Metadata from the “raw” Epstein prison video shows approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds were removed from one of two stitched-together clips. The cut starts right at the “missing minute.”

Newly uncovered metadata reveals that nearly three minutes of footage were cut from what the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation described as “full raw” surveillance video from the only functioning camera near Jeffrey Epstein’s prison cell the night before he was found dead. The video was released last week as part of the Trump administration’s commitment to fully investigate Epstein’s 2019 death but instead has raised new questions about how the footage was edited and assembled.

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  • @skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
    5•2 days ago

    Yeah. In order for the whole thing to work you’re putting a lot of faith in your ability to get out of there before the DVR files roll over at midnight. It’s not just that you’d have to do it in a minute, you’d have to be confident ahead of time of being able to do it and leaving no signs of struggle and also avoid any other cameras placing you unaccountably at that location at that time… all in all if you want the guy dead it’s much easier to manipulate another inmate into doing it for you, than to do all this Mission: Impossible shit and still need to hope that the next two governments help you cover it up.

    • FuglyDuckEnglish
      13•2 days ago

      so, speaking as someone whose used these systems for decades, DVR files don’t work that way.

      The old, old school multiplexing VCRs did, sure. Those were recording to VHS’s, and basically everyone swapped over by the early 2k’s. What’s hilarious is the reason. VHS tapes are expensive and wear out inside a few months- they’ve usually only got about six hours of recording, after which the rewind and overwrite. The high-end tapes purpose built for that might last four or five. back then, depending on how much data you had going, DVRs basically paid for themselves inside of a couple years (and the disks were expected to last a decade or so.)

      In any case, modern DVRs have no gaps. They continuously record in a rolling loop- typically 7, 15, 30, or 90 days. The DVR is actually a server running on a network, and the server manages the data stream coming in, and maybe streaming to a client wherever the security office or whatever is. (or clients, even. It’s all just software on the user end.)

      there might be a system with digital storage tapes, and not hard disks, but that’s really just a question of what digital media the data is stored on, and was relatively short lived. the digital tapes were used for very-large numbers of cameras.

      For the record, the fact that we have a single camera that was released and not an array of cameras (or video cropped out looking like a blown up thumbnail,) is because it was a modern system.

      • @skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
        -3•2 days ago

        I hope you’ll forgive me being sceptical that “used these systems” is enough authority to be able to speak for every make and model on the market… I’ve also used a few CCTV systems over the years and they’ve all been absolute lowest-bidder no-name dogshit that were packed full of weird idiosyncrasies.

        Again it comes back to the “how many people would you need to cover this up” thing - if the security systems in this prison genuinely did not cut their files at midnight, the number of people that would have to keep quiet about it is staggering; you’d need to not only swear all the guards to secrecy but also the people who made and sold them the system (whose reputation is being impugned, to boot) and anyone else familiar with that system, any one of whom could show up any time with the same model and say look, here’s hard physical evidence that what they said about the midnight rollover isn’t true.

        That said, they really need to release the Epstein Files.

        (edit: yeah yeah I knew this would get downvoted for not joining the bandwagon even as I was writing it… go whistle)

        • FuglyDuckEnglish
          8•2 days ago

          I hope you’ll forgive me being sceptical that “used these systems” is enough authority to be able to speak for every make and model on the market… I’ve also used a few CCTV systems over the years and they’ve all been absolute lowest-bidder no-name dogshit that were packed full of weird idiosyncrasies.

          I encourage skepticism! yes, the software were developed by the lowest bidder and every single one of them all had weird shit slapped in that got in the way of core functionality. I suspect part of that weird shit was that they were trying to keep people from accessing the files without their software. (As if the DVR didn’t save it as h.264 or whatever.)

          I’ve been in contract security for over a decade now- and my first post way back ages ago was “slow” to get rid of theirs in 06. (they had ordered their VHS’s in bulk so they wanted to go through them first. I think they cracked open the last pack around the time I was hired.)

          I’ve used more systems than I care to count or name; and usually became “the guy” that knew how to actually get it to do “the thing”. The worst part of that is most of the people selling the software clients would go tits up in a few years, which gets sold to another dev what doesn’t bother to learn the lessons from last time anyways. They just wanted one thing from the code or they had an idiot project manager that thought starting from failed code would be a good way to go.

          In any case, because of how the multiplexing VCRs worked, the video playback was always choppy. they’d record using NTSC or PAl at 30 or 25 fps; just like any standard VCR, except that each camera would record each frame in sequence. a 4-chanel (four cameras) would reduce the NTSC’s 30 FPS to 7. which looks like this. a 16 channel system would go down to 2 fps. Given the nature of the facility, I would assume they’re using 16x systems.