Resolution: My concern with the Berg Video

[jmowreader]

How come the resolution on the Berg video went to shit when they really started cutting on him?

[Malva Zebrina]

1. I do not understand the poor quality of the video at all

I have taken better quality videos even using the first clunky video cameras that came on the market. Even though I am am amateur, as this person might be, I have managed to get a clearer video than this.

There is something strange about the grainyness and the out of focus picture. It reminds me of the "fat Osama" tape.

[Dookus]

2. has anybody seen an actual videotape?

seems to me it's only ever been released on the internet.

[jmowreader]

3. Something else occurs to me...

We talk about how the video was edited. It was. That's quite obvious.

I wonder why.

If I was an Islamic terrorist and I was going to cut some American guy's head off then send a video of it to the press so as to piss off The Great Satan, I'd do the deed, take the tape out of the camcorder, write "To al-Jazeera" on it and drop it in the mailbox. I wouldn't pretend I was Francis Ford al-Coppola and cut the tape.

[Unperson 309]

4. Mis-spelling!

Er... shouldn't that be...

al Qoppola?

309

[jmowreader]

7. Yeah, I guess...

but depending on the translit system you use, it could be al-Qapala. Who knows?

[RafterMan]

9. Maybe it wasn't "clean"

he could have struggled, sprayed blood on the camera, cursed his killers, whatever. It could be that in the original take they just threatened him, then sawed his head off on camera later.

I can't bear to watch it enough to come to a conclusion.

[TrogL]

5. may have switched cameras or moved to a darker room

Much as I dislike the video is severerly compromised.

[EV1Ltimm]

6. video compression in post-production. n/t

[jmowreader]

8. If that is so, shouldn't it have been equally bad all the way through?

Because it is suspicious that the codec went all to hell at the exact time when...uhh, wouldn't it be a lot easier to chop a guy's head off if the guy was already dead, than to try executing him by cutting his head off? There's a lot of muscles and stuff that hold your head on, and if they were relaxed and not twitching and jumping around it would be far easier to cut through them. The cutter didn't have all that big of a knife (I have a bigger chef's knife), he needed all the help he could get.

Also: if you were trying to shock the Great Satan, showing a big pool of Berg's blood would be good; I didn't see one. Maybe there was one, but as crappy as that video is (I downloaded this video from two sources and watched it twice because I thought maybe the first outfit fucked it up themselves; it turns out to be that poor. If you thought it was bad once, sit through that fucking speech twice.) you'd never know.

[TheWebHead]

10. probably done on purpose

the speech showed them in a wide shot, while the beheading was close-up... To make sure they weren't identifiable, they degrade the video after the fact so that it's only good enough to see what they are doing, but not good enough for people to identify them.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

11. nonsense from a drunk person early in the morning

Larger amount of motion + constant amount of bits per second = poorer resolution when motion is present in frame. You see the same thing on digital satellite broadcasts.

Let's see... the downloaded video that I haven't watched yet appears to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 megabytes. I believe someone said that the length was about 5 minutes. So... (ignoring the binary math implications of all this...)

1 megabyte/minute = about 17kb/s. Not exactly TV quality. This has the potential to look really horrible for anything other than relatively static video.

Granted, this is only one way of divvying up the bits. I don't know the windows media codec, but assuming that it's some MPEG derivative it may be variable bitrate. Even so, given the size of the video, you're still going to get hellish video quality whenever there's motion in t