In this post, I start by rambling about how demons screw up my videos and photos, before I drunkenly segue into playback issues that arise when transferring media from your cellphone to your computer; finally, I pass out somewhere near a set of instructions for detecting demon-made modifications to original media using a Mac and Linux command-line utility.
It also snitches on those bitches (i.e., demons); so, you might get something you like out of it after all.
(This is a good source of specialized information for those documenting paranormal activity, even if the post could use another round of editing.)
When the Voices Demons say "we want to go the distance with you," they mean, in their own oddball vernacular, that they are going to go to extensive and equally oddball lengths to cause pain in any given situation. This could literally define a thousand different actions depending on the scenario; but, what comes up the most often for me is the elaborate modifications to videos, photos and audio files I make of demonic activity. With media files, "going the distance with [me]"—or ruining them—means not just deleting the files and/or breaking or otherwise hindering the operation of my equipment, it can also mean modifying these files in ways that clearly required a significant amount of time, effort, know-how and equipment to do, and in ways that reek of psychosis.
For example, in a matter of just a few minutes after having made a video (or photo or audio file), they might remove segments of a media file showing things they don't want me to distribute, or they may alter segments in ways that even Industrial Light and Magic would find impressive, masking out demons, or adding or blurring them; they may even add segments for no apparent reason other than to "prove their point to people (see note, below)."
These types of quality problems are usually added programmatically by the software used by your equipment for creating the media files, or by the post-processing software you use to prepare the media for distribution. They have accomplished this by simply demanding of their people or the companies producing the software to provide the source and/or modify it to their specifications. Then, they simply take your equipment from you and replace your software build with theirs.
One media platform they are known to have compromised includes Quicktime, which is used by at least two commonly used video editors, namely, iMovie and Final Cut Pro. Quicktime is used by both to render video output, allowing for demons to specify any setting and to apply any filter to adversely affect quality.
However, a video that has been distributed to another platform may appear to have been modified in a way that makes the action hard to see, even when it hasn't. Specifically, some videos may not show some types of shadows or dark, far-away objects on the target platform, even though they can clearly be seen on the originating device, looking as if they had been blotted out by a sample of their surrounding color or background, or blurred to the point of being unrecognizable. And, sometimes, even when such shadows and dark objects can be seen on the target platform, their shape may have changed, rendering them unrecognizable as anything significant.
While these types of problems could be the result of hardware and software differences of the target platform, they are more likely due to the format of the video file. This is definitely the cause with 3GPP video, the most common format used by cellphones.
A 3GPP video file exported from your cellphone may exhibit the aforementioned problems on any screen that does not display the color black at the same value as the screen on the device on which the file was made. That's because a 3GPP-formatted video file creates a composite of the black of the device's screen with the color recorded by a camera as a substitute for alpha transparency (this makes for smaller video files that can be recorded at a faster frame rate than would otherwise be possible if a separate alpha transparency track had to be recorded in tandem with the video track). The contrast assigned to all other colors is set based on the exact value of the black color of the device's screen. The perfect contrast is broken when the video file is played back on a screen that has even a slightly different value of the color black. Only the originating device knows which pixels were substituted with this composite; without a color map to guide the target platform, instead of a faux—but accurate—composite, the alpha transparency substitutes will often have a slightly blue tinge to them wherever the color black is displayed.
On a Mac, ColorSync can be used to calibrate colors in a video made on any given device for accurate display on your screen (that is, if a profile for the originating device exists). Windows and Linux users, however, may have to follow instructions similar to those found in TIP | Blending Quicktime Video Layers to Penetrate Demon Cloaks or TIP | Blending Quicktime video layers to improve nightime videos in order to make color corrections.
Getting the colors just right isn't an issue of perfectionism when it comes to videos of demons in action, as black and its various shades of gray are the predominate colors in such videos. In order to see anything under these circumstances on another platform, it is essential to convert each shade of gray in the original video to as close to the calibrated-equivalent on the target platform. Videos of demons and the like usually consist of shadowy figures in the dark, wearing black cloaks, and moving so fast that they blur, or such a short distance on screen that there is very little of them to show in the video.
