Kind: captions
Language: en
hi everyone and welcome back to this
series on
open source investigations from home i'm
ben
and this is part five so let's get into
it
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in this session today we're going to
look at how we can create a panorama of
a video
to assist us in geolocating exactly
where that video may have been filmed
when we say a panorama what we actually
mean is
a sequence of screenshots that are
linked together geographically
in relation to what we see in the video
when the camera pans around
so for example in this video that we're
looking at here
the person filming pans right around and
we can get a full
range of vision as to what features are
in the background of this video
in the foreground and the layout of this
compound where these people are
the best way to find a start point is to
have a look at which way the camera is
turning
for example in the majority of this film
the camera turns right to left
to give us a full vision of you from the
buildings and the vehicle that we can
see
to the right side of the field of vision
right around the property
until we can see that plume of smoke and
back to the building where the people
actually walked out of at the beginning
so for this panorama
i'm going to work my way from right to
left
obviously if your video or your footage
is moving from left to right
you would start your panorama in that
sequence from left to right as well
we can use software to try and create
panoramas and automate some of this
process
however i find it's not always accurate
in string together that sequence
and i like to be as perfect as possible
with stringing this sequence together
this geographic sequence
so that it will help us more in the
challenge of geolocation
just so we don't use up too much time
i'm going to speed up some of this
section and describe how i've been going
through this process
and exactly what i'm doing to link the
sequence of screenshots together
so to start with for my panorama i
always like to start with a black
background
it's easy to make you can do that in any
photoshop
utility or you can do it in which
is completely free
i use a mac so i just do a lot of this
in preview
as well which comes standard with a mac
computer the process we'll go through
throughout this video
is basically screen shotting sequences
that link together so for example a lot
of these screenshots you'll see
i always make sure that there is some
overlap and that the overlap is of
a object in the background or the
foreground something that's obvious
that i can overlay or overlap
in the panorama to make sure that the
sequencing
is correct so for example you'll see
that
i'm using the wall a lot as a measuring
tool to overlap
and sometimes i will cut the scene from
the face
of the main person seen in this footage
and work my way forwards from that to
know
and to have a little marker so in the
examples we can see
some of the the bins in the background
or the patches on the road or the trees
all of these help us sequence
our screenshots so that we can get a
proper panorama to give us a true
vision of what this actually looks like
on the ground if we were standing
there so now that we have our panorama
almost complete
what i usually like to do is to
use the transparency tool on preview so
this just allows me to remove that black
background that i was originally working
with
and make it into a transparent
background
and that will allow me to actually cut
the whole panorama
and to level it out so that we can
flatten the image rather than having it
on this angle that we've created here
and that really helps for presentation
if you're going to use this in reports
or
publishing it online or sending it to
other people
and with that we can now start to get
into the geolocation stage of actually
finding
and using this panorama to identify
where this video was filmed from
so first when we gelocate this video
what we're trying to do is find
uh where this may have been filmed or
any clues to the
location or the area so i originally got
this video from this account from ivan
sidorenko
we can see here that the video says it's
in syria
we can also see down in the description
a little bit more so again taking that
context
when we're doing the geolocation down
into the
description of the youtube video it says
video is during the eastern aleppo
offensive to recapture the thermal power
plant and surrounding areas
so i'm going to take it that maybe we
have a significant landmark that we
could look out for which is the thermal
power
plant near or in eastern aleppo
so what we can do is we can just go
straight to google
and i've typed in this search result
already
so i've typed in aleppo thermal power
plant
and we can have a look and see if we can
get a location for that so here's a
wikipedia page
and if we go down aleppo thermal power
plant
we've got some coordinates here so i'll
copy those
and we'll pop them into google maps
i'll take those coordinates now and i'll
put them into google earth as well
and just to be a little bit more
definitive about the location that we
found here
just to sort of verify that this is
indeed the thermal power plant in
eastern aleppo
we can see in the video that we have
this smoke plume coming out of the left
which could be coming from these
destroyed containers or drums or
whatever
they are and we can also see these these
silos or these these pylons over here as
well these towers
and we can see them there too so now we
can start to get into the process of
working our way backwards and
identifying where that compound
is where the video is actually being
filmed from as well
and so now we can really go through uh
google earth and because we were looking
at that smoke cloud
over there and we could see that we had
the pylons
if we go to our google earth we could
see and and
we already identified that this was the
possible location of this because we can
see
it was filmed at the aleppo thermal
power plant or in the background
but just to exactly geolocate that
compound
we can now use this and we can see that
okay that's the
smoke plume is coming from the
destruction that we saw here
and we could see the smoke stacks over
here
and so we can start to work our way
backwards from that
so if we have those positioned there
because the smoke was coming from here
the
plumes or the uh the sort of towers the
five
things here uh are on the right of that
in this image
then we can work our way backwards uh
from that
and see if we can find okay so we've got
a an
empty area there's a lot of trees on
this sort of part of it there's a lot of
trees over here and on the right of
where that
where that line would be coming back to
this
this uh person where that line would be
from the smoke
and to this person on the right of it
should be these
two buildings next to each other perhaps
this wall that finishes here
these trees or a tree-like area
so we can start to work our way
backwards from that
and see if we can identify anything
and as we've got this location here just
working my way back from
where that power plant is over
there we're now working our way back
and we found this compound here so we
could start matching up some of these
these buildings in the compound so we
have this one which is so
let's work our way from the right
actually so we have this
gap or this where a car park might be in
a little driveway into the compound
uh okay so we have that so we'll
orientate our map like this
driveway we've got some trees in the
background
yep check got that uh
we have a like a building structure over
there so that might be that
camera pans around and we can see in the
rest of this scene so
just down from that uh fair way down
from the
the entrance to this compound we have
some buildings on the inside of the
compound
okay check we can see them there not too
sure
if we can see the the tower or anything
along here
i mean the the flagpole or whatever it
was
but if we keep moving along we can see
some sort of concrete
barricade thing there
and that might have even been this
that's possibly it and that would match
up quite well because we've got
a fence line so perhaps it was being
filmed from here we have this fence line
we've got some trees over here as well
and so that's just the the power of
creating a panorama it seems like a lot
of work
but it also helps and why this also
helps is because if we're going to
present this
as a geolocation finding
we could simply take a screenshot
of this compound
which i'll select here
and then we could publish a comparison
between this panorama and this
screenshot
to say exactly why we think that this
or why we know that this is the location
and so we could even mark that up as you
know the entrance to the driveway here
these two buildings this possible little
wall and we can really figure out
almost down to the square meter or
square 5 meter or square 10 meters
exactly where the person that was
filming this
was standing when that video was being
filmed
and that's really useful for open source
investigations open source intelligence
and just general research for anything
you're looking at
when you're trying to find a location
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you