FAQs

  • Video redaction software

  • Secure Redact’s data, security and usage

  • Responding to DSARs

  • Pricing FAQs

  • Secure Redact app FAQs, including System performance and App usage questions

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Video redaction software

  • Video redaction is the anonymization of personal and other sensitive data in video to protect the privacy of individual subjects. It is carried out for a range of reasons including data subject access requests, to allow 3rd party processing of video data and to facilitate wider data sharing and collaboration.

    1. Collect the relevant section of video footage that needs redacting.

    2. Upload the video file for automatic face and license plate detection.

    3. Review the automatic detections overlaid on the video.

    4. Add new detections and tracks for additional objects (if required).

    5. Unselect any detected individuals or objects that you do not want to anonymize (if required).

    6. Redact and export the final anonymized video.

  • If you’re unsure about whether to pick a cloud-based SaaS solution for your video redaction, find out more here.

  • Our ML platform is world-leading in its ability to classify and anonymise personal and sensitive content. As a result, our solution is:

    • 200x faster than manual editing solutions. This means a 20min CCTV video which would usually take 8-12 days to manually edit and redact, will take 20 mins to process.

    • Cost-saving. For the same 20min video, this could save £1.4k - £2.2k per short video with Secure Redact, based on average cost per hour of manual redaction time.

    • World-leading accuracy. Better accuracy means less time for you spent editing; freeing up your time to focus on other duties.

Responding to DSARs

  • Read our step-by-step of how to respond to video DSARs here.

  • Read our step-by-step of how to respond to video DSARs in schools, here.

  • Read our step-by-step of how to respond to video DSARs in the NHS, here.

Data, security and usage

  • From our infrastructure, to customer deployment, to data storage and usage, Secure Redact follows UK and EU GDPR compliance.

    With regards to HIPAA compliance and how we process PHI data, we have completed SOC 2 Type 2 which includes ensuring proper management of personal information (including PHI).

    We work with a specialist security partner to perform regular audits and penetration testing via a grey-box approach. We have strict internal policies and practices in place to minimise data risks as much as possible. For more information, please contact us.

  • At Pimloc, we understand the critical importance of safeguarding sensitive criminal justice information. That's why we've implemented rigorous security protocols to ensure CJIS compliance. By adhering to the CJIS Security Policy's mandates regarding data encryption, access controls, audit logging, and physical security, we provide our clients with the confidence that their data is handled with the utmost care and in full accordance with federal regulations.

  • Our data processing is only ever for the customer’s redaction purposes. To find out more about how Secure Redact collects, uses, processes, stores and securely deletes video, please visit our page on Secure Redact’s Data Processing.

  • Here are our US Terms and Conditions, and our Terms and Conditions for all other businesses.

  • Here is our US Privacy Policy and our Privacy Policy for all other businesses.

Pricing questions

  • Pricing is based on Credits, which work across all file types — 1 credit covers 1 minute of video, 5 minutes of audio, 30 images, or 10 documents (credits are per document, not per page).

    Sign up for free and get 10 credits to try the platform — no credit card needed. From there you can top up as you go, or subscribe to a monthly or annual plan for a set credit allowance each month.

    • Free trial — 10 one-off credits on sign-up, top up at any time

    • Subscriptions — Basic, Pro or Advanced, billed monthly or annually

    • Top-up credits — available on any plan, valid for 6 months

    For larger volumes or multi-user teams, we have a range of Enterprise plans. Get in touch to discuss your requirements.

  • To learn more about Secure Redact Enterprise, please get in contact to discuss your requirements.

  • For all payments, we use Stripe. Accepted methods are: Visa, Mastercard, American Express and China UnionPay payments from customers worldwide - as well as Apple, Google Wallets and Bank Redirects.

  • If you need an invoice, please get in contact with us.

  • No — there's no credit card required to sign up and nothing is charged automatically.

    You get 10 credits once when you sign up. These are a one-off trial allowance — they don't renew each month. Once they're used, your account moves to a zero-credit plan and you won't be charged anything. You can top up or upgrade to a paid plan whenever you're ready.

