The clip, described
Try it
Nine seconds, in words
Picture a phone held up inside a doorway, filming the street. For the first three seconds there is nothing but hail: white pellets skipping off the roof of a parked car, off the road, off everything, and water already running fast along the gutter in a gray line. Then a woman in a green coat crosses. Her umbrella has blown half inside out; one hand grips the handle low and the other reaches up for a bent spoke. Her hair whips sideways. She turns her head toward the camera for about half a second. In the last stretch the phone swings up and catches the sign over the doors opposite, and the clip stops mid-swing. Someone off to the side says something short that you cannot quite make out.
That paragraph is standing in for the clip. There is nothing to play on this page, and that turns out to be closer to the real thing than a player would be. Scrolling a feed, you get one pass at nine seconds on a small screen, at whatever size your thumb left it. You cannot slow it down, and you would not think to. So the question was never what you could see if you studied it frame by frame. It is what you can decide from the pass you actually get.
Nothing about it is remarkable. That is deliberate. An obvious fake teaches nothing, because the hard cases are the ordinary ones — the clip you scroll past without stopping, in weather that happens somewhere every day. Next we go through the four things people are most often told to look for. Each of them has something real to grab onto here.
Where the nine seconds go
0s–3s
Hail on the road and the parked cars
3s–6s
A woman crossing with a broken umbrella
Her face is turned toward the camera for about half a second
6s–9s
The sign over the doors, then a cut
Nine seconds is not much. Almost every check people recommend has to happen somewhere on this line, and most of them have well under a second to work with.