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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...'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
which is why in most recent films, you're unlikely to see any computer without one.
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