5 Signs a Video Has Been Deepfaked
A quick, practical checklist for spotting deepfaked video — the edge artifacts, lip-sync drift and lighting tells that still give synthetic clips away.
Video is harder to fake convincingly than a still image — there are simply more frames to keep consistent. That’s good news: it means deepfaked video still leaves tells, especially in motion. Here are five to watch for.
1. Edges that shimmer
Watch the boundary where a face meets hair, glasses or the background. Face-swap models often produce a faint, flickering seam that wobbles between frames. Pause and step through it slowly.
2. Lip-sync that drifts
Audio and mouth shapes can fall fractionally out of step, particularly on plosive sounds (p, b, m). If the voice feels almost synced but slightly off, be suspicious.
3. Lighting that doesn’t agree
Real light is consistent across a scene. In composited or generated video, the direction or colour of light on the face may not match the environment — a warm face in cool surroundings, or shadows pointing the wrong way.
4. Too-still or too-smooth motion
Blink rate, micro-expressions and small head movements are hard to fake. Faces that are eerily steady, or that move with an unnatural smoothness, are worth a second look.
5. No provenance, suspicious metadata
A clip that claims to be a real recording but carries no camera metadata — or metadata that contradicts the story — is a red flag. Conversely, valid C2PA Content Credentials are evidence for authenticity.
No single sign is proof. The reliable approach is to combine them — which is what a forensic tool does automatically, fusing several independent signals into one verdict instead of relying on any single tell.
