You may have already seen my "low res" version of this video floating around on the web recently. I put this together for only one reason. To see if I could create a truly "viral" video. It worked... break.com/index/drunk-almost-hit-by-train.html The video got over 300,000 hits in 3 days from viewers on Youtube.com and Break.com . G4 Tech TV's Attack of the Show featured the video (as I have been told) where sadly, it was debunked as a fake... I tried to make the footage look like it was a old analog CCTV recording by adding the following effects... -blown out highs -desaturated color -bad horizontal sync -simulated AGC -phony date stamp (using the OCR font) -badly distorted, mono audio of limited bandwidth. The final touch was to encode a WMV file using a low bitrate to add that "cell phone video" look. I did not add my watermark it in order to help preserve realism. In retrospect I could have put a few more hours into the original edit to ensure a seemless look but the experiment worked so I am happy. Since then, I have fine tuned the video in HD which I have now uploaded to Vimeo. Sorry for the huge watermark but I have already had several other people steal/rip this video from my youtube page and claim it as their own. However, this is the only copy you will see in HD. During filming, the train passed and then I ran over the tracks a few seconds afterward. This was done to ensure that the colors and shadows would match perfectly. I then took the two pieces of footage and mapped them over each other using the pan & crop mask editor in Vegas 8.0. The video required many hours of hands-on frame by frame editing to ensure a seemless look, including multiple layer masks to cover and blend small continuity errors. My silhouette/shadow on the front of the train was mapped and blended directly onto 2 frames by hand in photoshop. If you look closely under the train's engine after it passes you can see my foot in 3 frames. Small details like this were added to help fool someone that may have analyzed the video frame by frame. The hardest part was to create a layer mask that covered the shadow of the crossing gate (off camera to the right) returning to it's upright position after the train passed. This can still be seen at 0:02 of the original low res version. This problem was only discovered after I returned from the shoot and had to be corrected in the edit. If I had waited five more seconds before running I could have saved myself 3 hours of editing time. As a footnote, the stumble you see as I cross the tracks was real and not planned... A happy accident? (bad pun... I know, I know)