Kos is a Klown (Or: Why did "Obama Girl" darken Obama?) UPDATE: Proof that Kossacks are morons

Kos started it. Now the meme has spread throughout blogland like a California brushfire.

The claim: In one of her recent television ads, evil racist Hillary intentionally darkened the face of Barack Obama. Moreover, she supposedly widened his face in order to give him a "blacker" nose.

Kos himself has devoted two front-page columns to this nonsense. We should note that Markos Moulitsas (unlike yours truly) has no background in image manipulation, video production or advertising. Moreover, he seems to have lost his ability to fire up Google in order to do basic research.

The false accusation originated with a diarist who calls himself "Troutnut." (A reassuring pseudonym if ever I heard one.) I take the liberty of reproducing one of Mr. Nut's "damning" graphics. If you visit his page, you will have access to the actual Clinton campaign ad, which incorporates a shot of Obama originally taken from the Ohio debate, as broadcast on MSNBC.

On Kos, some discussion revolved around whether the exact same frames were compared. I don't think that issue matters. The important point is that Mr. Nut's bottom image -- which comes from the Clinton ad -- does indeed show an image that is somewhat desaturated, widened, and darkened. (It is darker all around -- including the background.)

But if eeevil Hillary manipulated the image with racist intent, the same accusation can be levied against the pneumatic Obama Girl.

In the famed viral video, we find the following image:

This is an unretouched frame capture taken from the .flv file of the "I got a crush on Obama" video, available here. The footage comes from his 2004 address to the Democratic National Convention.

Most of you will recall that speech, and I'm sure you will all agree that neither Obama nor the background looked nearly so dark on your television screens.

Oh, Obama Girl -- how could you? You claim to be infatuated with the Savior from Illinois, yet we now discover that you have played to America's racist fears. How much did Hillary pay you?

By way of comparison, here's a better-quality image taken from the same speech. This version comes to us by way of a Charlie Rose broadcast uploaded to YouTube. Although the Obama clip does not contain the exact same moment captured in OG's video, it does give us an image that comes closer to the quality of the original broadcast, at least in terms of color and luminance.

I have no doubt that the first-generation video is much brighter still.

I also have no doubt that the lovely, lip-synching Obama Girl herself looks lighter and crisper in the camera original footage taken for her video.

You have to understand that all of these videos have been compressed -- heavily compressed -- in order to be uploaded to YouTube. Lo and behold, you will find that most YouTube videos are dark and desaturated when compared to better-quality materials.

For example, check out this clip from the film Sweet Charity. (I chose this example because the number is hilarious.) If you have a DVD of the film, you can do a side-by-side comparison. The experiment will conclusively demonstrate that Sammy Davis Jr. looks darker and murkier in his online incarnation.

Is there a grand conspiracy against Sammy? No.

The answer has to do with the codecs used to bring video down to a reasonable size for online streaming. Without these compression schemes, you'd have to wait hours to see that Sweet Charity number. All of these codecs are "lossy" -- that is, they degenerate the picture quality in various ways. Not only will you see poor resolution and weird, block-like artifacts, you can also expect to find differences in color saturation, contrast and brightness.

One popular codec is DivX, often used by the file-sharing community (i.e., your friendly bittorrent video pirate). DivX does a good job, but it ain't perfect. Fire up Google, toss in a few relevant key words -- "video" "compression" and "darken" -- and you will soon find this page. Read it and weep, Markos:

DivX blurs and darkens footage when compressing and compresses better when blurred.

And then there's Quicktime:

QuickTime compression tends to darken the video slightly, so you may have to compensate for this using the brightness adjustment tool.

Trouble is, most people do not use that tool. That's why Sammy looks darker on YouTube than he does when you rent the DVD from Blockbuster. So do Shirley MacLaine and everyone else in the show.

All compression schemes will degrade the image. Often, the image darkens. I'm sure that even the Charlie Rose version of the Obama clip, referenced above, looks brighter in the original.

Okay, so when Clinton's ad team went scrambling for footage of Obama, where did they acquire it? Not from the Obama camp, obviously. And not from MSNBC. I have no doubt that they got it from on online source.

(UPDATE: I suppose the clip could have come from a Tivo copy of the debate. Tivo is also lossy.)

So the video had already been degraded (compared to the original) when the editors of that commercial first took hold of it. Then they had to compress it again to use AfterEffects, or whatever other program was employed to put in the words-n-graphics. The results were then compiled -- and broadcast.

And when a clip from that broadcast was placed back onto the internet, guess what happened? The clip was heavily compressed yet again. The person doing the compressing probably didn't think about adjusting the color and luminance to match the broadcast original.

With each generation, the image gets worse.

So the darkening and desaturation is to be expected. But what about the widening of the face?

At this point, my friends, we must enter the eldritch realm of pixel aspect ratios, abbreviated PAR. You probably think that pixels (the smallest elements of a picture) are always square. But you are wrong. The best explanation of a complex technological situation can be found in a .pdf document available here.

