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

Windows Movie Maker

[buy59]

If you want to edit or create videos, there's no better software than Windows Movie Maker. Create real or faked videos - it's all possible.

Re:Windows Movie Maker

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Yes, fake movies are best produced with a fake movie editor.

The pixels!

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually look at the pixels. I've seen a lot of them in my time, so I can usually tell when they're fake.

Re:The pixels!

[Khyber]

At least we don't go accusing the wrong people of blowing people up, unlike Reddit.

At least we don't start witch hunts, unlike Reddit.

At least we focus on technology, unlike Reddit.

Re:The pixels!

[Chris Mattern]

Indeed. Just the other day, I spotted a #7F7F7F, and knew right away I was looking at a fake.

I dunno. Seems like kind of a gray area, to me.

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:it's really really hard

[gstoddart]

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

Of course, even easier is the science behind the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment.

Since it relies on placing a retro-reflector in a known position on the lunar surface, and understanding the physics behind it, you'd have had to have been there to do it.

Of course, for those who believe the moon landing was fake (or anything else which involves a blatant denial of science), no amount of refutation of their claims is ever going to work -- they're too invested in their beliefs to be swayed by facts.

Re:it's really really hard

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:it's really really hard

[Minwee]

This is the same guy who spent over a decade refusing to report his expenses as a City Councillor, kept his election spending secret until a municipal auditor forced him to reveal that he had spent far more than he was legally allowed to, and was impeached last year after taking bribes from companies that did business with the city. Rather than pay back $3150 (about one week's pay for him) when asked to and making the entire issue go away, he insisted on a lengthy court battle which cost the city and province over $100,000, demonstrated that he really didn't know what the words "Conflict of Interest" meant even when they did bite him in the butt (repeatedly), and was finally removed from office by the Ontario Superior Court. A second, taxpayer-funded appeal overturned that decision, allowing his royal Fordness to continue showing respect for taxpayers and cutting the waste out of government spending.

Doing things the hard way isn't just a habit for Rob Ford, it's a way of life. He has a history of not doing the right thing even after every possible alternative has been exhausted -- He just makes up new things to do wrong. When confronted with a middle-aged woman dressed as Xena who tried to interview him for the CBC, he had a choice between talking to her or saying "No comment" and walking away. Instead, he called 911 and demanded that the police arrest her because, after all, he pays their salaries. When the story went public he insisted that he had done nothing wrong and certainly hadn't requested special treatment. All he needed to do to prove this was to ask that the recording of his 911 call be released to the public and he would be completely in the clear and never have to worry about it again.

Know what? I still haven't heard that recording. And I'm not holding my breath on seeing any kind of drug test or medical report either.

Re:it's really really hard

[gl4ss]

well,

actually they(moon landing conspiracy theorists) believe that USA and USSR did everything in orchestration, even the fall of the USSR.
and well, everyone in europe being in the same conspiracy boat as well. they think that pretty much everyone else is "in" the conspiracy.
it's pretty hard to explain why they would fake the space race though whilst staying sensible at all, so quite many of them seem to believe in UFO's as well - and in that the government has antigravity technology they received from the aliens and that the space race was just a diversion.

it snowballs pretty quickly... which might be an indication that they did go to the moon.

Re:it's really really hard

[MozeeToby]

Ok, first and foremost, we landed on the moon. I'm not arguing that we didn't. I'm not an idiot. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. If John Glenn reads this I kindly ask that he not punch me in the face.

Now. All a retro reflector proves is that we landed something on the moon. Landing 'something' is a lot easier than landing people. The Russians could have very trivially mounted a retro reflector to their lunar rover and we could bounce lasers off them the exact same way you can bounce lasers off the reflectors the Apollo astronauts left behind. There are many good pieces of evidence to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that a manned lunar landing happened; the Lunar Ranging Experiment isn't one of them.

Simple test

[Alomex]

Q: Has the person appearing on it sued the pants off the holders?

Yes: Probably fake

No: Most likely genuine

Re:Physics.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's all a misunderstanding.

[Minwee]

What Mayor Ford doesn't want to admit is that the video is real, but it was taken while he was in the middle of secret negotiations with rival Toronto and Scarborough gangs. Ford was trying to broker a peace treaty and also recruit the gang members to work as the city's new sanitation engineering team, allowing him to cut the fat at city hall and pass on the savings to the taxpayers he respects.

Due to the tense nature of the meetings and the highly strung personalities present, Ford was loathe to bring something so provocative and weapon-shaped as his asthma inhaler, so he had no choice but to settle for a large glass pipe filled with prescription corticosteroids.

To minimize the possibility of rival gangs finding out about the meetings, all discussions were conducted in code. When he said "Justin Trudeau’s a fag", what he really meant was "I agree with your interpretation of paragraph seventeen, but I still feel that it contradicts the spirit of section seven which is also laid out in the preamble" and "those kids are just effing minorities" was a code phrase for "We cannot compromise on the issue of banked sick days, and have you ever been to the Russian Tearoom on Adelaide? Their curried chicken salad is to die for."

It's all quite obvious when you look at it. It's just the vast left wing media conspiracy that is trying to blow it out of proportion and make it look like something inappropriate.

Wasted money

[onyxruby]

Gawker is spending $200,000 to get a rise out of embarrassing a politician. It would be far to use it for something such as donating to the EFF, fighting the next SOPA or some other similar cause. Donating personal money for this cause is something only a tool would do.

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.

First, the process of elimination.

[VortexCortex]

Does the video include footage of a female having an orgasm?