Also at 1:15, the yellow cars and the surrounding vehicles right of the centre of the picture are cloned. I was wondering if it was to cover up a rival news service’s logo, but it seems an odd place to have a logo.
There are still a lot of bicycles in China, even in Beijing. But they’re not on the motorways and ring roads which have been built over the past 40-50 years to cope with the explosion in car ownership. It has become a car-fucked place like every other big city. Progress? Not to me. Billions lifted out of poverty to sit in traffic.
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Well, in real communist countries, there would still be ten lane wide roads, but with only an occasional few limos (reserved for the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat) tearing down the middle.
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As recently as the late 1990s private cars were almost unheard of in Beijing. I spent the summers of '98 and '99 in Beijing, and even on the ring roads it was all taxis, buses, trucks and the occasional cadre’s black Audi. By 2002 when I last visited Beijing that had started to change, and private car ownership has grown exponentially since then. It’s truly incredible how much it’s changed.
Yes, in the original frame you can even see that a number of the cars in the bottom duplicate actually intersect another car, or are cut off just before they do so (particularly the white car at the bottom right of your marked areas). The same thing happens with a couple of the cars around the yellow car top left.
And once you see that, you can notice a number of other cars that look like they’re oddly cut in half, even though I haven’t spotted where they are cloned from.
Where there’s obvious faking going on in that photo, the more reasonable explanation, I think, is that the video footage is real and that image there is someone else’s photo doctored for dramatic effect, which this video took unknowing that it was doctored. Maybe.
The trains are full too. It’s a problem known as prosperity.
This is why I like living in a small college town. Even on game weekends you can get where ever you want in 20 minutes tops.
Even driving in a medium sized city feels like hell.
What’s black and white and red all over? 99 percent of Chinese cars, if this sample is any indication.
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Nice find. I spotted the yellow clones because i was pondering the overall lack of variety of colors. As for CG, if it were being constructed that way, there would be no need for Photoshop chicanery. It would have been very easy to sprinkle enough 3D models around (even in cloned-style patterns, if being lazy) and have no clone-brush blending artifacts as seen in so many places in this image. The contrast of poor fakery here compared to rather decent looking video (when traffic is seen moving).
Just pointing out the fakery in the image at the time I cited. Not motivated to disbelieve, but once I saw the pattern, had to call it out. Others have provided further evidence of the cloning in this thread. I can’t speak to the whole video nor the actual traffic issue, however. But once fakery is detected, what should one assume about the rest of the evidence being presented?
We should probably assume there are no traffic jams in China. Right? No. So if it in fact was manipulated, I don’t know, maybe there’s a huge pothole, or a military vehicle, or an accident… and the editor wanted to smooth it over. I admit it’s kind of fishy, but it doesn’t do much to the main topic.
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WAIT a second… this could actually be a video compression artifact, couldn’t it? I’m not sure what algorithms are relevant here, but in a semi-structured surface like these blurred blobs of cars I think it’s possible!
Now who is grasping for reasons?
Another contributor to this thread, Pixelshifter, demonstrated through manipulations that one substantially large section of the traffic jam image was practically mathematically identical to another nearby section. (The black hole shown in his image means the difference between the two sections being compared is zero.)
Do I believe this video “evidence” of an extraordinary traffic jam contains intentional manipulations designed to make the jam appear larger than it was? Yep. Such a belief has no bearing in any way on actual traffic jams in China or my belief in them.
yes, I got that
Do I believe this video “evidence” of an extraordinary traffic jam contains intentional manipulations designed to make the jam appear larger than it was?
The existence of the duplicate section is clearly unusual. But its size related to the overall size of the traffic jam is small. Whatever the reason for the duplication is, even if it is conscious manipulation, it does not prove that the video was manipulated to a degree that changes the order of magnitude of this traffic jam, which would be a much harder thing to do than to gloss over limited areas.
Given that the camera is moving over the traffic jam, a video compression artifact certainly seems possible to me as another possibility, though I would not rule out conscious manipulation.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/45/879797
A whole lot of weird shit does happen with digital video.
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I’m guessing it’s something similar - it isn’t changing the size of the road, number of cars or anything like that, so it looks like the idea is just to cover whatever’s underneath the lower image. I don’t know about the reasons you gave - presumably a military vehicle wouldn’t be caught in the middle of the jam, a pothole would cause a bigger effect outside of that area (and would be visible on the video too) and an accident at that speed wouldn’t be so serious. Just trying to make the lines of cars look more uniform, perhaps? It could be a truck or bus in an image that’s otherwise just cars. In any case, it does look like the road is actually that big and completely congested, probably more than usual due to the obstacle on the other side of the toll gate (which you can see on the left in jerwin’s comment).
No it couldn’t that’s not how DCT+Entropy corrections work. It’s also not how B-Frames work.
Typically cloning artifacts in video are from one frame to another, not within one frame by itself.
Macroblocks aren’t typically reused within a single frame either, although they sometimes are dictionary coded and use the same number for a region, but a macroblock is too few pixels to get an effect like this, and it’s astronomically unlikely for several dozen macroblocks to just happen to clone each other like that. Same reason why even a video of text won’t necessarily compress all that well, even though it’s just repeated identical glyphs.
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Well, yeah, I give up… that part of the video is just a pan over a still image that clearly has been manipulated, but others are live video, and that would be much harder to do. I would assume some idiot did it for purely visual reasons.
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