What's your take on Judge Schroeder's ruling in the Rittenhouse case that the prosecution can't use pinch-to-zoom because it alters the video footage?

Judge Schroeder voted for TRUMP !

Not sure on this one. I guess if you are using technology, it is incumbent on you to show it is sound. It is evidence, after all. Does pinch-to-zoom alter the picture? I’d say the lay-person would say no. Even if it used AI to alter it for enhancement purposes, I’d venture that the lay-person would still say it was not doing anything to the picture. But let’s say that you have a picture where someone is holding something in their hand and upon zooming in, the AI makes it look like a gun when, in fact, it was something like a candy bar? AI is not infallible. I think that is what the judge was getting at.

I tend to agree with the judge, if, his thinking was as @seawulf575 suggested.
Photos shot on film could of course also get manipulated, in the past, and the same goes for digital, nowadays, but, as long as the original file (negative) is available one would think that could be seen as the unaltered image.
I don’t know, however, how one can determine the originality of a digital file (is that where metadata comes in?).
The only thing in this ruling, I feel, is the twenty minute cap.
One would think that a full day would be more logic, and fair.

I feel the judge is ruling a lot in favor of the defense.

Pure Bullshit. It is a completely inane argument.

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”
~William Shakespeare

There is DSP manipulation of some sort on almost every video you watch. If they’re zooming in until it’s grainy and hard to make anything out then I can see the objections. If it’s still clear then no. I mean shit, zoom in on the screen with another camera if needed. What should worry them more are deep fakes and I’m not aware of anything in place to stop something like that yet.

I guess the judge is a religious man, because he thinks it’s other people’s burden to refute bullshit evidence-free claims.

@seawulf575 “Does pinch-to-zoom alter the picture?”

Technically it does. It’s using bilinear interpolation. Essentially it’s averaging the pixel values between the existing values to “fill in the blanks.” It’s not AI, it’s a basic matrix math operation. The thing is, it’s being used all over the trial. Every time they print something they’re using bilinear interpolation. They’re using algorithms with the compression of the video. When they display video on the screen it’s using the same technique to scale it to the screen. It’s ubiquitous.

The burden of proof part was weird to me though. If I object to evidence submitted and claim there’s an invisible demon that has altered video, is the judge supposed to insist the prosecution find a religious expert to refute the claim in the next 20 minutes? It was bizarre. Furthermore the prosecution made the point that the same technique had been previously used throughout the case.

I’m just surprised that this basic technology hasn’t been settled in the case law. I did some Googling and didn’t immediately find something. But if you need an expert to testify every time bilinear interpolation of an image or video is used, you’d have to throw out almost every conviction where digital video or photography was used as evidence.

If iPads really altered images to that extent nobody would buy them.

He’s right.

He is correct in that it distorts spacial details. Your sense of how close together two items look will seem different when the pix is in portrait or landscape display or size changed.

With this, his MAGA ringtone, and his previous mandate to forbid the prosecution from referring to Rittenhouse’s victims as “victims”, it is pretty clear he is biased, and should recuse himself.

@SnipSnip If only that had anything to do with what the defense or judge claimed.

@chyna Have you watched the entire trial? I know I haven’t. I know there were some things the judge did recently that reeled the prosecution in and shut him down. I know there were people saying the judge was being unfair for those things. But one of them was the prosecutor trying to paint a picture of Rittenhouse through innuendo. He was asking Rittenhouse why he had been so quiet about the events of that night, why he hadn’t been talking about them. That question entirely ignores the 5th amendment of the Constitution and was being asked to make it sound like Rittenhouse was trying to hide something. The judge stopped it dead telling the prosecutor that the defendant is under no obligation to talk at all. So that was a bit slimy by the prosecutor and I think the judge did the right thing.

But I ask if you have watched the trial because I haven’t and I don’t know if there were other things that were going on that weren’t getting sensationalized in the media (either one way or the other).

@It’s an answer to the question. I don’t know what the rest of the post said. I read questions and answer them.