The specification for NTSC format professional standard definition video -- also known as "D1" after a high-end digital video tape standard -- states that a frame is 720 pixels wide and 486 pixels tall... However, 720 divided by 486 does not equal 1.333; instead, it comes out to something wider than a 4:3 image.

To compensate, these pixels need to be displayed on a television screen 10% thinner than normal to compensate (In other words, roughly 90% as wide as they are tall). This is referred to as a PAR of 0.90, indicating how much the image has to be scaled horizontally to look correct upon playback. As long as you keep the image away from a computer and just display it on a video monitor, you'll never see this internal accounting. Alas, as soon as you look at one of these images on a square pixel computer monitor, the images will look a touch wide.

When the Hillary ad was placed online, everything in it was broadened -- including the image of Obama, including the image of Hillary. Everything. If the Obama imagery derived from an online source, it could have been broadened twice.

And that's that. We here encounter no racism -- just an imperfect technology, misunderstood by Luddite lunkheads with a phobia for research. (Frankly, I strongly doubt that darkening Obama's face would ever affect a single vote.)

Did Markos seek technical expertise when he made his grand pronouncements? No, he did not. One of his commenters testifies that the image manipulation must have been intentional -- but this remark comes from a copy editor at an ad house.

Although I've never worked for a large, prestigious firm, I have been involved in advertising since 1984. I'm a graphic designer and illustrator, and I've known plenty of others in the trade. I do image manipulation every damn day. My lifelong best friend is a professional video editor with two decades' worth of experience, and we often "talk shop." He will surely confirm everything I say here. If need be, I can track down this guy, who can confirm that -- since childhood -- I've had a strong interest in the technical side of motion picture production.

Markos Moulitsas, you stand exposed as a fool.

You have disgraced your once-fine site. Indeed, Kos has devolved into an anti-Clinton smear machine -- worse than The American Spectator, worse than Limbaugh, worse than Murdoch, worse than the Moonie press. (Shame on Americablog, as well.)

I did not vote for Hillary. Even so, I am appalled by the sheer unreasoning hatred festooning Daily Kos and other progressive blogs. I am even more appalled by false accusations of racism leveled against the Clintons by fanatical Obama supporters.

Moulitsas is the new Scaife, and Kossacks have become the new Freepers. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Kos interview with Larry Nichols or Ken Starr.

The left has become the right. Facts no longer matter: When in doubt, smear.

(By the way, if you play back that overrated 2004 Obama speech, you'll notice something odd: Not once does he criticize the decision to go to war. He criticizes Bush for not sending in enough troops!)

UPDATE: Well, some brave soul used my post as the basis for a Kos diary entry. Here. The response:

Yes, the Clinton campaign darkened the ad, or chose the darkest possible images.

Here we see the Kos strategem: When a lie is exposed, simply keep repeating it. Don't bother with evidence. Just repeat. This tactic works for Limbaugh, Murdoch, Bush...and now Kos.

Let me state the facts very clearly, in language that even the most fanatic Obamabot can understand: THE CLINTON CAMPAIGN DID NOT DARKEN ANYTHING. THEY DID NOT CHOOSE A DARK IMAGE. THEY DID NOT WIDEN THE IMAGE. They are responsible only for what they broadcast, and the broadcast image was quite different.

The darkening and the PAR problem occurred when someone else uploaded the thing to YouTube. And the same problems occur with lots of other videos. That's why I cited the example of the Obama Girl vid. In that case as well, the problem was with the codec used to compress the video for online purpose -- not with the way the original video was made.

When another brave soul invited the above-noted moron to follow my argument, here was what the moron had to say about my examples:

They're completely irrelevant, far as I can tell.

Once, many years ago, I caught a whiff of pure ammonia. Damn near knocked me out. A whiff of pure idiocy, of the sort displayed by this Kossack, has a similar effect.

But that isn't the end of it...

If you really want to believe this, you need to get someone with a better clue as to how advertising is done and it's component technology. And I would really stress this second part, find someone that isn't a 911 conspiracy theorist.

Ho, this is rich. I don't know about advertising. I don't know about the tech. And this creep does.

Riiiiiiight.

Anyone who wants to get into a pissing match regarding credentials should re-read my piece. It gives only a small idea of the kind of expert "posse" I can line up if need be.

Moreover, this Kos kook calls me a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Even though my site is filled with links to sites which debunk those theories.

Apparently, Kossacks can't read!

Perception

Consider this post an addendum to yesterday's expose of Kos' nonsensical "darkened Obama" musings.

I spoke to my old friend, the video editor. He confirmed pretty much everything said in my post below -- and then he pointed out one obvious fact which utterly demolishes the Kos theory: Everything in that controversial Clinton commercial is dark. The broadcast version seems to have been fine, but the online incarnation is murky. Hillary is dark. The shot of the White House is ridiculously dark. The kid in bed is way too dark. The shot of Obama is actually the brightest image in the whole damned show!

If Kos and TroutNut had bothered to look at their own materials, they would have understood that Obama was not singled out -- the same technical problems visible in that one shot affected every shot. The entire video is too wide, not just the shot of Obama. Blame the Pixel Aspect Ratio glitch, as outlined previously.

