Some real-life video fakery in which I personally participated

[ktesibios]

Sorry to disappoint, but it wasn't a video of a terrorist attack, or a plane crash or anything historic.

It was a Bar Mitzvah, or, more specifically, a party for a kid who had just made his Bar Mitzvah. Here's the story:

Way back when I was working at Sigma Sound in Philly, we did a lot of VAPP (audio post-production for video) work. One of our occasional clients was a local videographer who eked out a paycheck filming things like weddings, graduations, Bar Mitzvahs and so on in between gigs shooting for TV commercials and suchlike.

He had been hired to film the (very expensive) party, and Something Went Wrong. When he got his tapes back to the office he discovered that while he had lots of great picture, the sound was totally missing. No audio at all.

This left him with three options:

1. Tell his client "Sorry, I screwed up and can't provide a finished edit. Here's your money back".
2. Add some title cards written in old-timey typefaces and a tinny piano track and see if the clients would go for the "silent movie" look.
3. Find some way to fix the problem.

Since there was no recorded audio at all, the only way to "fix" the video was to create an entirely new (and fake) soundtrack from scratch. He brought the problem to us.

We contacted the DJ who had worked the party and discovered that he was one of these annoyingly organized types. He still had his playlist from that gig, which made it possible to recreate- exactly- the music played at the party. We brought him into the studio and had him do just that.

The videographer did a very careful edit, to ensure that the final cut had lots of footage of people drinking and dancing and no shots of anyone identifiable saying anything- to avoid having a watcher go "hey- that's not Uncle Joe's voice!".

We filled in the soundtrack with crowd and party sound effects from our extensive SFX library and Foleyed what we needed to. At one point I found myself standing in the back hallway (where we had run mic and headphone cables to capture the reflective ambience) with a pair of headphones on, clapping in time to "Hava Nagila" in company with a few assistant engineers and the receptionist. I still remember the engineer's comment on our sense of time- "My God, you people are white".

We edited it all together, laid it back to the video master and gave it to our client. He gave copies to his clients and...

They didn't notice a thing. We totally got away with it.

Is there a point to this episode of "Weird Uncle Ktesibios tells another of his boring stories"? Yes, and it is this:

The standard-issue troofer reply to the question "If the collapses of WTC1, 2 and 7 were 'controlled demolitions', why do none of the many videos of the collapses record the sound of explosive charges detonating, which we would logically expect were there any charges?" seems to be "the government altered the sound tracks by removing the explosions". When challenged to explain just how one removes the highest-amplitude, broadband signals in a recording without producing any artifacts that would give the game away, the answer is invariably a load of handwaving that assumes the existence of tools with near-magical powers- tools which are, for some reason, unknown to the pro audio community.

What puzzles me is why CTers would prefer a narrative which requires the existence and use of powers which have little to no plausibility to professionals in the field (cf. anything claimed by Judy Wood or her acolytes about DEW and the opinions of actual aerospace engineers) when the sane way of keeping an embarrassing soundtrack out of public hearing while disseminating the video portion is just to make a whole new soundtrack from scratch and consign the old one to the bit bucket.

If, as we have already seen, a mediocre job of SFX editing for a TV movie about Rudy Giulani is good enough to fool troofers into thinking it's a "smoking gun", a well thought out job by actual professionals should do for people of normal intelligence.

So what's behind this insistence on the Omnipotence of teh Eevil Conspiracy? Is it a naive technophilia which assumes that anything can be accomplished by tippy-tapping away at a keyboard? Or an equally naive technophobia which assumes that the purpose of humanity's history of toolmaking is always aimed at facilitating evildoing? Is is that so much of the public's idea of science and technology is entirely manufactured by movie scriptwriters?

Or do we have, somewhere down in our psyches, a need to believe that Teh Bad Guys are super-villains?

Anyone have an idea?

 

[newton3376]

Sorry to disappoint, but it wasn't a video of a terrorist attack, or a plane crash or anything historic.

It was a Bar Mitzvah, or, more specifically, a party for a kid who had just made his Bar Mitzvah. Here's the story:

Way back when I was working at Sigma Sound in Philly, we did a lot of VAPP (audio post-production for video) work. One of our occasional clients was a local videographer who eked out a paycheck filming things like weddings, graduations, Bar Mitzvahs and so on in between gigs shooting for TV commercials and suchlike.

He had been hired to film the (very expensive) party, and Something Went Wrong. When he got his tapes back to the office he discovered that while he had lots of great picture, the sound was totally missing. No audio at all.

This left him with three options:

1. Tell his client "Sorry, I screwed up and can't provide a finished edit. Here's your money back".
2. Add some title cards written in old-timey typefaces and a tinny piano track and see if the clients would go for the "silent movie" look.
3. Find some way to fix the problem.

Since there was no recorded audio at all, the only way to "fix" the video was to create an entirely new (and fake) soundtrack from scratch. He brought the problem to us.

We contacted the DJ who had worked the party and discovered that he was one of these annoyingly organized types. He still had his playlist from that gig, which made it possible to recreate- exactly- the music played at the party. We brought him into the studio and had him do just that.

The videographer did a very careful edit, to ensure that the final cut had lots of footage of people drinking and dancing and no shots of anyone identifiable saying anything- to avoid having a watcher go "hey- that's not Uncle Joe's voice!".

