Garry Mack replies to Marcel Dehaeseleer 2006 Education forum
regarding splices in the wiegman film, and the fact that the Groden version is not the complete Wiegman film
Gary Mack:
The original, unedited Dave Wiegman film runs 36.5 seconds according to video tapes of the film's first broadcast at about 3pm local time that day.
If Groden's version is short, it's not his fault. That film has been shown many, many times since 1963 and I always see it edited differently. You have to known news film editors and news film editing techniques. The practice in those days was to edit film so blurry or confusing sequences aren't confusing to the audience.
Groden's version is missing a second or two at the very beginning of the film and some more is missing of the Newmans on the ground. There is one splice and maybe two, so more frames are probably missing at those places, too.
Groden owns at least two 16mm prints of the Wiegman film and the one he has on his video is the better image of the two.
As for the "problems" you found, none are significant:
1) The white line splice is, indeed, a splice. Whether the film was edited to remove blurry frames or was simply repaired from having been damaged, is unknown.
2) There is what appears to be another splice a little later. It is a black horizontal line near the bottom of the frame. (Black and white splice lines are quite normal, indicating editing on two different edit blocks that are not properly aligned.)
3) There are three segments to the Wiegman film, for once he filmed the Hesters, he stopped filming and walked toward the street. Then he started again and filmed the Newmans. Then he stopped again and, stepping onto the sidewalk, filmed the oncoming motorcade before panning to his left and catching Cheryl McKinnon dropping to the ground. Wiegman exposed 36.5 seconds of film in Dealey Plaza before jumping into his camera car and riding to Parkland.
4) Your "cross dissolve" is nothing more than ordinary blur artifacts from the film-to-tape transfer process. Different telecine machines create different artifacts, for they must match the 24 frames-per- second rate of 16mm film to the 29.97fps rate of US television. Converting US television to Europe's PAL standard or to France's SECAM standard induces additional anomalies.
5) In short, the blurs in the Wiegman film were present on the original broadcast of the unedited film. The composite "overlay" images you see are not present on the actual film. I have a 16mm 3rd or 4th generation print of the camera original Wiegman film and have examined it many times. The "overlay" is merely an artifact that appears only in some video versions of the film, not on the film itself.
6) You have to realize that a US video frame is actually two images, not one, and they overlap. Sometimes, depending on the video and how it was derived, one of the two fields (images) may not match the adjacent or following field, thus creating a composite. That is what you call an overlay.
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/6069-the-dave-wiegman-film/ Gary was wrong about one thing, the woman dropping to the ground was NOT Cheryl McKinnon ?
Her name was Doris Mumford
