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Night Vision Goggles vs Pirates
Cormorant writes "It was reported in The Guardian that Warner Brothers has sent night vision goggles to cinemas across Britain for ushers to don and scan for camcorder pirates during the entire length of the movie [the new Harry Potter], along with watermarks and codes displayed on screen during the film. Mr Graham said "Video piracy is rife everywhere, and with the UK screening the film four days before the rest of the world, Warner was concerned the movie would end up on the internet. Warner sees the investment as negligible compared with the threat to the whole industry."
It won't help. Most Night Vision Goggles are of the Image Intensifier type. These work by amplifying very small amounts of light. Infrared is more useful in tracking living creatures by their heat emissions.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
And what if the pirate *is* the kid running the projector? I know of at least one of these instances.
That's what the watermarks are for.
What?
At my theater, the projector is run only by the managers and the projector guy [all adults]. A teenager has never ran the projector...
/kid making $5.15/hour @ movie theater cleaning up your Icee spills
To correct you, screeners ARE copies made from VHS or DVD, sent to movie reviewers and members of the Academy (and others too). Screeners is the best quality you can get.
FOr your enlightment:
What's CAM, Workprint, Telesync, Telecine, Screener,DVDRip, Subbed?
CAM - This type of VCD was recorded by someone in a cinema with a camcorder and the audience can be heard! The picture quality is usually OK but the sound is mostly very bad and hard to make out speech.
TS (Telesync) - These are also recorded in a cinema but usually on an expensive camera and they should have a seperate audio source (so the audience cannot be heard), these are generally very good quality and highly watchable.
TC (Telecine) - Done a number of ways, all from taking directly from the reel. Ripped in either widescreen (letterbox) or in full-screen (pan and scan) with excellent audio and video.
Screener - A Screener is usually recorded form a promotional video tape or DVD which is sent to censors and film critics etc.. The quality is usually as good as a commercial VCD, some times a copyright message appears on the screen.
Work-Print - Each frame of the film is copied from celluloid (or another source). The sound is usually perfect and the visual quality can vary. These are sometimes incomplete movies.
LD/DVDRip - Are ripped from DVD or Laserdisc versions of the film and the quality is as good as genuine.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
I live in Indianapolis and most movies are upwards of at least $8-10 now depending on when you go, and we have a very modest cost of living.
What?
The way night vision goggle work is that they emit infrared light that can be detected by the goggles. Sort of like a flashlight that can only be seen by special equipment.
If the spurious infrared light interferes with the camcorder, then that's more of a side benefit. The goal here is to see if there are any cameras in use in the crowd.
Neat experiment: Take your remote control (Television, vcr, whatever) and point it at the lens of your digital camera while looking at the lcd. You'll see a flashing dot of infrared light.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
That really depends on Union involvement. Many regal cinemas for instance are non-union so the assistant and shift managers run the movies. They generally ARE teenagers.
In fact, the awards screener DVDs are only one source. (A "screener" is a promotional preview videocassette/DVD of a film provided by a film company, or its distributor, to video store owners or movie award voters prior to its general release date. Selling, trading or distributing these "screeners" is frowned upon by the MPAA)
Every point in the production cycle where the movie transitions from print to electronic version is a possible leak.
Screener traces are already in place. And there was a notable incident this year where an Acadamy of Motion Pictures member was caught bootlegging his screeners by the trace technology.
Have you Meta Moderated t
You're right, it's an urban legend:
http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/stealth.asp
"A friend of my father's was a cop in Nevada, and he was assigned the graveyard shift, posted outside of town on a little used section of road, given a radar gun and ordered to stay put and to pull motorists over for speeding. One night, while the officer waits by the side of the road, the radar gun starts screaming for no apparent reason at all, registering about 140. The officer, who was sleepy anyway, attributes this to a faulty gun, and ignores the incident.
A week later the same thing happens again, on the same stretch of road, at about the same time at night. This time, however, the gun registers 145, and the officer pays more attention. Later, after his shift is over, he has the gun checked out for problems, and is told it is operating perfectly. A week later, same road, same time, the gun goes off. By now the police officer is confused, and angry.
The next week he has men stationed at a road block a few miles down from the spot where he has been positioned. Like clockwork, the radar gun goes off, and he alerts his friends to get ready for whatever is racing down the highway.
At the road block is stopped a black Lamborghini, with an engine iced and baffled for silent running. The driver is a drug mule, hauling a load and staying on the backroads, and less frequently monitored highways. The car itself is running without headlights, while the driver wears night vision goggles.