    Paid plans can be cancelled or upgraded at any time. One thing to note — if you switch from monthly to annual billing, the annual payment is charged immediately rather than at the start of your next month.

  • It depends on how much you redact each month. As a rough guide:

    • Pay as you go works well if your usage is occasional or unpredictable — top up at £7.00 | $9.00 per credit on the free trial, or at a lower rate on any paid plan

    • A subscription makes more sense if you're redacting regularly — from £59 | $79 per month you get a set credit allowance and a lower top-up rate if you need more

    You can upgrade, downgrade or cancel at any time, so there's no risk in starting small and adjusting as your needs change.

  • Just head to the top right corner of the app — you'll find the top up and upgrade options there.

  • You can either top up with additional credits to keep going straight away, or upgrade to a higher plan if your usage has increased on an ongoing basis. Both options are available in the top right corner of the app, or please get in contact to discuss your needs.

  • No — any unused monthly credits expire at the start of your next billing month.

    However, any top-up credits you've purchased during that month, will last 6 months after date of purchase.

  • Once you cancel, you won't be billed for the following month — there's no deadline to cancel by. Your plan credits stay active until the end of your current billing period, after which any unused credits expire. Any top-up credits you've purchased are unaffected and stay on your account.

    If you've paid annually, remaining months are non-refundable.

    At the end of your billing period, your account moves to a zero-credit plan. Your account and uploaded files remain intact — you'll just need an active plan to process new content.

  • Your uploaded files stay in your account — cancelling doesn't delete anything. You'll still be able to view and edit them, you just won't be able to process new content without an active plan.

    If you want to delete your account entirely, email us at info@secureredact.ai.

    Under Pimloc's terms, files associated with accounts inactive for 60 days may be deleted. If you need secure deletion before that point, just get in touch and we'll sort it.

  • Sales tax policies vary across countries and US States. Please get in contact to discuss your tax status and required documentation.

Secure Redact app FAQs

System performance, Admin FAQs and App usage questions

System performance

  • Secure Redact is powered by a type of AI called deep learning; the system's algorithms have been specially trained to automatically detect personal data in security video footage. All you need to do to get started is to upload a video and the Secure Redact system will automatically find all the faces and number plates in each frame of your video (or image), you can then quickly check the results and either blur all detected content or select which people to anonymise. The redacted video can then be downloaded and used as required.

  • We have options for API integrations or for larger customers, on-premise and private cloud deployments. Please get in contact with us to find out more.

  • There are four stages to processing:

    • Initial video upload - this depends on the upload bandwidth of your connection.

    • Conversion of your video into a format suitable for processing.

    • Automatic detection of PII content in the video.

    • Redacting video footage.

    As a rule of thumb, overall processing should take around 2x longer than the video - this will vary depending on the frame rate of your video.

  • The audio transcription time can vary, depending on the length of the audio; however, it is usually quicker than the audio time itself.

  • Given the diversity of CCTV, Body worn and dash cam footage, no solution will ever be 100% accurate across all real-world video content, but that is something we are striving towards.

    Secure Redact models return maximum recall is currently exceeding 99% of identifiable PII in security video.

    Find out more about the accuracy of our solutions here.

  • Detecting all faces and number plates in all frames in a video is a difficult challenge, even for a machine. An hour of video footage from a busy scene can contain around 2 million individual faces (if you add all faces that appear in each frame together); even at 99.9% accuracy an algorithm would still miss 2k faces – missed faces may occur from acute changes in head position, lighting, movement and occlusion. Very small faces may also be missed, if they are unrecognisable due to low resolution. The application has a suite of editing tools so you can quickly review overlaid detections on each video. If required you can then quickly add additional detection boxes or individual tracks. If you do pick-up any missed detections, please let us know as we are continually improving service performance for these cases.

