There's been a lot of hand wringing over Hillary's ad "True" and how Obama's appearance differs from the original debate footage. Some have suggested it is accidental. Some have suggested it's deliberate and racist. I propose neither. I propose that it's incompetent.
There are three different actions taking place in the video as illustrated by cartwrightdale: desaturate, darken, widen. Let's start with widen.
When you look at your computer monitor you see an image composed of pixels. Those pixels are normally square. Most image and low-end video editors assume they are square. Traditional standard def TV material in the US uses the NTSC format, but NTSC doesn't use square pixels. NTSC pixels are 10% narrower than they are tall. So if you drop an NTSC video into a program that is assuming square pixels, it stretches the picture wider by about 11%. As it turns out, that's exactly the difference between the debate footage and Hillary's ad.
Saturation and darken are probably happening at the same time. Look at the ad again. There is no original content in it. It's a medley of Obama's reply to the 3 AM ad (which itself incorporates 3 AM content) some stock video television static, the debate footage, and Hillary 'working the late shift'. Now these 4 different sources of video along with the added text and effects are being pulled together to make one ad, being resized and adjusted to appear as a coherent piece. It's plausible that along the way a filter used to desaturate and darken another clip was reused (either by accident or because they didn't care) - or that the effect came from capturing the original source.
Quite a few videographers have stepped up and said that they'd never let such things through their work, and that ads get scrutinized so much that nobody could miss something like that, but that assumes that the campaign paid big money for these ads. I don't think that they did. There's nothing about this particular ad that couldn't be done in some prosumer applications. Two grand and you could have produced this ad, with existing footage, some common stock video and a shallow pool of talent. But was it done on the cheap or did they pay pros for it? Let's look at other evidence...
Hillary's "3 AM" ad was almost a complete rip off of a supporter produced youtube ad for McCain. Why would a crack ad/media team so blatantly take an existing concept? Probably because they didn't. My guess is the crack media time has been stripped bare and produced an idea pitched at them by someone on the periphery, and being overworked and understaffed didn't take the time to see that it was an existing idea. And the 'NIG' in the ad on the kids pajamas? Accidental, but again a good team would have spotted it when scrutinizing the ad and reshot that to get the 'NIG' out of there. They didn't. Either they didn't scrutinize it or they didn't want to pay to reshoot it. And even after the 3 AM ad was put out there, Clintons advisors aren't even prepared to answer the most stunningly obvious question that a reporter would ask about the ad: "What are her qualifications?" Silence. The ad went out in a hurry, there was no staff to anticipate the media response to the ad and prepare for it and the campaign got caught out.
More? Look at her website videos. Here's another one titled "Partner" released around the same time as "True". Play the video and pause on a spot where there is some motion like when Hillary is speaking. You see those horizontal lines? That's called interlacing. NTSC is a very old standard and in addition to the rectangular pixels (to save on the amount of info to transmit over the air) NTSC interlaces frames of video, so it shows half the lines of one frame and then half the lines of the next frame in an alternating pattern. It does this because old TVs couldn't 'paint' the entire screen fast enough, so this allows the TV to only paint half the screen each frame. Done fast enough and with screen phosphors that decay slowly, you never notice. That's what you are seeing. When the campaign moved that video to the web, they didn't even bother creating a web version. They took a NTSC version, probably off of a DVD, and 'ripped' it for the web. Creating a web version out of any video editing tool is a simple task, and takes minutes, but they didn't. And even in ripping it down, they did a terrible job. The people that rip Battlestar Galactica for BitTorrent are usually pretty good at deinterlacing the video, but Clinton's team didn't bother - they just shoved it out there.
This isn't the work of a professional media team. This is the work of volunteers or work hired out on the cheap. It is rushed, unprofessional, and poorly done. What you are seeing here isn't an intentional act to race-bait, but a campaign that is in crisis, out of cash, tight on staff, and making bad decisions. This really is 'kitchen sink'. They produce as much stuff as possible, run it out, and hope that more of it sticks than backfires. What do they have to lose? The bad decisions may be small ones, but even small innocent mistakes can escalate into big issues. And before you rush to deny that her campaign might be making such bad decisions, look at where a prolonged campaign with tired staff has pushed the Obama team. Michelle misspeaks when she says she isn't proud of her country, Obama is unaware that his economic advisor met with Canada, his speeches are occasionally halting and punctuated, and he's getting testy with the press over Rezco.
This is two campaigns that have been going day and night, flying across the country almost daily, reacting to a media onslaught, giving speeches and interviews nonstop, and trying to keep up with the day-to-day of keeping a campaign running. They are tired, stressed out, and making mistakes. You guys caught one, but rather than see it as a mistake, you see it as insidious plot. I don't think they can do insidious or clever any more. I think Clinton is down to chopping down trees with a sledgehammer. She's swinging hard with the last remaining tools she has but rather than let her keep swinging away, by throwing race back at them you've given her an axe. Don't attack her for being evil or manipulative, attack her for being broke and putting out crappy work. Put the pressure on them to produce rather than respond - force them to spend money and staff time. They can defend racism charges for free and eat up 3 days of pundit time, but if you hit them on issues and force them to do real work, they'll keep screwing up - and probably big given enough time. We won't need to catch that one, the media will for us and make a real story out of it. But right now, we're just making Obama's job harder with this racism crap.