The concept of manipulating video can be traced back as far as the 1950s when the 2-inch
Quadruplex tape used in videotape recorders would be manually cut and spliced. After being coated with
ferrofluid, the two ends of tape that were to be joined were painted with a mixture of
iron filings and
carbon tetrachloride, a toxic and carcinogenic compound to make the tracks in the tape visible when viewed through a microscope so that they could be aligned in a splicer designed for this task As the video cassette recorder developed in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the ability to record over an existing
magnetic tape became possible. This led to the concept of overlaying specific parts of film to give the illusion of one consistently recorded video, which is the first identifiable instance of video manipulation. In 1985,
Quantel released The Harry, the first all-digital video editing and effects compositing system. It recorded and applied effects to a maximum of 80 seconds of 8-bit
uncompressed digital video. A few years later, in 1991,
Adobe released its first version of
Premiere for the Mac, a program that has since become an industry standard for editing and is now commonly used for video manipulation. In 1999,
Apple released
Final Cut Pro, which competed with Adobe Premiere and was used in the production of major films such as
The Rules of Attraction and
No Country for Old Men.
Face detection became a major research subject in the early 2000s that has continued to be studied in the present. In 2017, an amateur coder named “DeepFakes” was altering pornography videos by digitally substituting the faces of celebrities for those in the original videos. The word
deepfake has become a generic noun for the use of algorithms and facial-mapping technology to manipulate videos. On the consumer side, popular video manipulation programs
FaceApp and Faceswap, developed from similar technology, have become increasingly sophisticated. The proof-of-principle software
Face2Face was developed at the
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the
Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, and
Stanford University. Such advanced video manipulation must be ranked alongside and beyond previous examples of
deepfakes. ==Types of video manipulation==