  • CCTV and other security footage tends to include noisy scenes with high levels of occlusion and movement. Video is captured on a wide variety of lenses, camera angles, and camera mounting positions, and with varying resolution/quality. These variances across footage can have an impact on Secure Redact's ability to detect people and number plates if a more unique video angle or context is uploaded. If the face and number-plate detection performance is not as expected for your video please get in contact, and we will endeavour to update our algorithms to take into account your specific style of content.

  • Secure Redact is an ML platform designed around responsible video and audio management, with lots of varying capabilities. This includes automated live video redaction, selective audio redaction, high-quality metadata and video analytics. To find out more, please get in contact.

  • There is currently no smartphone app due to the complexities of redacting video and audio on a small screen, but please get in contact to discuss your requirements.

  • The length of video you upload firstly depends on what usage plan you have - usage is metered per minute of video you upload.

    Shorter videos will be faster to process but you can upload multi-hour videos (e.g. 6 - 10 hours). However, this will take longer depending on your internet speed and your subscription plan with us (Enterprise and Advanced users have priority on jobs).

    If you have an extremely long video, we would recommend splitting it into smaller hour-long increments and uploading each separately.

Admin FAQs

  • For the Secure Redact user guide, visit Using Secure Redact.

  • Secure Redact is a cloud processing solution, the application runs in a local web browser. Secure Redact supports web browsers: Chrome & Firefox.

  • All major video file formats including 'mp4', 'mov', 'avi', 'webm', 'wmv', 'mpeg', ‘3gp’ and ‘mkv’. If you have a file format that is not currently supported please get in contact and we will look into adding it.

    All redacted videos are downloaded in MP4 format.

  • All major audio file formats including '.mp3', '.wav', '.ogg', '.m4a', '.aac', '.webm', ‘.3gp’ and ‘.3g2’.

    If you have a file format that is not currently supported please get in contact and we will look into adding it.

    All redacted audio files are downloaded in MP3 format.

  • The image formats that are supported are: ‘.jpg’, ‘.jpeg’, ‘jp2’ and ‘.png’. If you have a file format that is not currently supported please get in contact and we will look into adding it.

  • Yes, Secure Redact can redact individual images as well as video files. Single images are metered as 1 second of upload.

  • Your work autosaves every 10 seconds as indicated by the updating text at the bottom of the page. When you flick between videos in the Video List or if you refresh the page, your work will also save automatically.

    We recommend before logging out, checking that the last save was at its most recent.

  • Secure Redact currently supports SSO for Google and Microsoft. Please get in contact to find out more.

  • If you’re having trouble connecting to the app, or you’re not getting verification/password reset emails from us, check these 4 things:

    1. Are you using Google Chrome? Make sure you are.

    2. Is your browser up to date? Update it to be fully secure.

    3. Have you cleared your cookies and caches?

    4. Is our domain (https://app.secureredact.co.uk for EU/UK users or http://app.secureredact.usfor US users) whitelisted by your IT department?

    If you have checked all 4 things and are still having issues, please contact us at support@secureredact.ai.

  • To change or reset your password, go back to the login page, and click “Forgotten password?”.

    If you have logged in to Secure Redact using SSO, you must change your password for that SSO to reset it.

  • For daily reports on any incidents within the Secure Redact app, visit our live page here, where you can also subscribe for updates.

  • When using the Secure Redact application your video is rendered in lower resolution in the browser to allow for faster review, editing and response of the application. Your final downloaded video will be the same resolution as the original video that was uploaded. The final file size of the downloaded video will vary from the original as pixelated faces contain less data than the original segments (if there are lots of large faces in all the frames this could be a significant file size saving) and there may be some variance in output compression levels (Secure Redact outputs either a high, medium or low compression level to best match the input quality, bit-rate, from the original video). All redacted videos are downloaded in MP4 format.

    If you have more specific output compression requirements please feel free to get in contact.

  • Error code 500 = an internal server error.

    Try refreshing the app, and if the error code still persists, please contact us.

    Error code 401 = unauthorised error.

