posted on May, 4 2008 @ 09:56 PM
reply to post by Threadfall
I don't have a high quality version of the video to review and I wonder if there is more to this video than what we have already seen. One thing that
tells me it was not superimposed are the sharp movements of the camera. The video itself seems very amatuer, probably shot with a lightweight consumer
grade camera. I don't know what kind of camera was used but if it was a Canon it might have an orange tone to it if it was a Sony it should have a
pretty good optical zoom and a somewhat clear picture.
Anyhow, the editor who I quoted earlier mentioned that he did have a high quality video to look at. One of the things he mentioned was pixelation.
This is one clue you can look for if you are trying to decide whether a video has been super imposed or not. One thing that I noticed is that the
pixelation of the object as it is exiting WTC is that it maintains the same consistency of the quality of the rest of the video. It is actually a bit
blurry around the edges which makes me think that it was not superimposed. If it was super imposed you would see crisp smooth edges around the
object.
Another thing to look for is interlacing. On a TV motion is captured by interlacing. IN other words even horizontal fields would be on frame two while
the odd fields would be on frame one. This is easy to notice when you hit the pause button but hard to see when it is playing at regular speed.
If you scrub the clip to the part where the object is closest to the chopper you will notice that it is interlaced and also blurry. The blurriness is
due to the speed the object was moving, the interlacing is just normal though but it leaves us a clue that this was not just photoshopped in or added
in.
Also when you are working with keying, you can tell the computer to ignore certain colors. The most commonly used are Blue Screen and Green screen or
a luma key which keys out white or black.
Usually it is easy to tell if something is green screened because you will see color around the edges and they will often be aliased meaning that you
can see little squares or missing pixel data aroun the edges.
I did not see any of this, so if this was CG they did a really good job. Furthermore if it was CG'd the frame where the projectile is closest would
not have been blurry, unless they had the forsight to go in and make it look that way. The object in motion is consisten with the rest of the video,
which makes me believe that this was not superimposed.
There is one more thing I can try however. I can pull the video into my editor and apply a couple different filters to it, that should give me a
visual clue if the video has been manipulated or not.