The Man with the Mysterious Bulge

Rush job today.  Needed it by 4 pm. For a court trial the next morning.

It was a surveillance tape (VHS) that needed to be transferred to DVD ASAP. A company had been missing valuable art pieces from their walls.  Over the years, the business owner had treated himself to expensive work of art to grace the walls of the office he spent so much of his life in.  Mysteriously, pieces of art work were disappearing.  Stolen.  He didn’t have any surveillance camera in his office. After all, he had built a close-knit team that worked so long and so close together, they were like family. Setting up a surveillance camera to monitor their every move was the last thing on his mind.

He consulted the building’s security team to see if he had any ideas. The security officer had an idea.  Though there were no surveillance cameras in his office, there was a surveillance camera in the lobby.  Since the company’s office was on the 23rd floor, most probably, the thief would take the elevator.  Based on the date of the disappearance of the last art piece, the security officer pinpointed the surveillance VHS tape to inspect.

You may wonder, a VHS tape can only store up to 120 minutes, how does it capture a day’s worth of lobby comings and goings.  I learned that surveillance camera records in a funny way.  Something about multiple number of frames per seconds so that when you watch a VHS surveillance tape, the video timecode on the tape goes multiple times faster than real time (the number of seconds that lapse on your watch).  That’s how a whole day’s worth of recordings can fit on a VHS tape.

Enough of technical trivia, I’m sure you want to get to the bottom of the story.

Once the VHS tape was transferred to a DVD, it was much easier to go through the video on the computer and spot the ‘thief’.  How was the thief identified?  He walked out of the elevator with a mysterious bulge around the waist.  Sadly, the business owner identified the thief as one of his regular clients.  When the owner compared records and dates of the client’s visits, they coincided with dates art pieces disappeared off the wall.

artwork
Most of our customer stories are heart-warming touching.  This one is not so heart-warming, I’m sorry to say.

At Play it Again Video, a VHS to DVD transfer lab in Boston, we are not just performing a technical process of turning old VHS/VCR tapes to digital formats. We are protecting precious memories; there is a story behind every film/video transfer job. Other more heart-warming Customer Stories:

Comments

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