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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."
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
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.
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.
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?"