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British Movie Theater Staff To Wear Night-Vision Goggles To Combat Movie Piracy
Ewan Palmer writes: Movie theater across the UK will be required to don military-style night vision goggles in order to help crack down on movie piracy ahead of the release of potential box office smashes such as Spectre and Hunger Games. The initiative is part new measures to combat piracy as in recent years, pirates have found new and inventive ways to illegally record movies while using a smartphone to film through a popcorn box. Kieron Sharp, director general of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), said: "The bigger the film and the more anticipated it is, the higher-risk it is. We have staff on extra alert for that. James Bond is a big risk and we will be working with cinema operators and the distributors making sure we will keep that as tight as possible. We really don't want to see that recorded. They [cinema staff] are on alert to really drill down on who is in the auditorium and who might possibly be recording. They still do the sweeps around the auditoriums with the night vision glasses regardless of the film. But sometimes extra security is put in place for things like Bond."
and only get my movies at the pirate bay. No hassles. No real spying. God loves AMERICA! The POPE is here!
... the pirate's cameras often rely on infrared light. Several bright "invisible to the human eye" infrared lights pointed at the audience from behind the screen or even around it ought to do the trick. Just trying to cast light on the topic.
If someone is so cheap that they will watch something recorded from a cell phone I'm guessing they will never be paying customers no matter what happens.
I can't imagine that many people will eschew going to the movies for a smartphone camera recording. Maybe for screeners and Telecine rips but cam versions? Really?
I understand the incentive to watch a movie online but what is the incentive for someone to risk prison time to illegally record a movie
and upload it to pirate bay? What is the uploader getting out of it? Back in the BBS there was a barter system where you could get
credit by uploading something wanted that didn't exist yet but what incentive is there today?
Pirates will just switch from crappy low-res idiot-talking-on-the-phone theater recordings to high-quality pre-release torrents.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Everyone knows that CAMs are shit, those who do not normally see in a theater will wait for the bluray version or the HDRip...
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
the price of each movie ticket goes up to fund the payment of the extra staff's wages...
How about keeping the movies goers out of the theatre, that will stop the piracy.
Or yet...
DONT make the actual film (expensive messy business and all that)
Make a few "clips" and based on their popularity estimate the number of tickets sold.
Deny anyone going to the movies (they must all be pirates after all, so its only reasonable)
If you use Investor State clauses you could sue the government for expected losses based on the estimate of tickets that might have been sold.
BOOM... profits through the roof, which when put into contact with Hollywood accountants turns into a loss so you can screw the tax payers again.
No movie = zero piracy..... war has been won.
How about instead of building up a back catalogue of expensive "theft prevention" hardware and software, just make the movie available on DVD/Blu Ray straight away on release night?
Movies are an experience, but some people don't give a rats about the movie-going experience and just want to watch at home/on the train/whatever.
The best part about this is that noone will bother trying to record shit in a movie theater.
I'm sure that the there are theatre staff that record films too, but I doubt that the PR people will address that publicly. I'm sure theatre managers will be told to look at staff. But publicly, it's their customers they should come down on. Wow, way to go making people feel bad about pirating films.
Why don't the cinemas employ a SWAT team with a shoot-to-kill policy for pirates? That ought to stop movie piracy in it's tracks.
What I don't get is how the cinema staff could be sure that it's a camera that is in the popcorn box. Suppose there's a man sitting there in the cinema. He has a box of popcorn on his lap, but he isn't eating any of the popcorn, and he's holding the box with one hand on each side. The cinema staff use their night vision goggles to pick him out of the crowd as a suspect. They confront the man, and ask him to open the popcorn box. He complies, and all they see is popcorn. Still convinced that he's up to no good, one of the cinema staff puts a hand into the box, and starts moving the popcorn around, searching for the camera the staff are sure is in the popcorn box. But after shifting around the popcorn, this staff member doesn't find a camera at all. Instead, all he finds is the poor cinemagoer's cock and balls, which for some inexplicable reason have been stuck through a hole in the bottom of the popcorn box. Not immediately realising what was going on, the cinema staff member's hand thoroughly fondles the poor cinemagoer's cock and balls. As you can imagine, this is a pretty awkward situation for both the cinemagoer and the cinema staff to be in!
