ok, I am back and after a meal consisting of more than 2 chocolate bars I am able to think better and realize the essence of this news.
I made a fault in my earlier thoughts. Actually I was discussing this news with a collegue of mine and we both made the same mistake, so I will try to explain it:
I thought that you actually needed to record at least one frame of the picture which you want to manipulate. This would be easy to detect, as you would then either dump the one unmanipulated frame (the non-smart way) or show the previous frame twice. Both are not hard to detect for the trained eye.
Actually in theory the invention works like this:
Say you are a friendly dictator who wants to hold a speech in front of the masses. And say that you have a healthy hatred against persons with blue hats. So you feed the image of objects who have the size and the colour of a person with a blue hat to this software.
The camera shows the masses listening to your speech, suddenly an insurgent with a blue hat jumps into the picture. The image of the person travels with the speed of light to the lens of the camera which catches this image. Before the image gets recorded or broadcast, the software manipulates it and changes the image by cutting out the person and fills the hole with something that makes sense - maybe a person with a red hat
. This all happens in the timeframe (40ms) before the next picture is catched by the cam. So the picture that gets recorded is then indeed the new, altered picture.
Hope I made it a little clear. However my main reasons why I am not really shocked stay the same. Whenever you take something from a picture or add something to it, the principles are the same and used since years. When you add something you put something in front of the unedited picture - just like adding a new layer in photoshop. When you cut something out, you fill the hole with a new background - ideally with exactly the same background. The beaming in the Enterprise series worked like this, they just used an recorded image without the protagonists, but this is an old trick, used many decades before.
If you are not able to pre-record this image, the software has to fill the gap. To fill the gap you wopuld need exactly the same camera angle and position. Even a camera just behind the object you want to delete would show a slightly different picture, so you cannot use that. Imagine now person standing in front of a tree on a windy day, I really would like to see a believable manipulation of this and be able to examine it.
With the right instruments, you are basically able to analyze every line or column or pixel of the picture. Manipulations are detectable, but it would be arrogant to say that this is always the case.
I am worried about censorship/media manipulation to at least the same degree as Sky is. But us TV-clowns manipulate reality all the time. Beginning from the angle, point of of view, image section of the camera, colour settings, the choices which images are shown, the editing of recorded material, the audio mix, etc., etc. It doesn't mean that i am desensitived to these issues, but it's my daily work.
And regarding the news I find it interesting which events are not shown and which are.
hmm, answering to Sky's threads results in the same amount of words like his posts
- didn't even come to answer the delay/teletext/time issue, next post