A few years ago, I was working on a case with a large investigative firm in New York.

It was a big case with big implications.

While the investigative team had some big breakthroughs during the course of the investigation, one of the key elements of the case was the surveillance video.

And we’re not just talking about one camera covering one position. We’re talking hundreds of hours, covering more than 20 cameras in a massive office building.

The surveillance video, which tracked the movements of everyone in the building, was a critical component of the case. But sloshing through hundreds of hours of video would take hundreds upon hundreds of man hours. Time that we didn’t really have and an expense that the client didn’t want to pay for unless there was some compelling reason.

At first we tried the easy way, like looking at key moments and video taken from key camera positions. But we couldn’t find that smoking gun.

One late night, about 10 p.m., the lead investigator and I were looking at the surveillance video together. I found what I thought seemed like something interesting.

I asked her, “Take a look at this. Do you see what I see?”

For the next 10 minutes, we sat in near silence, watching the video over and over again—forwards, backwards, and from different angles and speeds, all of which effectively showed the exact thing that we had been trying to find all along.

Then she turned to me and said, “This is about as close to investigative porn as you can get.”

It was. Not in a Jenna Jameson sort of way, but it was a moment of pure joy. Totally exhilarating.

I can literally remember it like it was yesterday.

That night, after watching the video, we packed our bags and headed home.

That moment helped convince the client that we needed to analyze every single movement of every single individual in the video and catalog their whereabouts and locations, who they were meeting with and other critical details.

We spent the next few months looking at the hundreds of hours of surveillance videos and conducting interviews, surveillance and investigations on everyone and everything involved, ultimately gathering some valuable facts and evidence to obtain a favorable settlement for the client.

While that “investigative porn” moment didn’t turn out to be the most critical piece of evidence in the end, it didn’t really matter.

It was still unforgettable. It literally turned the case on it’s head.

I just wish moments like that happened more often.