Abstract: The present invention relates to a field inspection system (100) for compressing video signals received from a field inspection video camera (14) into compressed video data and for burning the compressed video data on a compact disc (118) along with an electronic logsheet. The electronic logsheet includes a listing of suspected defects or anomalies and associated pointers to reference frames in the compressed video data. The electronic logsheet may be displayed and an operator may access a portion of the field inspection video showing a listed defect by clicking a mouse button (116) when a pointer icon is positioned on the listed defect. To perform this task, the present invention utilizes a technique for randomly accessing the compressed video data in which reference frames included therein are used as access points to the video footage.