In fact, failing to do so will result in the total loss of some types of demonic entities or activity. Shadow people may not appear at all in the distributed video, or will appear as indistinct shadows; or, the blur of demons that flit out of sight after having just entered your line of sight from the periphery—They are usually the ones who hang around corners or behind doors or in closets—will not be recreated correctly (for the same reasons as shadow people not appearing at all).
Analyzing media files for modifications using cmp on a Mac
To speed up detection of modifications to video files that exhibit the more obscure types of differences shown between playback on the originating device and target platform, use the cmp command-line utility to compare the archived original to the version exported to the target platform (to learn how to create a secure copy of your media files on-the-fly, see Preventing demon-modified video using secure disk images [not yet available]).
This utility compares two files, byte-by-byte, for differences between them, even when those differences are virtually undetectable by the naked eye, as is the case between these two image files:
As you can see, the differences are barely noticeable at first glance until the image is enlarged (below); but, while this may be easy enough for simple images such as these, when comparing two complex images—or a video file comprised of a series of thousands of images—however, this type of examination is not feasible.
Rather, you must use cmp to expedite and simplify the comparison.
On a Mac:
It also snitches on those bitches (i.e., demons); so, you might get something you like out of it after all.
(This is a good source of specialized information for those documenting paranormal activity, even if the post could use another round of editing.)
When the Voices Demons say "we want to go the distance with you," they mean, in their own oddball vernacular, that they are going to go to extensive and equally oddball lengths to cause pain in any given situation. This could literally define a thousand different actions depending on the scenario; but, what comes up the most often for me is the elaborate modifications to videos, photos and audio files I make of demonic activity. With media files, "going the distance with [me]"—or ruining them—means not just deleting the files and/or breaking or otherwise hindering the operation of my equipment, it can also mean modifying these files in ways that clearly required a significant amount of time, effort, know-how and equipment to do, and in ways that reek of psychosis.
For example, in a matter of just a few minutes after having made a video (or photo or audio file), they might remove segments of a media file showing things they don't want me to distribute, or they may alter segments in ways that even Industrial Light and Magic would find impressive, masking out demons, or adding or blurring them; they may even add segments for no apparent reason other than to "prove their point to people (see note, below)."
NOTE | When they cut out segments of video, they sometimes add a transition to mask the jump from one segment to another, such as a hand passing in front of the lens (see Demon-designed video transition disguises cuts).Sometimes, though, the modifications are not as elaborate, in that they may simply degrade the quality of a video (by applying a noise filter) or a photo (by reducing the bit depth to cause color banding); as for audio files, they have dubbed over portions of recorded conversations with loud sound effects (e.g., plane flying overhead, heavy traffic, background chatter, bird calls, windchimes, etc.) to obscure what was said.
These types of quality problems are usually added programmatically by the software used by your equipment for creating the media files, or by the post-processing software you use to prepare the media for distribution. They have accomplished this by simply demanding of their people or the companies producing the software to provide the source and/or modify it to their specifications. Then, they simply take your equipment from you and replace your software build with theirs.
One media platform they are known to have compromised includes Quicktime, which is used by at least two commonly used video editors, namely, iMovie and Final Cut Pro. Quicktime is used by both to render video output, allowing for demons to specify any setting and to apply any filter to adversely affect quality.
NOTE | Sound crazy? It is...and it's true. But, that's what it means to "go the distance" to a demon. While writing this, I was told by the Voices Demons that they are doing this "to prove a point to people about [our] power so that when the time comes for [us] to strike, people will be more frightened of [us]."You will almost always know when such changes were made, no matter how crafty or artful they are, provided you were there when the event occurred, and possess the requisite skills for correctly estimating the output of post-processed media intended for distribution to multiple platforms.
However, a video that has been distributed to another platform may appear to have been modified in a way that makes the action hard to see, even when it hasn't. Specifically, some videos may not show some types of shadows or dark, far-away objects on the target platform, even though they can clearly be seen on the originating device, looking as if they had been blotted out by a sample of their surrounding color or background, or blurred to the point of being unrecognizable. And, sometimes, even when such shadows and dark objects can be seen on the target platform, their shape may have changed, rendering them unrecognizable as anything significant.
