UFO over China - suddenly disappears - August 17 2006 (great quality)

It's either fake or it's real. Does it really matter? Just open your mind and accept the existence of these things. That's why you're here seeing this type of material in the first place. Fate, purpose, reason. Life is a miraculous enigma.

Originally posted by dgoodpasture
It's either fake or it's real. Does it really matter? Just open your mind and accept the existence of these things. That's why you're here seeing this type of material in the first place. Fate, purpose, reason. Life is a miraculous enigma.

Well said - Seriously, Well said.

You'll get a vote for that.

Originally posted by simo
If you take a close look on the side panel of the video on Google, most of the feedback concludes it is CGI.

But it makes you wonder how much of that feedback is informed and intuitive. When you read "Blimp.Then doctored.I'v seen it done b4."FAKE!" - people too lazy to type the word 'before' and typing in txt message language.. there is one response that I'd like to know more.. the person who says "I have seen a couple of videos now with the same effect. Jittery video with CGI stabilized in top corner and slides exactly the same. What is the software program?" - if we can line the videos up side-by-side, we could make a more objective judgement on this as proof someone with nothing better to do is hoaxing this. And I'll happily abandon my ARV cloaking theory.

[edit on 5-9-2006 by RiotComing]

Originally posted by dgoodpasture
It's either fake or it's real. Does it really matter? Just open your mind and accept the existence of these things. That's why you're here seeing this type of material in the first place. Fate, purpose, reason. Life is a miraculous enigma.

yes it does matter. Just open your mind and accept the existence of these things? Thats like saying, Just accept religion because alot of people say its true. Get a grip.

Life is a miraculous enigma? Big words for someone who makes no sense.

The premise that “ camera shake “ is a sign of genuine footage – and that the presence of excess wobble would preclude the use of CGI due to framing difficulties , is entirely without merit

Camera wobble , or the appearance thereof , can be added AFTER filming , and AFTER the insertion of CGI

assuming the aim is to create a fake piece of footage that has " uber realistic camera shake and wobble " the process is quite simple ,

step one :

film the back ground footage , using a hi quality tripod and geared tripod pan & tilt mount

[ this gives you a stable base image with very predictable movements ]



step two :

use the CGI rendering prog of your choice to create your " space ship " images


step three :

use video editor of choice to layer your CGI footage into your back ground stock


step four :


create a " mask " which will represent your " viewable area [ see below image ]



step five :

edit your film [ crop ] , so that only the portion of image bound by the mask is visible in each frame

that sounds complex – but is in fact a simple series of mouse click

you DO NOT have to crop EVERY frame manually – you can just order the computer to blank out everything OUTSIDE the mask

the intermediate effect is this :



step six :

align your cropped frames [ which now look something like this ] into a straight line



step seven :

save the " finished article " to disc in a lower frame size , the " trick " is that you don’t have to reveal what your original resolution was . your back ground stock , produced in step one might have been & a resolution of 2305 * 1750

where as your " finished product " -- can have as low a resolution as 800 * 600

that gives you a lot of lee way to introduce motion and effects POST filming that did not exist

and this is the “ finished frames “



one final PS – I left the orange frame boxes in , and “ stepped “ the frame dimensions at some points , quite deliberately so that the uninitiated would see more clearly the process taking shape ,

if I wanted to create a convincing fake – it would be childs play to have edited those out

PPS : in steps six and seven it is obvious that the frame dimensions are NOT consistent – that is partly laziness , and partly to illustrate that the illusion of zoom can also be added as an editing effect

hope this helps .

unfortunately I do not have a working animated gif creator on this computer right now – so my “ demonstration “ frames are far less spectacular that I would have liked but I hope you get the picture < pun >

meanwhile here is a clip to consider if you think my “ solution “ sounded complicated :

plane lands on car .

That is what a talented individual with the right tools , equipment and motivation can produce using “ off the shelf “ software

Ok – the “ ots “ price of some hi end suites is $3000 , yup three THOUSAND dollars US

But the tech is out there

And Most of the steps I outlined are FULLY automated processes in any good editing suite – so it is not as hard as it seems at first blush .