We filled in the soundtrack with crowd and party sound effects from our extensive SFX library and Foleyed what we needed to. At one point I found myself standing in the back hallway (where we had run mic and headphone cables to capture the reflective ambience) with a pair of headphones on, clapping in time to "Hava Nagila" in company with a few assistant engineers and the receptionist. I still remember the engineer's comment on our sense of time- "My God, you people are white".

We edited it all together, laid it back to the video master and gave it to our client. He gave copies to his clients and...

They didn't notice a thing. We totally got away with it.

Is there a point to this episode of "Weird Uncle Ktesibios tells another of his boring stories"? Yes, and it is this:

The standard-issue troofer reply to the question "If the collapses of WTC1, 2 and 7 were 'controlled demolitions', why do none of the many videos of the collapses record the sound of explosive charges detonating, which we would logically expect were there any charges?" seems to be "the government altered the sound tracks by removing the explosions". When challenged to explain just how one removes the highest-amplitude, broadband signals in a recording without producing any artifacts that would give the game away, the answer is invariably a load of handwaving that assumes the existence of tools with near-magical powers- tools which are, for some reason, unknown to the pro audio community.

What puzzles me is why CTers would prefer a narrative which requires the existence and use of powers which have little to no plausibility to professionals in the field (cf. anything claimed by Judy Wood or her acolytes about DEW and the opinions of actual aerospace engineers) when the sane way of keeping an embarrassing soundtrack out of public hearing while disseminating the video portion is just to make a whole new soundtrack from scratch and consign the old one to the bit bucket.

If, as we have already seen, a mediocre job of SFX editing for a TV movie about Rudy Giulani is good enough to fool troofers into thinking it's a "smoking gun", a well thought out job by actual professionals should do for people of normal intelligence.

So what's behind this insistence on the Omnipotence of teh Eevil Conspiracy? Is it a naive technophilia which assumes that anything can be accomplished by tippy-tapping away at a keyboard? Or an equally naive technophobia which assumes that the purpose of humanity's history of toolmaking is always aimed at facilitating evildoing? Is is that so much of the public's idea of science and technology is entirely manufactured by movie scriptwriters?

Or do we have, somewhere down in our psyches, a need to believe that Teh Bad Guys are super-villains?

Anyone have an idea?

I do have an idea.

They are retarded.

 

[ElMondoHummus]

"My God, you people are white".
What puzzles me is why CTers would prefer a narrative which requires the existence and use of powers which have little to no plausibility to professionals in the field (cf. anything claimed by Judy Wood or her acolytes about DEW and the opinions of actual aerospace engineers) when the sane way of keeping an embarrassing soundtrack out of public hearing while disseminating the video portion is just to make a whole new soundtrack from scratch and consign the old one to the bit bucket.

Or do we have, somewhere down in our psyches, a need to believe that Teh Bad Guys are super-villains?

Anyone have an idea?

I look at it like this: These folks fancy either themselves, or their "heros" as being Sherlock Holmesian in their ability to pick out the anomalies in a story. 9/11 trutherism is, in fact, not a hobby involving learning history, it's a hobby learning how to examine detail with an eye towards rebuilding purposely selected and isolated ones into something resembling an alternate narrative. Nevermind that they must miscast or misinterpret the context and import of those details to do so. I mean, we see this every time we're here; look at how all the conspiracy peddlers in the forum keep on harping on what they see as wrong or contradictory in minute detail. The anomalies are what are important to them. The point here is that hypothesizing that the original soundtrack was deleted wouldn't allow them to pat themselves on the back for identifying all the "anomalies" they believe exist in the original soundtrack to begin with. They believe there are "clues" in any of the 9/11 material as presented to the population, and furthermore they believe they're the only ones sharp enough to perceive the clues. In short, throwing out the genuine soundtrack means throwing out the anomalies they intend to find.

There are examples of this everywhere else in this subforum. In another realm, look at how David Chandler's fans tout the "free fall of WTC 7" over and over. Sure, there was an identifiable period in the collapse where there was no resistance. But it was only a period, wasn't the whole collapse, and can be accounted for by a section of the tower falling as a unit. In fact, the whole idea that it was only a period really negates the idea that explosives demolitions were involved, unless the excuse is that it would've only been a partial demolition . But it doesn't change the overall narrative; it only provides a piece of interesting detail.

But Chandler's fans think otherwise. They present it as some sort of proof that demolitions were involved. Nevermind that this doesn't prove that at all; it's as if NIST said ''X' is around a pound' and the truthers said 'Chandler proved it was 15.5 ounces; NIST is wrong!'. The minute analysis leading to that detail does not oncover anything more than additional detail: Several floors fell as a unit, instead of separately. That's the story. But the 'free fall' is an anomaly on which they can hang conspiratorial proposals.

To sum things up: They don't come up with simplest answers to things such as the soundtrack because doing so eliminates their ability to relate their distortions to facts of the case. That's really the bottom line.

"My God, you people are white".

Dude, you all can't carry a simple beat? Should we get you all a metronome, or a conductor to help you clap?

 

[carlitos]

That's the real reason I quit going to church; I was embarrassed for the white people clapping on 1 and 3 instead of 2 and 4. I tried to get them to see the light, but to no avail.

 

[tfk]

I do have an idea.

They are retarded.

LMAO.

Newt, you DO have a talent for truncating the verbiage.

Tom

 

[newton3376]

LMAO.

Newt, you DO have a talent for truncating the verbiage.

Tom

lol

I try....