(Side note: For some reason, many people remain blind to aspect ratios. They buy widescreen TVs and then play 1.35:1 material stretched out to fit from side to side. The damnfool idjits think that the picture is supposed to look that way!)

Now let's zoom out for a wider view.

As we saw in our previous installment, most videos placed online are darkened by lossy codecs. Why did this phenomenon go unnoticed (except by professionals) until now?

Even though image degradation is all over the internet, it registered on the national consciousness only when a black candidate ran for president. If a codec darkens a shot of a white woman, nobody cares. If Obama looks dark, the sirens go off and fear-junkies screech that the darkening occurred by intention.

What does that fact say about our attitudes toward race?

Here are three images culled from the current Talking Points Memo page. The brightness is "off" in all three instances. The shot of Stephen Harper was probably over-exposed to begin with. The shot of McCain was taken with the light source in the background, which tends to throw off an exposure meter. The still of Hagee comes from a video, and I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the image went dark due to the codec. The original broadcast probably looked much better.

Did you notice these problems before I drew your attention to them? No. Why? Because all three men are white.

In the days and months and years to come, we're going to see lots and lots and lots of pictures of Barack Obama online. Many of them will be too dark. Please do not presume that conspiratorial forces are at play. Obama will "go dark" for the same reasons that Hagee and McCain went dark in the examples presented here.

Another point.

The believers in a Grand Plot Against Obama tend to mutter ominously that Hillary's commercial contains "subliminal" content. All such accusations are paranoid nonsense.

Get ready for a shock, conspiracy fans: Subliminals are impossible on television.

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

The word "subliminal" means an image that the conscious mind cannot perceive. In the United States, television broadcasts at 30 frames per second. A single-frame image -- 1/30th of a second long -- is perceptible, and therefore not subliminal. My editor friend tells me that he can easily spot a single "flash" frame when video is running at twice normal speed.

Forgive a bit of self-quotation:

I can't tell you how many times I've argued with film-illiterate conspiracy buffs who knew -- just bloody knew -- that subliminal images appear in The Exorcist. Every time I encounter this claim, I explain that, while quick cuts do exist in that movie, subliminals are impossible. Film runs at 24 frames a second, and 1/24th of a second is not subliminal; that's why you can see scratches and splices in a bad print. 1/3000th of a second is subliminal, but to flash an image so briefly requires a specialized piece of equipment called a tachistiscope. (For the same reason, no subliminals can ever appear on television, which has a 30 fps refresh rate.)

The usual response: "There must have been a tachisti-whatzit in the theater!"

Actually, I've spoken with the projectionist who ran The Exorcist during its first run at the National in Los Angeles back in '73. (In those days, big films did not open wide.) There was no such device.

Point won? Nope. The ne'er-say-die conspiracy buff would invariably accuse me of not knowing anything about movie technology (!) or of being part of the conspiracy.

(Before you say it: Yes, I know all about Vicary's stunt in the 1950s. He used a tachistiscope, and his results had no scientific value due to the lack of controls. And yes, I know about the Silverman/Weinberger experiments of the 1980s, which have been questioned due to some unsuccessful attempts at replication.)

Actually, I wasn't hard enough on Vicary. He flat-out lied about his results. Yet to this day, conspiracy-crazed boobs continue to repeat the lie!

Some controversial scientific studies indicate that carefully-chosen subliminals can have a modest effect. The most (in)famous experiment of the 1980s incorporated the phrase "Mommy and me are one." But the effect is subtle -- and without a tachistiscope, you just can't do it.

What about Wilson Key and his "embeds"? For those of you who have never read his books (which were wildly popular in the 1970s), Key thought that Ritz crackers were imprinted with the word "sex." He also said that advertisers paid airbrush artists to place penis imagery in photographs of icecubes.

Bottom line: Key was a blowhard pseudo-scientist and his books were garbage. (See here.) Back in the 1980s -- a time when I earned decent money -- I was a damned fine freehand airbrush artist. Nobody ever asked me to "embed" any hidden words or pictures into a photograph. I've never even heard a rumor of another artist receiving such a gig. Advertising pros laugh at Key's assertions.

Mind you, artists do sneak in hidden images as private jokes. I've done it. In the early 1980s, I illustrated a series of books designed to teach BASIC to kids. In one book, I hid the outline of a naked lady in a drawing of a castle. You know who gave me the idea? Wilson Key!

There's an old story (which may or may not be true) about an illustrator in the early 20th century who got a commission from Delmonico's restaurant. They asked him to create a pen-and-ink drawing for the Christmas menu. He provided an elaborate, exquisitely-detailed cityscape titled "Christmas in New York." After the menu was printed and in use, someone noticed a startling detail: In one tiny window of one small building, the artist had drawn an ultra-teensy image of Santa Claus performing an unnatural act with a reindeer.

I don't think that this image unconsciously sparked mass acts of animal abuse.

And I don't think that anyone's vote ever has or ever will be affected by a "subliminally" manipulated image of Barack Obama.

Subliminal advertising is a paranoid fantasy. If any blogger says otherwise, ask him or her to provide experimental data.