Maybe I've been watching too much
Captain Disillusion lately.
But I thought some of that shit just had to be faked.
Well, of course, card tricks are inherently
fake, that's the whole point.
But I was suspecting digital-image-processing trickery, the old "we'll do it in post!", rather than mere misdirection and sleight-of-hand.
Youtube, while not offering a lot of stuff that they should, let me replay a video at lower speed. So I did (not the whole thing, but some key bits).
I was already composing an email to the aforementioned Captain, because I thought I had spotted trickery of the post-production kind.
The color-changes of his vest in particular. At regular speed, that just looked like a digital effect. But at 0.25 playback speed, I was able to spot exactly how he did it. He's just effin' quick about it.
The way he makes the white rectangles go to the other side of the table, that still looks like a jump cut to me. Or, rather, the way he makes them appear there looks like a jump cut, making them disappear from his hands looks like real slight-of-hand. But I conclude it only looks like that.
A few of the other things I thought might be faked look, at 1/4 playback to be genuine, physical trickery, so I'll grant that he probably also did such to make the rectangles appear on the other side of the table. There's no reason to shoot a video of someone doing that many frankly badass tricks, but then add image processing and suchlike on top of that. However he made the rectangles appear there, it not being visible at 1/4 speed just tells me he did it >between frames<.
This is a 60 fucking Hz video. At best, it was recorded at a lower frame-rate, minimum around 24, and he made that happen in less than 1/24th of a second. I think I'm seeing minute motion-blur, so that they recorded at a lower frame-rate and then converted for youtube isn't entirely outlandish.
So, in conclusion:
Hat's fucking off, Mr. Chien, the hats are fucking off!