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.