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The evidence room

Five instruments, built from the footage that actually shipped. Each one is a single comparison with a single control: drag it, flip it, play it. Nothing autoplays and nothing downloads until you ask — the case study argues that the whole pipeline ran inside a 16 GB laptop's budget, and a page about restraint that opens by pulling ten megabytes of video would be arguing against itself.

01 — the flicker

two LED walls, beating against the shutter

Both clips are the same six seconds of the locked-off centre camera, frame-aligned: the untreated export, and the same shot after a masked five-frame temporal blend, a deflicker pass and the warm grade. The wipe shows you where the banding sits — it is on the two side screens and nowhere near the couple, which is the whole point of the mask. The flip shows you that it pulses, because flicker is a change over time and half a frame of each is the wrong instrument for that.

note — the raw side strobes. it plays on loop as soon as this instrument scrolls into view, because flicker only shows up as motion — use the pause control below if you need to stop it. note — the raw side strobes, and this comparison only reads as motion, so reduced motion keeps it paused. press play below to compare on your own terms.

left of the divider: the untreated export. right: the same frame after the masked deflicker and grade. the full account →

02 — the skin

the correction that lost

Two frames from the same flash: the cyan stage wash on the couple's skin, and the per-frame face correction that pulls it back out. It is a clean fix on a still — and it is not what shipped. In motion the correction chased a strobing light and the skin crawled, so the version in the finished film touches no colour at all: a gentle brightness-only pull-down inside the body mask. This instrument exists to show the idea that lost, because the still is exactly what made it convincing.

The same frame after the per-frame face correction: the cyan is gone from the faces, the rest of the light show is untouched. — one flash frame, before and after per-frame face correction — the approach that was later dropped for a brightness-only pull-down. why it lost →

A flash frame before correction: cyan-shifted stage light washing over the couple's skin. — one flash frame, before and after per-frame face correction — the approach that was later dropped for a brightness-only pull-down. why it lost →

03 — the mask

what the segmentation actually produced

Every correction above is gated by a mask, and a full-frame segmentation pass kept losing the bride — a dark gown against a blazing LED wall. So the pipeline finds each face first, crops tightly, upscales the crop, and segments the patch alone. These are two real outputs of that pass. Switch between them: the hard case is the second one.

A per-person segmentation mask, green fill with a red outline, plus a pose skeleton, cut around the couple mid-flash with the LED wall excluded. — mask plus pose skeleton on the couple mid-flash; the LED wall sits outside every person-crop, so it is excluded by construction. how the mask is built →

Two overlapping dancers, each segmented independently into its own mask. — mask plus pose skeleton on the couple mid-flash; the LED wall sits outside every person-crop, so it is excluded by construction. how the mask is built →

04 — the cut

three angles, one timeline

Three cameras covered the couple's performance and none of them shared a clock — one body's clock ran about nine and a half hours fast. GCC-PHAT against a clean reference song track is what put them on one timeline; a single confident-looking wrong peak, 146 seconds out, is what made that stage run twice.

honest framing — the correction is already applied in these three exports. measured pairwise offsets between them are 0.02 s, 0.21 s and 0.19 s. so this figure shows what they are: three angles already locked together. it is not a re-enactment of the drift.

camera a

camera b

centre

the same six seconds from three cameras, already on one timeline — play them together and they move together. how it was assembled →

05 — the finale

four seconds, no argument

The closing shot of the performance edit: a slow push into the embrace, on a held frame, which is the only place in the film the camera is allowed to move. Everything above exists so that this looks like nothing happened to it.

the last four seconds of the graded performance edit, looping. what came after →

notice — photographs of private people

Please ask before you use these images

The photographs and video here are of real people — my wife, our families, and the guests at our wedding. It was a private family occasion, not a public event, and everything is published for one reason: to show the engineering work honestly. There is no second purpose.

So please ask first. Permission is a real possibility and not a formality I intend to refuse — email me at [email protected] and tell me what you have in mind. The cases I mean, plainly:

republishing them, in whole or in part
press, editorial, or commentary use
marketing, promotion, or stock libraries
inclusion in datasets, or training or fine-tuning models
AI-generated derivatives, edits, or likenesses

The diagrams, figures, code and writing are a separate matter — those are mine to license and are covered by the site's usual terms. It is the pictures of people I am asking you to check with me about, and I would rather be asked than find out later.