The Shape of Days

11/22/05 1:04:49 AM Thanks to the benevolence of reader Jamie at IntoxiNation, I’ve gotten my hands on a higher-resolution recording of the broadcast. While it’s still not a perfect copy of what went out over the air, I’m sufficiently convinced that what I’ve seen is an actual recording rather than a mock-up or simulation. Jamie has more information and stills from the video on his site.

It’s my profound displeasure to report that the clip Ian was hosting tonight does indeed appear to be bogus. The superimposed X that appeared in the clip I saw does not dissolve in or out, and it only appears for three frames: one frame of white and two frames of black. Why Ian’s clip differs significantly from what actually aired is a question only he can answer, and I hope he chooses to on Tuesday.

I’ve got nothing against Ian at all, either before or after this incident. I think he’s a great guy, doing the public a real service. But it’s vitally important to remember that video clips on the Internet are not primary source material, that video can be edited as easily as copy can these days. Just because somebody posts a clip that looks like it came from CNN doesn’t mean it actually came from CNN.

In this case, Ian’s clip was a more-or-less, sorta-kinda faithful simulation of what CNN broadcast, but it was not the genuine article. And as we all learned last year, “fake but accurate” is no excuse.

As for how this happened, you don’t have to be a seasoned TV veteran to recognize that this was obviously just a technical glitch or production error. Live television is a monstrously complex enterprise, and technical directors mash the wrong button all the time. Accidentally superimposing a piece of videotape on top of a live shot is neither unprecedented nor particularly interesting, and deserves absolutely no outrage at all.

The more disturbing possibility is that rather than being a glitch, this was an ill-advised prank or stunt that was carried out by a technical director with poor impulse control and a juvenile sense of humor. But even that’s something I find it hard to get juiced about. Lots of people hate the Vice President; we knew that already. Some of them have the emotional maturity of playground bullies. We knew that too. The idea that one of them would be running the live-to-air switcher in CNN Center and choose to jeopardize his career by acting out would seem a lot more implausible if we hadn’t seen this sort of thing at CNN before. But even then … you want me to stop the presses for what, now?

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11/22/05 8:43:45 AM Ed Minchau of blog Robot Guy points out that it looks like Ian’s clip was the result of a frame-blending time warp. Put simply, frame blending is the process of combining two adjacent frames to create an “in between” frame; it’s a sort of interpolation. It’s notoriously finicky, and in this case, it turned a cut into a dissolve that never could have happened in real life.

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Ian apparently started with a timebase-conformed clip that he then warped. Jargon off the table, somebody (Ian or someone else) converted the clip from the 59.94 fields per second broadcast rate to another, lower frame rate, maybe something on the order of 15 frames per second. This was done in software by combining fields to make frames and then dropping out whole frames. That’s why the first frame of white is missing from Ian’s time-warped clip: because it had been dropped before he even started.

Basically, this incident was the result of making a holy hash out of a piece of broadcast footage, then posting the results without explanation. I hope in the future Ian chooses to fastidiously document his clips, explaining exactly what was done to them, by whom and why. I think it’ll make up for this little gaffe in spades.

Incidentally, Ed defends Ian’s use of obsolete and highly destructive “WMV” video compression by asserting that it’s better than uncompressed video. He’s right, of course, and he’s wrong. The standard for broadcast-quality video compression is H.264 and has been for nearly a year now. Ian would have been far better off leaving the clip’s raster, time base and speed the same as the broadcast version and simply encoding it down to about 256 kilobits per second or so with H.264. The resulting clip would have been a much more faithful reproduction of what went out over CNN’s feed, and his credibility would have been unsmirched.

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11/21/05 10:34:15 AM Mary Katharine Ham, on whom I’ve got the world’s biggest blog-crush since she sent me that nice e-mail earlier today, brings us news of something distinctly odd on CNN this morning. From where I sit, it looks like Matt Drudge caught it first; rather than try to run down the chain of custody, I’m just going to credit this one to him until someone corrects me.

Here’s the summary: According to Drudge, during CNN’s live broadcast of the Vice President’s speech to the American Enterprise Institute this morning, a large black X appeared on the screen, obscuring the Vice President’s face. According to Drudge, the X appeared “repeatedly” and for “less than a second.” Drudge somewhat erroneously calls the effect “subliminal.” (Just to be totally pedantic, to say that something is “subliminal” means that it exists below the threshold of awareness. By definition, if something is subliminal, you didn’t notice it. If you noticed it, it’s not subliminal. I bring this up only because calling something “subliminal” brings in all sorts of sinister connotations, and this story is bizarre enough without them.)

