Foiling Cinema Pirates 392
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...'"
How sad (Score:5, Funny)
I truly hope pirates will get over this obstacle.
Don't forget... (Score:3, Funny)
Oooh, and also the people who really, really think everything is supposed to be laughed at by slapping their hands together while jumping up and down in their seat like a fucking spaz.
Let's not leave out the ugly Cassanova in the row in front of you making out with his horrid-looking girlfriend. Of cours
Re:Don't forget... (Score:2, Redundant)
few weeks ago when i went to see daredevil, this asshole got 3 phone calls during the movie and had a 5 minute or more conversation each time. i dont know if the management ignored complaints or if anyone even went out to complain. it's kind of like when some piece of shit runs in and turns on the lights in the middle of the movie and runs out laughing. it anno
Re:Don't forget... (Score:5, Funny)
When someone kicks my seat, I turn around, and stand up if necessary, but that works better for me than for most because I'm a big mofo. You might want to take a posse to the theater if you are small and unthreatening. :P
Maybe 10 years ago.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted there's always a market for somebody who would like to see the Matrix Reloaded captured on someone's pen-camera, but is that really the demographic that the movie industry is losing money from?
Re:Maybe 10 years ago.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe 10 years ago.. (Score:5, Insightful)
So with all of these fancy new digital camcorders... is it not possible to change the frame rate, thus rendering useless any crapness?
Re:Maybe 10 years ago.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also possible that they're just alternately showing frames later/earlier than their usual times. I'm not sure of the exposure time on most cameras, but it's probably less than half of 1/24 of a second (the time between frames on film). Moving frames by that small of a time it slightly would probably not be noticeable by most, unless they were actually looking for it.
Re:10 Years Won't Solve Chinese Piracy of Movies (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you are the one with the mindset problem. "Ownership" is an abstract idea that cultures choose to enforce through the mechanism of government. It makes a lot of sense for items that are fundamentally scarce... material goods, livestock, land. It may make some sense for encouraging innovation and the collection of data that would otherwise not be collected. Maybe. It makes little sense for cultural artifacts... things like music, art, and stories will be produced inevitably, and it's been that way for millennia, and some of our greatest cultural treasures have been created by copying and building on past innovations. But I guess the way you see it, Shakespeare "stole" all his materials and should tossed into the slammer with other murders and rapist.
Let China do whatever the heck it wants to do... maybe it's better, maybe it's worse, but we don't have the grounds to tell them what their culture should be like. (And if you haven't noticed, an awful lot of people in Western culture rationalize the "theft" of music... perhaps our laws should be changed to match our actual beliefs, and not the economic will of corporate content controllers.)
Re:10 Years Won't Solve Chinese Piracy of Movies (Score:4, Interesting)
Using moral criterea, it can be universally agreed upon that murder is a crime. The same cannot be said for stealing, as ownership becomes less and less justifiable as the items in question become less and less tangible.
There are no moral bases for the copyright laws that exist in a country. Why is a song copyrightable, but not speech? Why a sequence of bits of some length copyrightable, but not a sequence of two bits? There's no question the criteria used determine such laws are arbitrary, its just a question of whose ass they've been pulled out of.
If some sort of law is required but one based on universally accepted morals cannot be found, the determinance of that law should be deferred to the next closest thing to universiality, culture.
Re:10 Years Won't Solve Chinese Piracy of Movies (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be a smart-ass... the people who believe in complete, total cultural relativism are just as naieve as the people who believe that their culture's values define a universal ideal to which all other cultures should adhere. In reality, morals emerge from the day-to-day experiences of human existance. E.g., "do unto others as you would have them do onto you".
Things like murder, rape, and violence have been universally condemned by every culture. That's because it makes people feel bad. Of course, not that every culture has also had exceptions to these rules... things like "justified homocide", "holy war", "preemptive strike", prostitution, marital rape, and the "he-had-it-coming" defense... the badness of the experience is absolute, but the rules with which a culture encodes it vary widely.
It's a wide world though, and cultures start to have a greater number of opinions on things like "nonmarital sex", "blowjobs", "dissedent speech", "spitting on the ground", and "pirating music". My point in the previous post was that we should realize that there is a great room for flexibility here, and it's ultimately up to the Chinese where they want to take it.
I, for one, think humanity as a whole would be better if we severly curtailed the role of copyright and patents. It's probably not optimal to abolish them altogether, but I we should radically rethink them. Think about it: if no copyright existed, people would still be making music, art, books, and software (open-source is a good example of the latter, but it is by no means the only example: a lot of software that is produced is done so because it will pay for itself). If no copyright existed, we might have less quantity and less special effects and less pop-garbage merchandise. But it might be made up for in terms of stronger culture and localized talent with richer variety.
