintaining the integrity of the original evidence.

This all helps ensure that video evidence is not only clearer to interpret, but also easier to review, share, and defend.

Learn more the latest in Magnet Witness

Learn more about the latest ways Magnet Witness supports your end-to-end video investigation workflow, by watching our webinar, “Unlocking workflow efficiencies in video forensics – what’s new in 2026” or read more in this blog: Simplified start and export in Magnet Witness 1.10