Status: False"
You are correct in your understanding of watermarking. However, one of the main requirements of a good watermarking system is that the watermark should be preserved in the presence of image modification (compression, cropping, rotating, etc.) This means that many watermarks themselves are not implanted once, but repeated many times throughout the frame. There is currently a lot of research in the field of watermarking because it is a difficult problem to solve, and the ramifications could be great. (I recall seeing a slashdot article where a man was arrested for pirating movies because the movie studios watermarked each screener DVD differently and were able to trace the internet release to its source.) Some watermarks operate in the frequency domain (such as the fourier transform, or discrete cosine transform DCT) which recognize patterns in the image, and describe the image as a summation of waves. Applying a watermark in the frequency domain means one bit worth of data changed is distributed throughout every other pixel in that row/column of image.
In summary: Im absoultely positive the MPAA is using watermarking techniques, and I am sure that they have put tons of research money/time into defining watermarks that will survive the MPEG or DivX encoding algorithms.
And btw:
A serial number in a random frame can be blotted out easily or the entire frame can be cut out by someone compressing the video stream to an mpeg or divx.
Yes, it is infact illegal to bring a camera into a cinema in the UK, california and many other places. Doesnt matter that you dont use it, mere possesion of it within the cinema is enough to have you arrested. (Cue plea`s of "but officer, I didnt intend to SMOKE that pot, its merely in my possesion"). This is actually fairly standard for UK law, for example you are not allowed to carry bladed items or pointed items above a certain inch length in public, unless you have a good excuse (its my job, im a carpenter. i just bought it, its still in the wrapping. im taking it over to my mates house, he wants to borrow the tool set.), you also arent allowed to "go equipped" with certain items.
There's a theater where I live that charges $2 and $3 for tickets. They only have 4 screens but they always have current movies. Big name movies are $3 a ticket and not-so-big ones are $2.
Too late. Get your latest Harry Potter film on IRC.
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
i encourage you to go to south korea, moscow, thailand, kuala lumpur, jakarta, rome, or any other place in the world (basically, anywhere outside of the USA) where it's trivial to get pirated dvds and see what percentage of them say 'screener copy' at the bottom at some point in the film.
Not quite. It depends on what type of night vision goggle it is but in general I would say they use image enhancing night vission goggles as these are probably the least expensive.
What would be fun, in a weird and cruel way, is to take a very very bright light source to the movie with you and see how many ushers you can blind.
For those interested on how these things works, try this link.Does anyone "make out" in theaters anymore? That may have been possible in the 1960s when the gigantic single-screen theaters with lots of dark corners and balcony space were still in service, but in today's shoe box, you'd be right out in the middle of everyone.
Perhaps it would be possible in the top row of a large stadium-seating theater during a lightly attended movie, but at that point, wouldn't the back seat of a car in an empty car park be more private?
For us Yanks, that's potato chip bags and candy wrappers.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I went to the "Vue" in Shepherds Bush last night to see Day after Tomorrow. First we had this advert about how piracy funds terrorism, then there was some gimp at the front of the theater with some binocular type device. I accidently shined my keyring torch at him (they didn't say they were going to spy on us)
This films been out over a week in the UK, god knows what they were looking for. They sadly didn't throw out the mentally ill idiots a few seats to my right (texting all through the movie, didn't have the courtesy to put it on vibrate), or the person that was actually talking on a phone part way though, or the idiots behind me that kept saying "here come the wolves, look out!" and "look behind you" and other shit.
It's probaby just the area, never get these twats in Penzance, or even in Exeter or Manchester.
Go to the website for Regal Cinemas (owns Regal, United Artists and Edwards Theaters) and you can buy all the tickets you want (even good for premiers) for $6.50 each if you pay with an American Express Card.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
And PA is not just one state away. It's a world away.
That cracks me up that that was modded "Informative" :-)
I used to work in the reel room of a large cinema (think of the scene from 'Fight Club'). I would get offers of money in exchange for taping movies from inside the box; whenever I would, the sound quality was much better because the noise of the audience was cut out completely. By disabling the built-in microphone on the camera and running an external mic (to cut out the noise of the reels) we could get excellent sound quality, and the quality of the picture is exactly like what a person can download.
Smuggling the camera in and out of the box is no problem whatsoever; stick it in a backpack and absolutely no one gets curious, ever.
The point is: I don't think I'm the only one who has done this. The people in the theater are not the only ones you need to watch out for--the people who have free access to ALL the movies the cinema offers are likely where most of the downloadable movies come from.
You're actually supposed to use soft cheese curd. Mozzarella would work ok I guess, but it'd be more gooey and gummy and messy (like a pizza or nachos) than poutine is supposed to be. The real Québecois cheese curd seems to hold together a bit better.