Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Doofus Of The Day #762


Today's award goes to the video editing team for CBS's '60 Minutes' program.

The battery-powered Tesla Model S is one of the world’s fastest and quietest luxury cars, but you might not know the latter if you watched the "60 Minutes" interview with Tesla founder Elon Musk that first aired on Sunday.

Now CBS says it regrets the "error" that led to that impression.

Following an introductory segment by Scott Pelley, whose wife owns a Model S, there is a series of shots provided by Tesla of a Model S driving down a road accompanied by the out-of-sync sounds of an internal combustion engine and the shifting of a transmission.

The Model S has neither of these things.

Instead, it is propelled by a single electric motor that emits little more than a quiet whirring noise, which can also be heard under some, but not all, of the images. The revving engine noise is also used with several shots of a stationary car’s interior, which was filmed in a studio setting.

Later in the report, footage of a Model S travelling through Norway’s Lærdal Tunnel again features the sounds of an engine in the background. The footage, also from Tesla, is presented on the company’s YouTube page with completely different audio that’s more in line with the actual sound of the car.

There's more at the link.

That's just great - grafting motor noises onto footage of a silent car!  Whoever thought that one up needs to be reassigned to YouTube, to do penance by getting rid of the ghastly music soundtracks people insist on adding to otherwise perfectly good videos.

Peter

2 comments:

Rick T said...

Always, always, always remember the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: we know this is deceptive audio editing, so how many *other* times was the audio modified without it being so obvious???

Just another example of why I never watch broadcast news.

NotClauswitz said...

At least it wasn't a two-stroke engine applied to it - like the Harley in Terminator!