Even if they don't do this, it will be pirated anyway... There's always that one theater where the owner doesn't give a damn, and might even be the one ripping it himself.
All it takes is for one lapse in security, not necessarily in your theater or even your country, and all the time and money spent trying to prevent that movie from leaking is wasted.
This would be like buying a car alarm that self destructs if any car in the entire world is stolen.
Boy, you people in England really have to wait a long time for movies, don't you?
#DeleteChrome
spoiler alert.
... Money.
Uploaders are usually part of a group who earn money by :
- offering early access to the latest movies
- offering them on public sites and make money through kickbacks from big file storage websites membership sales
- offering them on public sites and collect money through advertising on that site
- offering them on public sites as a frontend for malicious activities like advertising fraud and malware distribution.
It's ironic that you can't take high-tech spy gadgets into a James Bond film.
What if I'm turning up in costume? Then I *have* to have them.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
you might be in the position where you have Netflix and other services to fullfill your movie needs.
We don't have it here and Netflix makes damn sure you will not be able to use their service, even if you would like to pay for it.
Besides that, most of the movies are synced in the local language, making even the most serious movies just a big joke.
And we have to be lucky to get the less popular movies because the movie distributor has a monopoly here and basically only shows those movies which generate a certain amount of revenue. So for example European movies are never show here.
If you are lucky you can get some DVD's through import shops, but even that is considered illegal with courtesy of the Hollywood movie cartel.
It's easier to get the latest Columbian drugs than foreign movies....
So the only option a lot of people are left with are just the illegal options.
And luckily the quality of CAM is not that bad in general.
... of disappearing night vision goggles and some very happy teenage boys.
A better experience than my home cinema. Which may be only a 26" computer monitor and two 200l floorstanders, but I get to eat and drink whatever I want, no-one's stupid comments interrupt me, chewing noises, cellphone screens or noises, babies crying, commercials, etcetcetc.
Last time I went to the movies was for the last star trek film, the one with young spock. I had such a horrible time, my and my roommate never even suggested to go to a theater ever since.
I'm not so sure why they waited 70 years to turn themselves into a Government controlled society and surveillance state. They just don't seem to have enough neurons left to understand their prophet George Orwell.. or are just don't give a crap any more or maybe they really want it. (A lot of US citizens seem to also).
Their country is falling apart, with Scotland and Wales having debates about leaving the mes to create their own messes. Their multi-cultural environment isn't working. They are just not a model that anyone wants or looks up to..( but are there ANY in the world left?)
If the citizens want their government to use totalitarian measures to force them to kiss the US equivalent of the RIAA and MPAA.. so be it. I really don't care about them.. great history.. no future.. they lost me when they build the "London Eye", an true Eye sore and especially appropriate for the 21th century UK where "Eying" the citizens is priority #1.
If the staff are assigned nightvision goggles, what other things are my concession dollars funding?
No big deal. Happens to me all the time.
Because the biggest component of "piracy" is - CAM VERSIONS! Can't WAIT to download that shitty cam version of a movie instead of the full Blu-Ray.
But why don't they just slip the projectionist a C-note for a private showing.... If there money in it, organized crime will be involved, and it's not too difficult to lean on somebody. It doesn't even have to get nasty. For most of those guys, just get 'em laid.
Meanwhile movie theaters look like a demilitarized zone, with big signs everywhere about how they can search you at will. And the theaters are just empty. When I go, and I don't often go 'cause the make me appreciate how gentle the TSA is, I have the whole theater to myself. It's been that way for over a decade. I don't know how these businesses stay in business.
Now they've got night vision goggles so teenagers can't even sit in the back and make out.
Just get a bunch of high-power IR LEDs and sprinkle them around the cinema, have them run at some annoying frequency like 13Hz all slightly out of sync. It'll light up the goggles like in Archer...
No, government is just the publicly-funded private police for the corporations. Thank Milton Friedman for that!
Mostly random stuff.
... about why this looks so pathetically surreal? It would fit perfectly in Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
I suspect that movie wasn't really about Brazil, after all...
