[HOAX] Haiti UFO Video - YouTube

Thanks for the welcomes. Yes, it really is me. If I were a faker, I'm sure I would choose someone with a more distinguished resume.

I'll try and give an example of the palm trees tomorrow. Like I said, I don't doubt they used Vue (for a reason I will explain in a second) but don't think it's a smoking gun per se.

I'm having a hard time with the two years thing too. I would say this is a three month or so operation with a team of people working part time. Additionally, the specific technology that was most likely used wasn't around two years ago, so they would have had to start and then change workflow as the project progressed. Here's what I mean.

First off, the camera used. Highly compressed formats like DV and HDV have been around for years. However, high end compositing software can't get around compression artifacts that pop up when you try and manipulate lower res formats. This would lead me to believe that it was shot in some format with less compression like HD or DVC Pro 50. Now, the movement of the camera in the video suggests that it is a small camera. That would rule out the Sony F-900 (which is what we use in Hollywood and what Lucas shot Star Wars on). I suspect it was shot on a Panasonic HVX-200 which is small but records in HD without a lot of compression. This would allow the artists maximum flexibility to create really seamless composites. The HVX-200 wasn't around two years ago, and became readily available around the summer of 2006.

Secondly, the latest version of Vue which has photo real capabilities wasn't released until about a year ago. They've made a really big push into the market over the last few months. While I don't believe the entire image was created in the virtual world, it would make sense to me that they would use Vue for a portion of the shot. There may have been objects in the second half of the shot that spoiled it, but provided them with good "tracking markers". Once the shot was tracked, they could paint out the other objects and replace them with Vue architecture. If you look at the first part of the shot, the palm trees (especially the ones in the distance) are very different from each other. If they took the time to tweak those so they looked different, they would have changed them all, so no one could recognize the similarities (although I still don't see this as being definitive).

Lastly, I don't buy that this wasn't intended as a promo for something or as an elaborate hoax. A bunch of artists with a pet project would do something much more sexy if they were just going to show off for each other and their friends. My friends who do this stuff create little cartoons or dramatic space battles, not examples of seamless compositing and rotoscoping. This was conceived as a hoax from day one or these guys were paid in excess of $150,000 by someone to create this as a marketing tool, commercial etc.

Thanks for giving me a place to talk about this. All of my friends are sick of hearing me talk about it!