I’m constantly finding and experimenting with new tools for journalists that come across my desk. My current testing table includes API tools, VPNs and a QR code generator. But one task that seemingly every newsroom needs to tackle is to be able to verify contributed videos.
Videos present a steeper challenge than photos for a variety of reasons. They consist of a long series of images, not just one static image, so finding the origin isn’t as simple as a reverse image search or looking at the metadata in Photoshop. And they consist of multiple components and layers including audio, faces, voices, backgrounds, frames and timecodes. Any of those components could be fake or manipulated.
