Awesome Captain Disillusion

Captain Disillusion’s latest educational video about video explains how the speed and way a shutter opens and closes affects still and moving images. You’ll learn how shutters work in film cameras, CCD camcorder sensors, and modern CMOS-based digital cameras. Plus, why rolling shutters cause image distortion and the tech that can minimize it.

There’s a trend on TikTok where people have posted videos of typically populous locations that appear utterly devoid of people. They’re images straight out of dystopian science fiction, but they’re not real. Captain Disillusion explains the VFX techniques that go into producing these convincing “Empty World” illusions.

It’s been some time since Captain Disillusion debunked a video, but this one was worth the wait. This time, he took on an illusion in which a magician appears to push a card through a glass window to an orangutan. After putting a few theories to the test, it doesn’t add up – but Cap’s sleuthing eventually reveals the truth.

Digital images typically have three color channels – red, green, and blue, and sometimes a fourth, Alpha channel, which defines transparency. Captain Disillusion the ways they can be created, and how the improper use of the Alpha channel can mean the difference between a seamless composite image and disaster.

Captain Disillusion is back. This time, he’s not here to debunk some video fakery but to show us how various visual effect shots are done in music videos. With the help of the J-Pop band Atarashii Gakko!, a green screen, and an office chair, he put together a sequence of cool VFX shots for three music videos.

The Great British Bake Off is called The Great British Baking Show here in the U.S. because Pillsbury owns a trademark on the words “Bake-Off.” Captain Disillusion digs into the consequences of this legal battle in the way the show has to be shot, edited, and have VFX applied to modify its contents for Netflix.

If you haven’t seen Macro Room’s amazing Playing with Time video, go watch it first. Then come back to this post and watch Captain Disillusion’s deconstruction of the clip, which explains in great detail how its creator likely achieved the complicated visual effects sequences.

Captain Disillusion is back with another one of his great educational videos about imaging technology and terminology. This time, he explains how our brains and eyes perceive color, and how computers can be used to manipulate hue, saturation, and brightness to our every whim.

In April 2020, a shaky video made the rounds on the Internet that purported to be a gathering of unidentified flying objects moving above the surface of the Moon. Like many videos he’s seen, Captain Dissilusion questioned the clip’s legitimacy, and points out its numerous flaws.

Rather than debunk a single bit of visual fakery this time, Captain Disillusion kicks off 2020 a few months late with a 10-minute compilation of videos which aren’t what they seem. That Zach King ladder clip is definitely a tricky one to figure out.

After posting his video on how interlacing works, Captain Disillusion was alerted to a small error in his video by an eagle-eyed Redditor. But since YouTube won’t let you replace a video after you upload it, he made this addendum video instead.

Captain Disillusion’s latest lesson on video technology delves into why signals used to be split up into alternating fields and then reconstructed on the fly. We no longer need to use interlacing, but it was a cool solution to a challenging engineering problem.

As part of his informative series on computer graphics and visual effects, Captain Disillusion provides a great layperson’s lesson on the fundamentals of pixels and image resolution. As the resolution war escalates, are we already at the point of diminishing returns?

Captain Disillusion pauses from debunking viral videos to provide a little education for video newbies, with a great primer on how frame rates work, how they affect moving images, and why the NTSC broadcast TV standard is still an odd 29.97 fps.

Captain Disillusion investigates those videos that show what appears to be water frozen in time, and demonstrating something known in science as “laminar flow.” It doesn’t take the Cap’n long to replicate the effect himself, but is it real or fake?

For his latest lesson on the harsh realities of reality, Captain Disillusion takes on a classic internet video, in which a Rochester Institute of Technology student attempted to create the urban legend that an Escher-inspired staircase actually exists somewhere on the campus.

By now, just about everyone on the internet has seen the video of the Plinko-like machine that appears to magically sort thousands of colored marbles neatly into a rainbow. We always figured it was fake, and now Captain Disillusion explains how he thinks it was done.

Captain Disillusion takes on another seemingly impossible viral video, though it takes him at least 37 seconds before he’s able to figure out how motion artist Kiyan Forootan pulled off the illusion of a see-through dancing character. Basically, Kiyan is a computer graphics master.

Captain Disillusion usually takes on videos which at least appear to be somewhat believable, but this time he went after stuff like the ridiculously fake “Gateway to Sedona” because he was incredulous that the video actually has true believers.

The always educational Captain Disillusion takes a break from debunking viral videos and questionable crowdfunding to kick off a new series about the masters of visual effects. The first episode looks at the ahead-of-their-time visuals in the Back to the Future trilogy.

There are millions of trick shot videos on YouTube (and we’ve featured our share of them.) Now, Captain Disillusion is here to burst our bubble – and all of those basketballs, footballs, tennis balls, and golf balls, as he shows us some of the tricks of the trade.