Part-Time Pundit: Photoanalysis

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November 21, 2005

Photoanalysis - X Marks the Spot

I'm liveblogging as I do this... thanks to Political Teen and Right on the Right for letting me know and getting me hi-res video.

Here's Drudge's Story and Malkin's Coverage.

So far the biggest problems are the color of the ticker, Cheney's suit, and the text are very close to the same, which makes it very hard to pull out the text. The X appears to be exactly centered on the screen, however. Possible it is some automated message, whatever the text says will show that for sure... still working on that frame by frame.

12:00 AM CST

The X is definitely centered, but the text most certainly is not. That implies (but doesn't gaurantee) human interaction, at least for the text. An automated message that takes the effort to center the X would most likely center the text... the most obvious text that comes out is the word "black" at the end.

12:10 AM CST

Right now I'm working on enhancing and enlarging the video. For whatever reason the pictures I get out aren't as good, so I'm working with video editing to try to see if I can get something.

12:15 AM CST

Over the "Wrong" on the second line of the tag line is a character that is below the rest... but only one character... either non-english, a 2nd line with a very out of place character, or something not of the a-z alphabet.

12:28 AM CST

Here's first image, will clean this up more to pull out letters and remove noise.

12:33 AM CST

The letter hanging down is a g, the word is "begins" and it just uses a typeface that has g hanging low.

1:07 AM CST

So This guy beat me to it.

"Transition begins after 5 frames of black". Just an automated message then.

9:56 AM

A quick explanation for people curious how this worked. Essentially you grab two frames, switch one to negative and overlay them. The same pixels should cancel and reveal what has changed. I was working on getting this when The Dan Report posted the finished solution.

Posted by John Bambenek at November 21, 2005 11:50 PM