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

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."

Comments

it's really really hard

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Here's a blog post on why the moon landing could not have been faked.

http://www.geek.com/news/why-it-was-impossible-to-fake-the-1969-moon-landing-1537386/

It's fairly similar reasons why the Ford Video is real, and explains why His Immensity hasn't had anything to say since the story broke.

Re:Physics.

[PapayaSF]

Just get a lookalike actor and a decent makeup technician, and produce a perfectly "real" low-fi home video.

And, indeed, there was an online ad Looking for a Rob Ford look alike/imposter (Toronto), though it seems to date from January 2012, and of course it may be entirely unrelated.