One standard for the record.
Every island, every job.
Three questions worth asking any videographer.
Who's behind the camera?
When you book a videographer, you're trusting someone you've never met with the only video record of the testimony. I'm Andrew Graves. I shot depositions in the Bay Area and Sacramento for about ten years before moving to Hawaiʻi, roughly two hundred a year. A lot of IP work with firms you'd recognize. Social media cases, asbestos, employment. Some of it you've read about. Those are the ones I can't name.
I get to the room an hour early. The hour covers setup, a full sound check, and whatever the room throws at us, so we go on the record on time. Most rooms are a hotel conference room, a law firm, or a court reporting office. Sometimes it's a living room or a doctor's office.
I prefer a cross-table shot and set up on one corner with the reporter at the end and the taking attorney next to the camera. It's their depo, though, and they can move me. The witness sits across from the camera, straight on, not a profile. I introduce myself, show them where to sit, clip the lav on, and remind them it comes off when we stop. People forget.
What happens to the card after the depo?
The card stays in the camera body until it's in a locked Pelican case. Nobody handles it but the videographer on the job.
I image it the same day, home or on another island. One NIST-tested write-blocked card reader does the work. The tool writes an E01 forensic image and verifies it against the source.
Hashing is part of every in-person job. It's there so authenticating the video later doesn't have to mean hiring an outside expert. If a recording gets challenged two years from now or five, the work is already done and the answer already exists. The E01 image and hash certificate are available as an authentication package, and it can be ordered at any time since the hash values were created the day of the job.
Clients don't touch the SD card. They don't need to.
Who controls the recording?
One attorney can put us on the record. It takes consensus to go off.
Usually one side asks, and I wait two or three seconds for the other side to object. If nobody does, we go off. If someone does, we keep rolling.
The only time I stop on my own is a technical failure. I say so on the record, explain what's wrong, and we go off until it's sorted. Two independent recorders run the whole time, so a single failure can't take out the record.
Both rules come down to the same thing. The videographer is neutral, and the record shows exactly what happened.