CD Scandals: Why the ‘morphed’ video argument doesn’t work

Chennai: Every time a scandal-video is leaked, those with their pants down on camera cry hoarse: “it is not me, it’s morphed, it is doctored.”

In the latest case, Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi has obtained a restraint from the Delhi High court against media houses and his former chauffeur from publishing or making public a CD that allegedly contained content of him in a compromising position.

While we are yet to know the truth of the claims, we decided to investigate how easy or hard it was to truly morph people on video.

Of course it is possible. That is what our film makers do.

But is it easy?

No it isn’t. It takes a lot of time, a lot of skill and, a lot of money.

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According to computer graphics specialists and film makers here, if one has to do a convincing morph so that one takes a fake face or fake image for real, it is as good as a graphics project for a film. And it has a per-second cost.

A simple morphing on still images is an easy job even for an amateur, but a moving image is a different ball-game. Superimposing of a face on another person’s body requires painstaking frame-by-frame graphical work that only a professional can do.

“We are not talking about putting a mask like image without expressions on the face of a moving person,” a graphics specialist said.  And these graphics require good machines and highly skilled technicians.

So, the bottomline is if there is a scandal video that is genuinely morphed, there is lot of money, effort and technical infrastructure involved. They need to be investigated and busted so that important people can live in peace.

Short sex clips, often clandestinely shot by one of the partners in the act or a third party, have become the standard form of adult entertainment throughout Asia over the last few years.

Although no region is immune to “sex-tapes,” these ‘scandal” clips are mostly endemic to our region. They have claimed the lives and careers of many.

The worst was in Indonesia in 2010 when a hugely popular singer called Ariel was sent to jail for three years for allegedly having sex on camera with star actresses such as Luna Maya and Cut Tari.

Apparently, he had sex with many other women on camera, some of which were leaked out leading to a minor storm in the country. During the same period, similar videos surfaced in Vietnam, Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India.

In Sri Lanka, it allegedly involved a monk; while in Bangladesh, Philippines and Vietnam, the attraction was popular TV actresses.

In India, it started much earlier and has never stopped since then. However, the latest trend is the involvement of politicians.

Interestingly, while some of them watch it in the assembly, some get morphed into them.