Stepping even further back (and ignoring my particular stance on intellectual property), I think there's a lesson here about globalization: globalization brings with it legal and cultural homogenity and more centralized control. This is bad... the human race will be more robust if reasonably-sized regions can experiment and evolve independently (much like the U.S. gets an advantage out of different states experimenting with different policies [e.g., notice how all the lawmakers have rethought deregulation of the power industry after that little experiement in California failed]). WIPO's ideas about intellectual property may be ideal (*cough*bullshit*cough*), but I'd much rather us find that out by having different nations experiment with different IP models than to have WIPO impose its will on the world and have reform come only decades later after reform, revolution, or revolt have had sufficent time to brew.
The only thing we have to fear is a world where nothing can change...
I wonder if they really can make this 'invisible' (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds to me like another reason not to go to a cinema anymore, along with reasons like the crappy picture quality (come on, stretching a 35mm film to that huge a screen is just dumb) and the fact that theatres in the netherlands only show ancient movies (except some big movies like LOTR which are released worldwide on the same date).
Ever seen a recording of a computer monitor? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Ever seen a recording of a computer monitor? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, annoying only half of one percent of your audience with HEADACHES is an outstanding idea. Especially the people who take the time to come to your preview screenings.
Assclowns.
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl (Score:5, Funny)
"I agree. Also I wonder when people start complaining about all the headaches, experiencing random nausea and such after a movie screening, will the MPAA blame this on the pirates too in some roundabout way?"
Are you kidding? This is America. Someone will watch the pirated copy and sue the RIAA.
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl (Score:3, Informative)
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 blast
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are bothered by a 60Hz monitor with a white background you are probably going to be bothered by a white scene in a cinema as well. I hope that this technology will not worsen the effect too much.
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl (Score:3, Informative)
I expect that some people will still see it... (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a large variance in human persistence of vision; it's more of a bell curve. The reason for this is evolutionary; studies have shown that some people have better visual resolution, while other have better motion detection thresholds. For example, my resolution is lousy, but my color vision has better frequency discrimination, and I can detect even very slight motion in my peripheral vision ("How did you know I had come into the room?").
It seems to me
Subliminable messages (Score:2, Funny)
Screeners are crap (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not watching a movie I'm dying to see in this quality. And I'm not watching divx of movies I'm not dying to see.
That's just about it.
So keep the SuperAgents out of the theatre, please.
Re:Screeners are crap (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Screeners are crap (Score:4, Funny)
Seizures (Score:3, Funny)
There's flicker already.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Other news (Score:2, Funny)
Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Stops cams? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Stops cams? (Score:3, Interesting)
dave
Interesting idea, but will it work? (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose that given the natural latency of the human eye, this could work. When I pick up a TV screen in my old-style video camera, the picture has bands of light and dark in to, presumably due to the scan rate of the camera matching the scan rate of the television.
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, ?? I would think that adding some sort of latency in a video camera to emulate that of the human eye would render such protection schemes useless.
As expected, the article nor the follow-up links had any information regarding HOW this protection would work (or at least none that I could find).
Re:Interesting idea, but will it work? (Score:2)
Re:Interesting idea, but will it work? (Score:2)
Re:Interesting idea, but will it work? (Score:4, Interesting)
TV added to film not just added digitally... (Score:2, Interesting)
See "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) for a good example of this. There's a TV news anchor reading
at his desk, shot from the side (right profile.) On the desk is a TV showing the synchronized front-on view of the same news anchor. Then the scene you're watching switches to the front view of the news anchor: they shot the scene with two (motion picture f
Re:Interesting idea, but will it work? (Score:4, Interesting)
That would be true only if the protection scheme relied solely on varying the projection flicker. My impression from the blurb was that Sarnhoff was going to target strengths of video cameras (greater light range sensitivity) and turn that into a liability. For example, many CCDs can see infrared wavelengths (train a consumer video camera at a IR remote and you can see the diode flashing.) If you wanted to screw with the recording, just overlay the projection with a high-wattage IR pulse, preferably in a shifting moire pattern to really mess up the viewer.
However, if you're dedicated enough, all of these protection schemes can be nullified - with a progressive frame camera, shifting refresh rates can be ignored, with the appropriate filters extraneous IR/UV interference can be screened out. And, of course, none of these protection schemes can defend against a projectioninst collaborating with a pirate to telecine a print directly to video, bypassing the need to skulk in dark corners with a handycam...
Mod Parent Down - Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
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.
LCD screens don't have this problem (Score:4, Informative)
Passive Resistance Idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Great for the videophiles out there (Score:2)
Maybe it works like TV or old PC screen on television, where the refresh rate synchs up with the recording rate.