APE OUT .

Is it possible for one of you to stabilize the footage, centered on the ufo?

Nice Video! thanks for posting it, hey all long time no see

It's a fun vid, but the distortion around the craft kind of reeks of superimposing...and as some of our resident image experts posted, this was right from the get go of the vid....

Filing in the highly probable fake category (personally).

Doesn't matter to me if real or not. What I would like to point out is this is exactly how UFO's move.

We have cars that go from 0 to 60 in ..... sec.
They have ships that go 0 though thousands...........sec.

Im going to put my input into this being a fake.

Notice how the cameraman makes an effort to maintain the appartment building in the shot? It's my opinion that is to enable motion tracking for adding CGI. I've done the process before myself with 3D Studio Max. It is very easy to achieve with enough reference points i.e. that top corner of the apartment building.

Other than for motion tracking purposes I see no reason why the "UFO" was filmed in the top right corner, whilst maintaining the apartment building. Why not center the UFO completely? Or zoom in as far as possible?

Originally posted by subz
Other than for motion tracking purposes I see no reason why the "UFO" was filmed in the top right corner, whilst maintaining the apartment building. Why not center the UFO completely? Or zoom in as far as possible?

the obvious reason -- well obvious to me is for helping to asses size , range and velocity

there are a lot of fake " ufo films " especially the mexican ones -

that claim to show ufos in hi speed motion -- against a blank sky

and its often obvious that the cameraman is just jiggling the camera

having a foreground object in shot is often very usefull .

True, but that does not bode well for the integrity of this footage.

Are we to believe that this guy was aware of the need to have a reference object for the "UFO" to gauge speed and distance? Is he a UFOlogist who just happend to be in the right spot, at the right time with a video camera?

It's another point that would indicate this video was staged.

ignorant_ape

Excellent step by step explanation.

Basically, that was the system used by our "friend" from Australian UFO wave.

He said that he used only footage filmed with the camera on a tripod so the video was fixed and he could add the camera shake after.

Maybe someone is trying to make more of the same?

To the original poster: Good find, it is a very interesting video, fake or not.

To some of the other posters: Why bother coming to ATS if all you do is shout, "FAKE!" or "Hoax!". You do realise ATS is here to deny ignorance, not encourage it, right? If you have nothing good to say then... go away.

Edit: That last section was to the posters who did not explain why they thought the footage was a hoax.

[edit on 5-9-2006 by xeroxed88]

Originally posted by xeroxed88
To some of the other posters: Why bother coming to ATS if all you do is shout, "FAKE!" or "Hoax!". You do realise ATS is here to deny ignorance, not encourage it, right? If you have nothing good to say then... go away.

But how can you say anything good when 99% of the cases are hoaxes? people like the idea of life elsewhere in the universe, but nothing good comes out of UFO research due to the many hoaxers.

Originally posted by masterp
But how can you say anything good when 99% of the cases are hoaxes?

Yes, I understand that frustration. But I think it's important we need to take each sighting on their merits, regardless of the sheer number of hoaxers out there. It's important to analyse these things - 1) it keeps our photo / video experts on their toes and I thank them very much for their contributions to this thread and 2) wouldn't it be a tragedy if one day a video identical to something like this springs to light, and the real deal was met with a unison chorus of "FaKe"?

I still haven't quite given up on this one, still searching for additional information and background.. though nothing but dead ends. I think an excellent point was made above though regarding the buildings as reference points - also if I was filming this thing, I'd surely have it in the centre of the shot the whole time - your gut instinct would surely attract your camera lens to the saucer. It's not something you see every day, after all.

This is a really good find, its one of the best ive ever seen, very realistic, im currently examining the frames
I suspect the flash is it leaving our dimension into another.