The real problem with this strategy is that they are trying to contain a river with their hands. If even a single copy of the film is taken, it becomes as many copies as it needs to be (thanks to the lossless reproductive power that digital information allows). You can try to catch people at the theater (theatre for the non-Americans) and maybe catch one or two people a month, but someone will always manage to do it because there are hundreds of theaters each staffed with dozens of entry level workers.
I'd be interested to see how their policy changes when they find out that someone has already released a copy of the film online. Do they just give up and stop wasting resources and man-power to find someone who can't possibly do any more harm than has already been done? Do they start cracking down harder on the 'un-spoiled' movies? Or will they just continue to harass their own customers needlessly?
The strategy discussed here is like trying to stop a virus caused pandemic with antibiotics given to a single community. Expecting it to work is laughable and it's simply a waste of resources.
When I get the rights to sue movie producers for filling my head with garbage. Fuck them, most of the new movies suck. I am pretty sure that all the movie producers are meth addicts anyway.
years ago I watched a shaky, dim release of a pirated film with silhouettes of people walking across the screen.
Fairly quickly pristine copies came out. I didn't see the point of camcorded. Somewhere in the world, there is a manager or a projectionist or a screener who is going to release a copy. Or 6 to 20 weeks later, a perfect copy from the bluray or DVD will come out.
Besides, i can see films on monday for $4.50 u.s. at the theater 4 miles from my house.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
1. There's lots of light in a cinema, a big bright image lights up the audiences faces. I would have thought ample light to run a regular inexpensive CCTV camera pointed away from the screen toward the audience. That not just locates offenders but provides evidence too. More light can be added in the form of IR as others have noted.
2. NV goggles are expensive and having the staff roam around in them adds even more cost.
3. Once the NV goggles have the sensitivity turned right down to allow for the brightness of the screen, I would have thought that would render them not much better than human eyesight.
I imagine this is a scare tactic and nothing more, maybe there'll be a couple of sets of rented goggles moved from theater to theater and "paraded around" to scare people off.
Nullius in verba
I can see a movie once and then see it over and over again without further charge. It's called memory. Let the MPAA try to use night vision to find me memorizing stuff.
Shouldn't their baseball bats be adorned with condoms to protect from the germ-cloud that emanates from these deplorable humans inhabiting movie theaters.
After all in the UK, a dead human being is a good human being. Because when dead, like a dead pig, we can butt fuck it to our hearts content.
Ha ha
There is a conflict between the natural and inalienable rights of people and the attempts of governments to curtail the resulting actions. It's neither novel nor resolvable.
Ones and zeros. Any series of ones and zeros can be represented as a number, understandable by human minds. It is the natural and inalienable right of humans to communicate, thereby sharing, numbers. Humanity, throughout history, has attempted to suppress the ability of others to communicate freely. Every attempt to curtail communication is a battle against the natural state of humanity's need to communicate. Attempting to suppress a natural right always, always, always results in greater suppression of rights or failure.
Most of us appreciate the outcome of limiting sharing in order to concentrate value. We like multi-million dollar movies. What we don't like are the inevitable outcomes where people are punished in ways that seem unreasonable. The problem is that the two issues are inextricably linked.
Possession of a number, and sharing of that number should never logically be illegal. Making sharing a number illegal goes against natural human nature. Thus we have a conflict with the historical approach to encouraging innovation and creativity and the natural law that humans must be free to share information. Technology hasn't created this problem, but has made it more obvious. Human nature is also to acquire power so we're pitting two natural human activities against either. Of course the natural right to communicate will eventually prevail over the power acquisition impulse, but not without conflict. Right now the impulse to acquire power is grounded in government enforcement, but the natural right to communicate will always find an expression, thus government censorship (copyright enforcement) is destined to fail.
In the future, regardless of attempts to prevent it, free sharing of information is inevitable. Acquisition of power will adjust. Movies will be paid for by trailers created in order to generate pre-creation funding. You'll see trailers for movies that haven't been created yet, based on subjects you're interested in and directors you trust. If you like the trailer you see, you'll pledge money taken in escrow. If all goes well, you'll get to see the movie, but otherwise you'll get your money back with a trivial amount of interest. Everyone will get to see the movie for free if it gets made, nobody will make movies that flop and nobody will be punished for sharing numbers.