According to Brian at TVNewser, a CNN spokesman tonight attributed the appearance of the X to a “technological malfunction.”

Notice all the carefully worded “according tos” in there? I haven’t seen any of this myself. I didn’t watch the speech, didn’t see any Xs. I have no opinion about anything that I’ve related up to this point. It could all be nonsense for all I know. But about what follows, I know a thing or two and have an opinion that, gosh darn it, I just have to share.

Ian at The Political Teen has what appears to be footage recorded from the CNN broadcast showing the appearance, duration and disappearance of the X. I say “what appears to be” because … well, what Ian’s running on his site does not look right to me. It doesn’t look right at all. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and say that it’s not physically possible for the video at Ian’s site right now to be an accurate representation of what went out over the CNN feed this morning. Now, let’s be clear: Nowhere on his site does he say that the video was recorded off of CNN’s broadcast. I’m not accusing him of misrepresenting anything. I think he created a simulation of what the X supposedly looked like, posted it in good faith, and was widely misunderstood. That’s my working theory at this point. I’ve contacted Ian asking for a clarification on this, but as of this writing I haven’t received a reply. I’ll update this post immediately if Ian gets in touch with me.

Now, on to the nerdy details.

I downloaded the video that Ian’s running, which for reference he called “CheneyLo.wmv.” I brought it into QuickTime Player to examine it a frame at a time. I saw the X appear in a five-frame dissolve starting at frame 32 — that is to say, the X sort of “faded in” between frame 32 and frame 36. It’s not there at all in frame 31, barely there in frame 32, darker in frames 33, 34 and 35, and fully there on frame 36. That’s what we call a five-frame dissolve.

Here are frames 31 through 36:

That’s six frames of video, which on your TV would have been broadcast at a rate of approximately 30 frames per second, so a five-frame dissolve would take approximately one-sixth of a second. The X stays on the screen from frame 36 to frame 49, then disappears again with another five-frame dissolve. From the first frame in which the X is visible to the last frame, a total of 21 frames elapses, or just slightly over two thirds of a second.

But there’s a problem with the video, and it’s not a small one. Notice that the bottom of the screen is occupied by CNN’s news ticker. In frame 31 it can be seen to say “FTER THE FDA PROPOSED RESTRICTIONS ON ITS TOP-SELLING ASTH”. This ticker moves continuously, sliding from right to left smoothly throughout the course of CNN’s broadcast. If you were to record some footage off of CNN and examine it frame-by-frame, you would see that the ticker moves slightly in every frame. That’s how the illusion of continuous right-to-left motion is created: by sliding the ticker a little bit in each frame. If the ticker did not move a little bit in each frame, it would appear to jerk or stutter when you watch it on TV.

But over the entire 62-frame duration of Ian’s video, the ticker moves exactly two frames. In the first frame, before the X appears, it reads “FTER THE FDA PROPOSED RESTRICTIONS ON ITS TOP-SELLING ASTH.” At the end of the clip, allegedly 62 frames later, the ticker reads “TER THE FDA PROPOSED RESTRICTIONS ON ITS TOP-SELLING ASTHM.” Here is frame 1 side-by-side with frame 62:

Here are the tickers from frame 1 (top) and frame 62 (bottom) shown side-by-side and enlarged to show them more clearly:

A common technique for slowing down prerecorded video or film footage is to simply duplicate frames. Instead of showing frames 1, 2, 3 and 4, you’d show 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2 and so on. In this case, it looks like Ian took three frames of CNN footage and repeated them, superimposing the X on top with five-frame dissolves on the front and back. That’s what it appears to have been. If he can clear this up one way or the other, I think everybody would appreciate it.

11/22/05 12:18:24 AM

I spoke with Ian a few minutes ago. He stands by the authenticity of his clip, but pointed me toward a source that may have a higher fidelity copy. I’m going to get it shortly, if possible, and take a look at it before turning in for the night.

11/22/05 12:24:37 AM

Unfortunately, the “higher fidelity copy” is nothing of the sort. It’s an MPEG-4 clip encoded at 250 kbps, making it almost useless. But the fact that it’s been conformed to fifteen frames per second makes it officially, totally, utterly useless for any kind of real analysis or examination.

That said, the clip does show the superimposed X, at exactly 00:01:28.1/15; that’s one minute, twenty-eight seconds and one frame on a fifteen-frames-per-second timebase, for those of y’all unaccustomed to reading timecode.

I hope Ian replaces the questionable clip with a high-fidelity, real-time, 30-frames-per-second clip tomorrow morning. This issue is bizarre enough without muddying the waters further.

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