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Ask Slashdot: How To Determine If a Video Has Been Faked?

Posted by timothy on from the justice-for-marion-barry dept.

BStorm writes "The Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has been making headlines around the world, for allegedly smoking crack. This story was first broken by gawker.com, which is now crowd-funding $200,000 to buy the video in question. What do you look for to determine if a video has been faked? Of course I am only interested in the technical details and not the tawdry details related to this case ;) I live in Toronto, so the video still frame posted on Gawker certainly does look like Rob Ford."

2 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Physics. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Faking a video by photoshopping it together from other video sources would indeed be rather hard to do convincingly. However, why bother with photoshopping? Just get a lookalike actor and a decent makeup technician, and produce a perfectly "real" low-fi home video. Especially when the subject is supposed to be whacked out of their gourd on drugs, you don't need to meticulously recreate their familiar sober style of speech and body-language.

  2. Re:it's really really hard by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The moon landing could not have been faked because:

    The USSR.

    (unless your conspiracy theory includes the Russians using their own space tech to observe no moon landing taking place, and then deciding not to tell anyone, because they were secretly best buddies with the USA)