It won't happen soon. It won't happen without conflict. Laws will come and go. People will be unfairly punished, movies will fail. Inalienable rights will eventually prevail because law cannot suppress human nature.
Unchecking "Post Anonymously" because I've had just enough beer to stop caring if people are upset by the truth.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
"... But this one's eating my popcorn!"
Note that this is a gag punchline, involving a darkened movie theatre.
Over the years, many jokes have constructed around this punchline; the most common one involves a man smuggling his BFF Chicken in, so that they could watch the movie together.
In the Ireland of my youth, it wasn't a chicken, it was a snake, the gotcha being that there are no snakes in Ireland. Since the joke involves unusual things found in trousers, a common recent variant mentions Ferrets.
Maybe I'm old and tech has improved since I last used a night vision goggle. Don't the goggles intensify brightness by like 10x?
What happens if they look at the projector or the curtain?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
FTFY
This night googles have been used for years in the USA. So they jack you in price for sitting you in a glorified garage, already fuck the movie colours for it "not to be copied" to the point that for instance, the chromatic of several movies are definitely odd even when watching the original both on cinema and TV (Resident Evil, Chronicles of Ridick and Book of Eli comes to mind), and now they handle you as the enemy in the combat field, and teens cannot go there dating and petting without giving an hard on to the employees. I have not been in a cinema for years, and sure wont be in a near future. For me, it would be some place better than home, and not worse. A living room, they serving me lobster with me with I watched a movie, and with some naked female waiters, and I might reconsider it. Otherwise, I wont be paying to enter a glorified prison system. They are forgetting it is not your great-grandfathers time where they were awed by movies, nowadays we all have entertaining systems at home.
We'll be footing the bill for those things, which they'll purchase at near military-prices, with the ticket costs.
Which will drive moviegoers down further as they're already getting a bit ridiculous, and will be blamed on piracy as well.
Really? Fucking with your paying customers to prevent some crappy cam version to hit the internet?
When are they going to learn?
In Soviet UK, movie watches you!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you want to make a decent CAM copy, you don't sit in a cinema desperately trying to hide your camera. You pay off one of the minimum wage ushers.
But hey... let them continue treating customers like criminals, herding them into a room where they are watched with infrared cameras in case they film part of your "masterpiece" about fighting robots or superheros. Idiots.
If they ever bother me about this when I just go there to relax and watch a movie I will immediately demand my money back and never visit that movie theatre again.
This just furthers evidence that the film makers have no idea about piracy. Only the truly dedicated are going to download cams, and they either went to see it in cinemas on day one or were never going to see it in cinema to begin with.
Movie theatre staff *won't* be wearing night vision goggles. It's an absurd idea. The most one can expect is that if a particular cinema has been the source of piracy in the past (identifiable from watermarks in the image / audio), then there might be undercover investigators in the audience looking out for surreptitious filming. Personally if I were pirating movies I'd vary my routine around and I'd stick the camera into a cup or popcorn bag where it would be virtually impossible to see in the dark.
The camera lens gives off an intense IR signature, will look like a bright dot. That's what they are looking for, hot camera sensors.
i live in the uk and my local cineworld did this briefly about 5 years ago after a commandment from on high. The staff found it embarrasing and stupid and i remember seeing them wandering in with the goggles on and staring at us for a few seconds then walking off again. They only did it for a couple of weeks.
This isn't new, and it isn't really a sustained procedure of audience monitoring. It's a publicity stunt to make people think they're being watched - make a giant fuss about how they're watching everyone in the dark and hopefully that will scare them into not filming the screen.
They do it long enough to make people aware of it then stop again. Then in another 5 years make a big hoo-haa and break out the night vision goggles again for a couple of weeks.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
And who's going to watch for movie theatre staff that pirates movies? It only takes one to get a copy out to the scene.
The approach I take is to not bother going to the overpriced, customer-hostile and noisy cinema. There are very few films that are so amazing that I can't wait a few months until they come out on DVD/Netflix/Amazon etc.