    This usually happens when your session has been logged out. The Secure Redact app will automatically log you out of your account after a prolonged period of non-activity - to provide additional security protection for your account. You can try logging out and logging back in to resolve this. If the error persists, please contact us.

  • If you get a notification in-app saying that there are not enough minutes remaining, this means that you need to upgrade your subscription or top up your credits. Do this in-app via your account (top right).

App usage questions

  • REDACTION BOX = the area of a face, license plate or object that will be redacted, within one singular frame.

    TRACK = a consecutive set of redaction boxes following the same face, license plate or object throughout the video, ready for redaction.

    Once you have uploaded your video, it will appear in the video player. The orange boxes overlaid onto faces and license plates in the video player are the redaction boxes and tracks - i.e. the faces and license plates that will be blurred in your final, downloaded video.

  • You can flick between videos whilst the system is adding redaction boxes to one video. A blue notification will appear at the top once the redaction boxes are complete.

  • If you’re on the Advanced subscription plan, or you are a Secure Redact Enterprise customer, you can trim/clip videos upon upload (simply click advanced settings).

    However, if you are on the Free trial or Pro subscription plan, this is not possible.

  • When you upload a file to Secure Redact, you can trim video or audio on upload via the “Advanced settings” (under Auto Detect).

    *Only Advanced and Enterprise users have access to this feature.

  • All users can trim or clip a video or audio file after upload. Only clipped sections will be exported for download when clicking “Export”.

    To trim or clip a video or audio file after upload, go to the Redact Panel.

    1. Click the + button next to Clip.

    2. Type in start and end times for clips, or click “Set to current time” to change to the current video or audio frame.

  • If an individual appears at the beginning of the video and then again at the end they will have two individual tracks. Depending on the quality of uploaded video, sometimes there may be multiple tracks for the same individual in subsequent frames.

  • Videos CANNOT be unblurred when processed with Secure Redact.

    Each frame of a video is an image. An image is made up of pixels. The process of redaction alters the original pixel data within an image. The information in the redacted regions has been destroyed. The original pixel data cannot be retrieved from the redacted version. For videos this process is applied on every frame to generate a redacted video. The redaction algorithm used is unique to Secure Redact and is dependant on the input image data and random injection to ensure it can't be reversed.

  • If you need to make the redaction boxes (orange boxes) larger to include hair, clothes or other pieces of PII not in the box(es), go to the Redact Panel on the right.

    You can increase the box size of all boxes at once, in the Box enlargement section. Then click Export to include the box enlargement in your final, redacted video.

  • Even though your audio may be 100% transcribed, the detection for redaction in the video may still be processing. If it has been a while and the processing is still incomplete, please contact us.

  • If you have an upload error, your video has failed to upload or the redaction is “stuck”, please check that your video is in one of these approved formats: 'mp4', 'mov', 'avi', 'webm', 'wmv', 'mpeg', ‘3gp’ and ‘mkv’.

    If it is not, please convert it to one of the above approved formats, or contact us and we will look into adding it.

    If it is already one of the approved formats and if your videos looks like its stuck 'converting’, this may be because the system may take a few minutes to scale up. If you get a 'failed' message, please get in contact.

  • If your video is glitching or there are issues when you have uploaded it to the app, do the following:

    • Make sure it is in the correct format.

    • Try playing it on your local machine to check there aren’t any issues.

    If you are still experiencing problems, please contact us.

  • If it looks like the whole screen is redacted, you may have accidentally toggled a Spotlight track. Look out for a track in the timeline with a repeat circular pattern on it. Click on it and then click Toggle Spotlight from the Toolbar, to untoggle it.

  • If you are trying to only blur a few faces and leave everyone blurred, click Select All, next to the filter button in the Timeline.

    Then click one of the eye icons to unredact everyone. Afterwards, you can re-click the eye icons in the corresponding rows of the people you want to redact.

  • If you are trying to unredact all the boxes together, click Select All, next to the filter button in the Timeline.

    Then click one of the eye icons to unredact everyone. Afterwards, you can re-click the eye icons in the corresponding rows of the people you want to redact.