While these types of problems could be the result of hardware and software differences of the target platform, they are more likely due to the format of the video file. This is definitely the cause with 3GPP video, the most common format used by cellphones.
A 3GPP video file exported from your cellphone may exhibit the aforementioned problems on any screen that does not display the color black at the same value as the screen on the device on which the file was made. That's because a 3GPP-formatted video file creates a composite of the black of the device's screen with the color recorded by a camera as a substitute for alpha transparency (this makes for smaller video files that can be recorded at a faster frame rate than would otherwise be possible if a separate alpha transparency track had to be recorded in tandem with the video track). The contrast assigned to all other colors is set based on the exact value of the black color of the device's screen. The perfect contrast is broken when the video file is played back on a screen that has even a slightly different value of the color black. Only the originating device knows which pixels were substituted with this composite; without a color map to guide the target platform, instead of a faux—but accurate—composite, the alpha transparency substitutes will often have a slightly blue tinge to them wherever the color black is displayed.
On a Mac, ColorSync can be used to calibrate colors in a video made on any given device for accurate display on your screen (that is, if a profile for the originating device exists). Windows and Linux users, however, may have to follow instructions similar to those found in TIP | Blending Quicktime Video Layers to Penetrate Demon Cloaks or TIP | Blending Quicktime video layers to improve nightime videos in order to make color corrections.
Getting the colors just right isn't an issue of perfectionism when it comes to videos of demons in action, as black and its various shades of gray are the predominate colors in such videos. In order to see anything under these circumstances on another platform, it is essential to convert each shade of gray in the original video to as close to the calibrated-equivalent on the target platform. Videos of demons and the like usually consist of shadowy figures in the dark, wearing black cloaks, and moving so fast that they blur, or such a short distance on screen that there is very little of them to show in the video.
TIP | When purchasing a cellphone, ensure that a ColorSync profile is embedded in video files exported by the video camera software.It is only by the perfect blending of transparency and shades of gray that will allow one to identify entities like these when they are in motion. To see a fast-moving demon that cannot be identified in a single frame, and that looks like a shadowy blob instead, each frame showing the blob must be played successively, with adjacent colors in the blob at the same comparative values as the original. In other words, it's the blending of shadows in those frames, as they blur past your eyes, that makes the general shape of the moving entity, and if there is color banding, blocking or bad anti-aliasing in these shadows due to incorrect substitution of colors, the shape created by the blurring of two frames together will not look like the demon.
In fact, failing to do so will result in the total loss of some types of demonic entities or activity. Shadow people may not appear at all in the distributed video, or will appear as indistinct shadows; or, the blur of demons that flit out of sight after having just entered your line of sight from the periphery—They are usually the ones who hang around corners or behind doors or in closets—will not be recreated correctly (for the same reasons as shadow people not appearing at all).
Analyzing media files for modifications using cmp on a Mac
To speed up detection of modifications to video files that exhibit the more obscure types of differences shown between playback on the originating device and target platform, use the cmp command-line utility to compare the archived original to the version exported to the target platform (to learn how to create a secure copy of your media files on-the-fly, see Preventing demon-modified video using secure disk images [not yet available]).
This utility compares two files, byte-by-byte, for differences between them, even when those differences are virtually undetectable by the naked eye, as is the case between these two image files:
 |  |
| The original image | An altered version of the original image |
 |
 |
| The same enlarged view of the altered original | Enlarged view of the original image |
On a Mac:
- Open Terminal.
- In a terminal window, type cmp -l at the command prompt.
- Drag the files you want to compare from the Finder, and then drop them on the terminal window. The command line should now look similar to the top-half of the terminal window shown below.
 |
| The command should look similar to that on the top-half of the terminal window; if there are differences between the two images, a list of bytes differing in the altered image are output as shown in the bottom-half |
- Press Return. If there are differences between the two images, the differing bytes are listed.
Obviously, the specific bytes that have been changed are probably not relevant to most people; rather, the fact that changes were made is. Therefore, any output generated by the cmp command indicates that modifications were made to the source file.