The bottom line is, the media companies have an over-inflated opinion of their product. I'm happy to wait a bit and then watch it in the comfort of my own home. And if this means that the cinema industry dies, then so be it. Cinemas need to attract customers, not treat them as potential criminals.
Meanwhile, I'll get on with doing lots of other non-cinema leisure activities.
Hard to believe people watch movies this way? I either pay to sit and watch it on a nice big screen with all the surround sound and HD or wait for it to come out on rental. The quality of these pirated versions is dreadful and its hard to believe people are so cheap as to waste time downloading such crap just to say they watched it free. It reminds me of the bootleg copies sold out of the back of a car. Worse then a copy of a copy of a VHS tape. Gee, if your that cheap why even bother watching the movie?
Normal camera lenses are totally opaque to thermal IR. The lens itself can get hot due to the working electronics, but in a sufficiently large camera (what you want for recording a movie) it should be a non-issue.
It is far, FAR easier to just tag every movie with an ID.
Let's face it, these are special copies they rent from the movie distributors. They could all be tagged.
All it takes is a bunch of frames throughout the movie having some small, invisible to the untrained eye, artifacts or such.
Even crappy cameras will pick up on some of those frames at some point.
Boom, cinema identified.
Of course, you can get around that by looking at 2 or more separate films, identifying oddities and removing them.
Hell, with some lights placed in the correct positions, you could bloody triangulate the cameras position in the cinema.
Not that it matters anyway since most of the good pirate copies come from staff, or leaks from the actual copy directly.
Hide the camera in the cup, and film through the straw.
Let's hope cinemagoer doesn't regret the choice of hot butter topping
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Instead of patrolling on behalf of the movie studios they patrol on behalf of their paying customers and eject people who are on their cellphones, excessively chatty, or bring screaming kids into the theater?
And they wonder why people have stopped going to the movies.
I have no desire to see the latest film at the time it comes out. I simply stick it on the list of "want to watch". Wait 12-18 months and I can pick up that blockbuster movie second-hand on DVD through Amazon market place for a a couple of quid, rather then pay £15 ( plus snacks with added Snax-Tax(tm) ) or even £10 for a new release. I have one go-to seller on Amazon market place that always has second-hand DVDs for £1.50 +P&P. I can get a stack of 8-10 films for £20, rip them from DVD to the media NAS box and then enjoy them in the privacy of my own home with my snacks at a reasonable price from the local supermarket, I can drink beer, get off my face if I wish and shout at the screen without being thrown out for being disruptive, well that does happen sometimes if it's a movie my wife wants to watch! Ha ha!
I can see a movie once and then see it over and over again without further charge. It's called memory. Let the MPAA try to use night vision to find me memorizing stuff.
And like most of us you have a perfect photographic memory. Obvs.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
As you can imagine, this is a pretty awkward situation for both the cinemagoer and the cinema staff to be in!
It also explains why the popcorn is salty and sticky at the same time
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Release on all formats at the same time. Let people pick where they want to watch it.
First, those employees are not paid enough to risk a confrontation.
Second, I have yet to see a single pirated move recorded in a theater that I would ever want to watch. The sound is wrong, the video quality is poor, their are people in the way, people talking, shaking video, etc.
Anything other that a direct RIP from the original, is a waste of time and not a real threat to the industry's stormtroopers.
People still go on dates to the movies? Is this 1959?
2 hours of watching James Bond play poker convinced me that i never need to see another bond film ever again.
Just wait for the DVD/Blu-Ray rips to come out... way better quality, anyway.
Almost all of the pirated movies that I have seen were stolen at the studio, not the theater. Some of them even had the production information still on the screen. And some of them were the complete DVD/Blu-ray movie package that was yet to be released.
The studios know their own people are stealing, but they keep blaming the general public.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Damn it! You've just publicised my 'special move' when going on dates at the cinema. I let my date munch away on popcorn and then get her prize at the bottom. It never fails to surprise and delight. I can't imagine why I've needed to do it to so many dates though...