[edit on 6-9-2006 by Order Out Of Chaos]

To tell you the truth, I do some video editing and have key framed a few things before with After Effects. The one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb in this video is that the ufo matches almost in every frame to the shakyness of the camera. The camera movement is natural. It is PAINSTAKINGLY hard to match frame by frame the position of the UFO to match the shaking of the camera. The only way to do this with CGI is to take two camera passes with a highly expensive camera rig that is computer controlled movement. One pass of the scenery, then the computer goes back and does the same movements filming the ufo infront of a green screen. then they simply blend them together. This video looks very authentic, but because of the dropped frames from compression it's too hard to analyze without the full framed original video.

Originally posted by porschedrifter
To tell you the truth, I do some video editing and have key framed a few things before with After Effects. The one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb in this video is that the ufo matches almost in every frame to the shakyness of the camera. The camera movement is natural. It is PAINSTAKINGLY hard to match frame by frame the position of the UFO to match the shaking of the camera. The only way to do this with CGI is to take two camera passes with a highly expensive camera rig that is computer controlled movement. One pass of the scenery, then the computer goes back and does the same movements filming the ufo infront of a green screen. then they simply blend them together. This video looks very authentic, but because of the dropped frames from compression it's too hard to analyze without the full framed original video.

jebus wept , what planet are you on ????

i will now quote from the features guide for adobe after effects 7.0

Powerful masking tools
Unlimited masks
Control which parts of a 2D or 3D layer are visible by adding and animating an unlimited number of masks on any layer.

Imported masks
Import Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator® paths as masks.

Mask animations
Stroke, feather, transform, animate, and apply motion blur to masks over time.

Combined masks
Combine masks using Add, Subtract, Intersect, and Difference.

Mask auto-tracing
Quickly turn any channel, including alpha channels, into a vector-based mask, and quickly create animated masks.

Masks from text
Turn After Effects text into masks using the Create Outlines command.

RotoBézier masks
Create RotoBézier masks from scratch or convert them from Bézier masks. RotoBéziers simplify repetitive tasks by reducing the number of control points you have to think about.

Faster mask rendering
Render even complex masks up to 100% faster than in previous versions of After Effects.

Smart Mask Interpolation
Create smooth, realistic intermediate mask keyframes automatically based on settings you provide. Take control of mismatched points, or create arcing mask transitions to replicate natural motion. (Professional edition only.)

to put it bluntly , you clearly have no idea how video editing actually works .

motion blur is PAINFULLY SIMPLE to add or remove from video , your delusions to the contrary are irrelevant



[edit on 7-9-2006 by ignorant_ape]

Originally posted by ignorant_ape

Originally posted by porschedrifter
It is PAINSTAKINGLY hard to match frame by frame the position of the UFO to match the shaking of the camera.

jebus wept , what planet are you on ????

to put it bluntly , you clearly have no idea how video editing actually works .

motion blur is PAINFULLY SIMPLE to add or remove from video , your delusions to the contrary are irrelevant

(Let me start by saying I'm a lawyer and not a video effects expert...)

Um, ignorant_ape, wasn't Porschedrifter talking about something that can be achieved by using motion _tracking_ (not, as you suggest, motion _"blur"_)?

Motion blur is used (as it's name suggest) to make an object blurred, as if it were in motion.

Motion tracking on the other hand is used, amongst other things, to make an animated object appear as is it is in the same scene as objects in a non-animated scene.

(Alternatively, you can film using a tripod and artifically introduce the _appearance_ of a shaky camera - but I think Porschedrifter's point is that this is unlikely to be the method used in relation to this video since the shaky motion _appears_ to be natural).

By the way, I'm still looking for discussions directly relating to UFO hoaxed videos which include informative descriptions of the various techniques used (e.g. motion tracking, compositing, track mattes etc).

So far, most of the information I've seen on the relevant techniques was in other contexts. Surely given all the time spent (??wasted??) on discussion of UFO videos someone _must_ have written relatively comprehensive articles about these basic points.

It seems that quite a few people are content simply to say "Cool" or "FAKE!".

These discussions will never really get anywhere unless a solid foundation is laid. I know this may be a bit boring, and not as entertaining as jumping into specific videos, but sometimes that's the way life is...

All the best,

Isaac Koi

[edit on 7-9-2006 by IsaacKoi]