Very nice ufo video

wahrheit

Congrats again for your work. Impressive. Thankfully you are not a lonely dude that is craving for attention! :p
 
Ashles said:
that's certainly one way round of looking at it.

There is of course another, more logcal explanation...

Nah, too boring isn't it.
I'm sure that the advances in computer graphics and low cost home video effects software, and the proliferation of these impressive UFO videos are nothing more than coincidence.

The aliens must have been waiting for our technology to become advanced enough so that charlatans like wahrheit would assist in obfuscating their arrival.

;)
 
Warning ;) Full spoiler ahead

Actually, when I first saw the ufotheatre video, I didn't think of any fancy computer graphics or animations. Though I worked (and partly still do work) in the TV business for more than 10 years and would have access to high-end stuff, I figured it would take ages, even for very skilled people, to produce such a video by means of a computer, 3D software or anything like that. The camera movement is just too jerky, and almost every single frame would have to be fixed manually, let alone the rather complicated matter of motion blur etc.

I had the impression it was done, or could have been done, by means as old as cinematography itself: A simple glass plane at something around 45 degrees in front of the camera. This has been done 100 years ago, and obviously, it still works pretty well. And it saves a ton of time, the videos took me less than an hour, no post production was needed (except for the idiot titles). These videos are right from my amateur digital camera, no image editing done. The orbs are nothing but a primitve Flash animation running full screen on an old 19 inch screen, I think you can even hear me hitting the space button to start the playback.

This, and an amateur-like setting of the camera's white-balance, focus, stupid use of the zoom, lowering the camera before actually turning it off etc. produce a way more "real" feeling than most sophisticated computer animations could do. I couldn't even find a simple glass plate, so I used an opened plastic CD case as a transparent medium to film through.

The only real problem is focus, since the mirrored image of the orbs is very close compared to trees and the sky. This can be solved, in part, by using a bigger glass plane of good quality at larger distance to the lens, which also does not produce two mirror images of the orbs running on a screen left or right of the camera.

And that's when I spotted something quite remarkably in the original ufotheatre video: The zoom and focus issue. Look again at the ufotheatre clip. First, the "mother" orb, is pretty much in focus, because the field of view is very wide, thus eliminating the focus problem. That's normal photographic physics, in a wide shot close and distant objects are more likely to be in focus than in a tele shot. But when they zoom closer, the "mom" orb gets blurry, exactly what I experienced while trying to produce the fakes.

ufo_zoom.jpg


All this is no proof that the ufotheatre thingy was faked, or was faked in the same why I did it, but the zoom issue makes me think that it could have been done exactly that way. There's other possible explanations, but Occam's razor would go for this one, I guess.
 
I can't tell you how much I love being around such great problem solvers. My friend did write back, by the way. He said it would not be likely to be CGI, or if it had been, the source video would have been more simple. He's going to check with a few co-workers and get back to me on how else it might have been done. may come up with the same idea as wahrheit. I'll keep you posted.
 
Fantastic. I really had no expectation that a reflection of a monitor could work that well.

I still think the ufotheatre one is some form of CG, because of the single pixel orb. But if that's true, they're probably kicking themselves to see how much easier it could have been ;)

David
 
wahrheit said:
Warning ;) Full spoiler ahead All this is no proof that the ufotheatre thingy was faked, or was faked in the same why I did it, but the zoom issue makes me think that it could have been done exactly that way. There's other possible explanations, but Occam's razor would go for this one, I guess.

I think this technique might explain how the video was created. I like the KISS (Keep it simple stupid)methodology you used. You might get a different response from UFO proponents. You might even be called a (gasp) "debunker"!
 
Explorer said:

The advent of computer simulation now virtually renders any photographic evidence inadmissable, which is a tragedy for the prospect of genuine scientific research of transient remote phenomena, natural or supernatural.

Those paranormal investigators should have gotten off their lazy butts and demonstrated the truth of supernatural phenomena when they had the chance. Too late now. :(
 
aggle-rithm said:
Those paranormal investigators should have gotten off their lazy butts and demonstrated the truth of supernatural phenomena when they had the chance. Too late now. :(

The problem has always basically rested with those sad people who feel they have to fake these issues for some kind of ego trip. Even before computer simulation there have been fake photos, so I realise the problem isn't new, but it is not getting any easier, is it?

Who knows, the eventual outcome may be that this board eventually becomes purely dedicated to praising the merits or otherwise of competitive photo/video images.

How dull is that? Oh well, a few geeks may get some pleasure out of it!
 