(of course, the 'cinema move' of pretending to stretch your arms and then putting them down around your date is another Top Move, but it's become somewhat over publicised so doesn't get the same surprised reaction as the box thing).
Well, I don't know about the OP, but the specific reason I stopped getting to movies was the birth of my kids. The only thing worse than paying full movie prices plus full concession prices is having to pay even more for a babysitter. The wife and I get occasional dates, but it's rarely for a movie.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Want to see if your local theater staff has night vision goggles? Take some IR leds to the theater and keep them on during the movie.
Only dumb birds land downwind.
This. Why go to all the trouble of getting a babysitter just so you can gamble your evening on a movie you haven't seen before and might not be any good?
Want to see a movie? Watch it at home.
Want to get out and be alone? Go somewhere where you can _talk_ to her.
If you pay someone 7 dollars an hour to sweep popcorn, and that someone owns a tripod.. that someone has uniquely private access to a theater... private enough that they can run a sound cable from the projection booth to said tripod.
Give that same employee access to night vision goggles, and you will prevent no piracy at all.
I mean, how bullet-proof is any plan that involves compelling a bunch of minimum wage employees to ensure that 1 billion in profits isn't whittled down to 999 million in profits? (not that there is any proof piracy actually costs studios money)
In other words they seriously think that the anticipated big budget movies that are poised to make hundreds of millions $ will suddenly make even (significantly) more, if they don't let some dudes record it on their smartphone and share via torrent, by equiping cinema personel with night vision googles.
That's quite pragmatic.
So... only one Movie theater is doing this, or there is only one Movie Theater that span the entire UK?
So the staff member finds a stiff member?
Try it! Library of Babel
I don't go to the movies anymore. Last few times I've gone I've wished I was back home before the 25-30 minutes of ads were done. It costs around $20 to buy a movie ticket here, so I don't see why they need to waste my time with these ads. If they can't afford to show the movies without the ads, then maybe they should just stop having cinemas. I'm perfectly happy watching movies from the comfort of my home, using whatever streaming service is all the rage. I'll microwave some popcorn and spread it out all over the sofa and pour soda under my feet for that authentic cinema feel. Maybe even invite a really tall friend over to sit in front of me and partially block out the screen.
The world of decryption keys in film world is interesting . DCP films have decryption keys that work in a time window. http://indiedcp.com/digital-ci... ... they don't actually control how many times the film can be run. This means 'super restricted' digital prints can still get played overnight - and they definitely are.
These nightvision things are to keep management happy - they have thick contracts with studios so 'security theater' in the theater has to be applied.
I was in a early screening movie that had studio security parading around watching people with the scopes after collecting cell phones and wanding people, it was redonk especially since the key was still unlocked overnight - and the movie had a rebellious theme but more physical security than any other.
To deter inside jobs there is definitely watermarking now, it's hard to spot but actually sometimes you can, may be a series of dots around a corner rather than some more carefully hidden signal. (and there may be audio watermarking too, but i think with two clean audio captures from different sites you could diff it out).
--hongpong.com
99% of the crap on the big screen today isn't worth the money. Take a husband, wife, and the typical 2 children. Gas to and back, tickets, minimum 10 bucks each (unless you go to the early show) Say 7-8 bucks for the kids minimum. Popcorn, drinks, snacks (unless you cheat and bring your own 40-50 bucks. You are looking at anywhere between 80-120 bucks easy. Once a movie is released, wait a few weeks, download a REAL image of the movie not that "filmed in a theater" crap, or, just wait a month or two for it to show up on netflix as a legit source, watch it for 10 bucks, make your own snacks. No hassle.
Detecting an employee cam is not really all that difficult if done from the booth. Due to the geometry of the projected image on the screen, keystone distortion gives a combination of projection angle and viewer angle. Modern digital projectors have keystone correction. Old film projectors simply had aperture plates. Here is the difference.
An aperture plate is inserted into the projector to mask the sides and top and bottom of the projection beam to fit the screen. It provided no keystone correction. If a monitor test grid were projected, it would have keystone distortion with the lines narrow at the top due to the above audience projection angle. This applied to all 35mm and 70mm film projection. In short throw theatres, some barrel distortion is also introduced.
