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Foiling Cinema Pirates
minesweeper writes "According to this Associated Press article, in fighting the piracy of advanced-screenings of movies, Hollywood has deployed agents with night vision goggles and placed metal-detectors at theater entrances. Nevertheless, video cameras are still being smuggled in and the recordings smuggled out and onto the Internet. Now, the latest attempt to fight piracy will be to show the movie with a particular flicker, imperceptible to the viewer in the theater, but making any video recording unwatchable. Quoth the article, 'Cinea LLC, which created an encryption system for DVDs, and Sarnoff, a technology research firm, are developing a system to modulate the light cast on a movie screen to create a flicker or other patterns that would be picked up by recording devices...'"
There is a recent press release on the stuff by Cinea and Sarnoff. The release on the Cinea website is inside an annoying sequence of pop-up windows, but Sarnoff has the joint press release here. not much more information, but useful.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I think you got screeners and cams confused. Cam copies are poor quality recordings of the cinema screen using a hidden camera.
Screeners - which you mentioned are copies from media (usually DVD) sent to rental stores, etc well in advance before a film starts showing. They have perfect quality, and dont differe much from the final DVD excapt that they may lack some extra/bonus features.
In the movies, when you see a scene with a television in it, why are there no such artifacts? Is it due to shooting with film, camera speed, ??
In the movies, if you see a scene with a TV, the TV image is added in during post production. The sync issues can't be fixed.
If you watch TV news, look for an image of a TV. There is an enormous amount of flicker & scan artifacts. The TV news people don't have the time (or budget) to fix the images of tv images.
With people out there who say they can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3, I wonder if people won't complain about this, even if they can't see it.
If you get a camcorder and record a regular CRT and play it back, you'll see all sorts of crazy flickering on the recording. That's because the screen only updates X times per second, and that doesn't always correlate up with how often the camcorder takes a shot.
Generally, people can use a CRT without seeing this flickering. Although if you use a lower refresh rate, most people get headaches, and some will notice flickering or just sense something is 'wrong'.
At the right refresh rate, you could recreate this effect while annoying only perhaps 0.5% of your audience, and if it's just for a few preview screenings, it might be a good idea for them.
With people out there who say they can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3, I wonder if people won't complain about this, even if they can't see it.
:)
Time to go off-topic. Yes, I can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3. Assuming you're talking about a 192kbps or less mp3 on a decent sound setup. Also, I'm not one of the people who has damaged his hearing by blasting rap-metal in my car so loud that people 3 cars over being vibrated in time with the bass.
If you are someone who has blasted his music at high volume, you *have* damaged your hearing and that does explain why an MP3 sounds "just as good" as a CD to you. It's as if you were color blind and trying to critique monitors for their suitability in color correction work.
Another factor is what use for playback. If you listen to a CD and an MP3 on your cheap computer speakers or your average car stereo and say "they sound the same" that's because of your cheap speakers. A crappy divx rip and a DVD look the same with your eyes closed, too.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
The research is funded by a $2 million grant from the Advanced Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency.
So the government is funding commercial companies (Cinea, Sarnoft) to come up with a technology to help protect the profits of other commercial companies? Not entirely unexpected, I suppose...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Actually they use a genlock to get the TVs and monitors to match the scan rate of the film camera.
The reason Apple Macs used to be seen so much in films is simply that Macs have always had a genlockable video output (along with Amigas), whereas PCs require more work to genlock.
Watching a semi-focused and shaking image of a movie with mono sound on my TV in no way substitutes for going to the theatre for a movie experience.
Unless the cost of seeing the movie includes round-trip airfare. Most films are not released simultaneously in all global markets.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Maybe the theaters I worked at were different than the ones you saw, but even with the platter system(which is what I assume the huge film plates you refer to are), you still need someone up in the projection booth. Granted, they can be a manager or someone else who has other things to do, but you still need someone up there to do the cleaning and threading. First off, as to your comment about moving the plates around, the film sitting on the platters weighs a lot, it took two of us to carry the film around(the platters themselves generally do not get moved as moving them increases the chances of getting a brain wrap). The film gets threaded through the projector between each showing(you don't have to rewind, but you do have to rethread) which usually takes a little while(not more than 5 or 10 minutes generally) especially if you do basic cleaning of the projector in the process. Thus, they do not just switch the film on and that's it. Granted, it's not an overly hard process to learn, but it isn't trivial by any stretch of the imagination. Also, if you don't want the film to look grainy and dirty, you have to do at least some cleaning of the projector between each showing. The film tends to create a good amount plastic dust and flakes during its run through the projector which have this habit of sticking to the film since it has a pretty good static charge to it. Thus, if you don't sweep the remaining stuff off the projector, you'll end up with a good amount of dust just waiting to stick onto the film. This all doesn't take into account actually building the films. Films come in nice little carrying cases divided up into sections so that it can be shipped more easily. These film strips have to be taped together along with the trailers and whatnot at the beginning of the film. This is also not a trivial task, and when you're done with a run, you have to break the film back down so you can ship it back to the distributor. I've worked at some good sized theaters, and they were all like this. So, in my experience, it most definitely is not just push and go. It requires a decent amount of work to clean and thread a film.
Moderators on crack? This is a serious observation from the article. I wouldn't be bothered if the RIAA was spending $2 million of it's own money - but taxpayer's money? If you find this observation troll you're insane or you didn't read the article. In either case you're crazy.
Thank you.
which is why in most recent films, you're unlikely to see any computer without one.
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The film projectors "flash" each frame of the film multiple times to reduce the flicker-effect. So the real frequency could be 48, 62, or even 96 fps.
Taxpayer money? You make it sound like the MPAA is a branch of the federal government.
From the article: "The research is funded by a $2 million grant from the Advanced Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency. "
I WISH it was an MPAA funded project. Then it would simply be a waste of their money. But it's not - it's a waste of our money.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Here are some links to reputable sources that underscore the problem in Chinese society.
Please read " Singapore implicated as piracy hub". This article has a chart showing that the rate of movie piracy for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan is 91%, 25%, and 44%, respectively. Contrast these shocking figures with figures for normal Western countries like Australia and Japan; their rate of movie piracy is 8%.
Please read " China Learns to Say, 'Stop, Thief!'". It explains that Chinese society has a software piracy rate of 92% in 2002 and claims that this figure is an improvement over the rate of 94% in 2001.
This problem of pirating movies and software is a cultural problem, not a legal problem. Most Chinese simply believe that stealing intellectual property is acceptable.
Time to go off-topic. Yes, I can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3. Assuming you're talking about a 192kbps or less mp3 on a decent sound setup. Also, I'm not one of the people who has damaged his hearing by blasting rap-metal in my car so loud that people 3 cars over being vibrated in time with the bass.
If you are someone who has blasted his music at high volume, you *have* damaged your hearing and that does explain why an MP3 sounds "just as good" as a CD to you. It's as if you were color blind and trying to critique monitors for their suitability in color correction work.
Loud bass/rap music can be bad for your hearing in several ways:
(1) Low frequencies tend to move more of the basilar membrane and this means more overall damage.
(2) As we age, we tend to loose the ability to detect high frequencies -- someone listening to loud bass music is setting himself up for total hearing loss later on.
(3) A lot of percussive sounds generate a large initial pulse which contains all frequencies -- this means the whole basilar membrane gets a jolt and this means potential damage to at all frequencies.
Sounds should be taken in moderation like most everything else.