Given the amazing technology that these aliens obviously have, you'd have thought they would have a light switch to turn the lights off so they wouldn't be seen. Or did they just forget ;)
 
They intentionally leave the lights on so they can be seen. Haven't you read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? They're alien"teasers" "buzzing" the Earth as a lark.
 
Well, I recieved a second e-mail from my friend (the middle budget CG guy) regarding the "1 pixel orb" that's been discussed previously. I admit I know very little about such things, and his answer was a cryptic 2 words. "Video Compression". Does that make sense to anyone else?
 
I'd appreciate more than 2 words but I'll try & extrapolate. I think your buddy is saying that if the image compression was low enough to show such a sharp dot then the rest should be sharp aswell.

But thats me saying that, not ya CG working friend.
 
treble_head said:
Well, I recieved a second e-mail from my friend (the middle budget CG guy) regarding the "1 pixel orb" that's been discussed previously. I admit I know very little about such things, and his answer was a cryptic 2 words. "Video Compression". Does that make sense to anyone else?

Yea. Normally, to save the video data in a file, you would need to store the color information for every single pixel in every single frame. That's REALLY big. (I have avi video uncompressed for 10 minutes that's about 1.5 gig or so on my hard drive at home.)

When you compress the data, you find some way to simplify it and store it according to patterns. You necessarily lose information when you do this (hey, for once the "information theory" creationists bandy about actually applies to something we're talking about!) When you uncompress the data, it sometimes leaves artifacts behind.

Let me give a vastly oversimplified example that might help. Say we had a screen where the pixels were on or off that was 4x4. Instead of storing each frame, maybe I could store the mode bit value of every third frame. So...
frame# 1 2 3
00 10 00 00
00 ... 10 ... 10 would become... 10

and then I could play that back for 3 frames to "decompress" it. The resulting playback would look terrible and stilted. That would be an artifact of video compression. Better algorithms trick us into missing the artifacts better than my quickly made up example, but they're still there. Look at a detailed JPEG image (JPEG is a compressed graphics format) really close sometime and you'll see weird coloring artifacts of the compression.

That our "space ship" appears to be a giant square is probably an artifact of the compression algorithm. The algorithm somehow averaged intensities that normally look like a circle to us into a square.

"circle" "square"
111 333
151 --> 333
111 333

The fact that white on black are very contrasting intensity values probably comes into play here.

EDIT: Quote my post if my "graphics" aren't lined up right. Anyone know how I can preserve whitespace in my post?
 
Code:
When posting, click the # button. It opens up a monospace (fixed-width) font thing for typing out code
 
That our "space ship" appears to be a giant square is probably an artifact of the compression algorithm.

It's not that it's a giant square, but that it's a tiny square, a single pixel.

The algorithm somehow averaged intensities that normally look like a circle to us into a square.

I suspect the "original" footage would also show a single pixel. I don't think the compression could take a fuzzy blob and turn it into a sharp pixel.

Is there a link to the full DV footage somewhere?

and then I could play that back for 3 frames to "decompress" it. The resulting playback would look terrible and stilted.

It would only do something similar to that "mode" thing where it wouldn't have a great impact on the playback. In this case, where we have a single bright pixel, it's likely that the algorithm has allocated more bits to the area to maintain that detail.

David
 
davidhorman said:
I suspect the "original" footage would also show a single pixel. I don't think the compression could take a fuzzy blob and turn it into a sharp pixel.

Compression -> decompression causes you to lose information in some way. A blurred and moving object only a few pixels on the screen could be averaged to a single more intsense pixel by a compression algorithm.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question289.htm

See how the last image at 95% compression starts to have boxes show up? Look at the tree branches in the right side of the screen. Notice that some of the blurs become single pixels squares in the last image.
 
Notice that some of the blurs become single pixels squares in the last image.

Are you using a different definition of pixel to me? The solid blocks are not single pixels.

puppies95.jpg


David
 
About time

And for a moment I though it was only going to take a single pixel to totally dismiss this video. In my opinion dismissing anything that easily is about as fanatical as faking a video and later actually believing it was an actual an ufo.

I am glad to see some of you are talking about compression now. To take a digital video that has been compressed in the camera, decompress it, deinterlace it, change it, compress it AGAIN, then have the result exhibit the same qualilty and compression artifacts as the original sounds damn near impossible to me. The method being proposed would have taken extreme effert to complete yet was treated as trival. And it took only a single pixel to 'prove' this is what they had to have done.

And then wahrheit came by to finally show a method the video could have been created. Finally the single pixel didnt need to prove anything. Draw your own conclusions if the original is a fake or not. You dont need to prove it me it is.
 

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