In digital projection, keystone distortion can be adjusted out by setting up the projector with a test pattern to make the geometry correct even with off axis projection.
No consumer phone that I know of has keystone correction for off axis correction of a film projected onto a flat screen. This will reveal the camera location when compared to the original projected image.
Most modern films are Digital, especially blockbusters. This means in most cases the projector has been professionally aligned to the screen with Keystone correction. With this knowledge, any keystone distortion and barrel distortion would be from the angle and distance of the camera from the flat projection surface. Shots taken from above the audience are taken from the projection booth.
With watermarking, a stray dot, blip, extra few frames between scenes, or other subtle alterations can identify which movie screen showed which film at what time. From there forensics can identify the general location in the theatre the cam was deployed. It's easy enough to identify a booth recording from the keystone.
The truth shall set you free!
The real issue is studios giving out pre-release copies of their films to hundreds of people.
After all, theatre employees are so highly paid that movie pirates would *never* be able to bribe one to look the other way with their night vision goggles.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
...in order to help crack down on movie piracy ahead of the release of potential box office smashes...
"The bigger the film and the more anticipated it is, the higher-risk it is."
So, the most watched and profitable movies are the ones that need the most protection?
I suppose it's worth pissing off a few consumers to make those massive profits into massiver profits.
Why don't they just aim a bunch of infrared LED's at the audience? Wouldn't that mess with the recording devices without the audience noticing?
Of course, the IR couldn't be too powerful, or you could damage people's eyes. In a darkened theatre their pupils would be dilated, and IR does not cause the pupils to contract like visible light.
Thanks for letting us know how you feel about your customers.
Requiem for the American Dream
Requiem for the American Dream
... so if I can't be bothered to go to cinema (because unable to convince myself about the movie worth this treatment) I'm perfectly happy to wait for WEB-DL or BluRay rip.
Watching CAM rips as your primary movie source is inexplicable, but short scenes that get cut/changed are interesting in small doses.
Schnapple
I would imagine in that scenario, the one with his cock and balls poking up into the tub of popcorn would be doing it for the benefit of a girlfriend that may be enjoying the film with him.
And considering the social handicap a typical Cheeto-fingered Neckbeard who would be likely to be the one doing a secret cam recording through a popcorn tub has, the odds that he would be trying to surprise a girlfriend instead of making a recording are simply astronomical.
(And amusingly, as I reread this, I am hearing it perfectly in the voice of Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory, with either Howard or Raj looking guiltily embarrassed.)
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They've been claiming on doing this for years... (But, as others have said, I believe that most of the piracy is from other means)
What a really awesome thought to record a movie with goggles and take them to piracy and get the profit from it. Even they can copy them and release on illegal office. Security is necessary to protect the movie release. But not able to protect properly and safely. They recorded the movie in the hall and sell them the copy. Need to guard properly at hall. http://www.locksmithsinscottsd...
Of course James Bond is a big risk. He's got a fucking license to kill. He's SUPPOSED to be a fucking big risk. You fucking fuckers. Fuck you.
That added cost is why people just bring the screaming little shits with them....
On that note, I'm concerned that knowing there is some wanker watching with spy goggles might interfere with a lady's willingness to fulfill the odd request for a mid-cinema blowjob.
Yes - but did you have to tell them?
Now they'll be wanting us to have our memory erased after going to the theatre...
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Since all movies are digital most of lots to the good pirated movies are taken somewhere in the production stream. You can even try to intercept the broadcast sent out from the studios to the movie theaters. So you don't end up getting people jumping up during the movie and you don't get flashes of light form cell phones. Really everyone has a cell phone and everyone has the abiltiy to make a copy on the screen but what I have heard and read most pirating is done somewhere along the production stream...
Paul E. Bahre
I enjoy, after paying $15, sitting through 20 minutes of advertisements, having people put their feet on my head-rest. . . to be treated like a thief.
I've been to a cinema once, perhaps twice, in the past 20 years for these reasons alone.
Maybe they could sell buggy whips in the lobby?
What incentive do the theater owners and employees have to comply with this directive?