Three Words (Score:5, Funny)
Seizure
Lawsuit
No more Hollywood cinema for me (Score:3, Insightful)
this. Not only do they have ogling agents and metal detectors, but now
they're purposely distorting the image. (Ignoring the risk of
epileptic seizures?) For those keeping score at home, that's yet
another account of reducing the use value of the movie to increase
it's trade value. (Others include regions and encryptions on DVD..)
I see this as economical sabotage as well as hugely egoistic. I'll be
sticking to warez and indepentent cinema from now on, rather than risk
funding even more of these pathetic stunts.
(This may seem a bit flamey, but well, "Fear leads to anger" and
Hollywood is certainly scary enough for me now. Thanks.)
Re:No more Hollywood cinema for me (Score:2)
Don't worry, I'll stay away from those thieving Hollywood executives. Thanks for your concern, though.
On a more serious note, I think it's a real problem that many lines of work - especially the more cre
Re:I was waiting for you (Score:3, Interesting)
The article speaks about disruptive patterns. This won't be cheap nor easy, and who will pay for it? Most likely the people who buy cinema tickets, DVDs and merch - the consumers.
Without the monopoly on reproduction that the state grants with copyright, the
Hollywood really *does* care! (Score:2)
Researchers are mindful that creating too rapid a flicker could trigger seizures in some people.
Awfully nice of them to watch out for us that way...
Is it just my imagination, or does this article try to paint the Hollywood "agents" and "enforcers" as some sort of quasi-law-enforcement personnel?
Cinea and Sarnoff's Press Release (Score:3, Informative)
Whack-A-Mole (Score:2)
They're losing their Whack-A-Mole [techtarget.com] game with the true pirates. As a result, they're getting frustrated. They are bound and determined to take their frustrations [mpaa.org] out on the little guy [eff.org] and want to extend legislation [eff.org].
In other news (Score:4, Funny)
Sony sues Sony on DMCA charges (Score:4, Funny)
Sony threatened a lawsuit against Sony, claiming that the system developed to reduce flicker was primarily intended for circumventing access control on copyrighted motion pictures published by Sony and that Sony camcorders incorporating such a system violated the DMCA with respect to Sony's copyrights.
Movie Bosses IQ going down by the week... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets mess up the quality of presentation in the name of 'copy protection' and make the paying customer suffer. Borrow the idea straight out of the CD business - copy protection with CDs is going down with the customers SO well!
Really smart...
(Yeah yeah, supposedly you cannot see the flicker. I belive it when I (don't) see it - until then I assume this degrades the image quality.)
Now if this is limited to 'pre-release' preview screenings where the people are not, by default, paying to see the movie - then I have little issue with this - go ahead and muck the picture as badly as you want if the screening is a freebie. However, if I'm paying for it, I don't want crappier quality in the name of 'copy protection'.
Does the RIAA have Buddah-sense? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is what my grandmother would have referred to as "closing the barn doors after the horses have already left."
Hmmm. $50 to take four children (and myself) to go see Ice Age or invite over every neighborhood kid on the block to watch it on our HD for free before it hit the theatres. That's a tough call. Well, "free" isn't strictly true. $5 for a metric ton of popcorn.
I don't know what is wrong with the RIAA. If people are willing to watch a shitty copy (Cam/Telesync sucks) of a film instead of shelling out the loot for the full whiz-bang of a theatre experience
The truly stupid would say "it tells me we need to hire thugs to guard doors."
The moderately stupid would say "this means we need to lower prices."
The bright would do nothing.
The enlightened would see an untapped market.
Re:Does the RIAA have Buddah-sense? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they're sick and tired of you bitching at them for stuff the MPAA is doing?
Re:Does the RIAA have Buddah-sense? (Score:4, Insightful)
Those who would shell out the money to see a movie on the big screen whould have already done so. It's those who won't normally shell out $10 a person to see a show that will buy the VCDs.
So instead of spending many millions of dollars fighting a battle you will never win, why not make a few bucks off these people? Come out with your own version of 'bootleg' make a compressed version of your movie, in 320x288, make the color a bit off-ish and downmix the 5.1 sorround to a mono.
Sell it for $2 more then the piates and what do you have? a product that is still better then a camcorder movie, but still crappy enough to keep people in the cinema. You make mone instead of loose it in sales and fighting pirates, and even if the pirates bootleg that, because it's within their means, people'd rather do the right thing.
And Step 3, Profit!
Re:Does the RIAA have Buddah-sense? (Score:3, Funny)
"At least you used your karma bonus modifier to reply."
Karma? Oh, right. The fatwah-of-disagreement on Slashdot. Oh dear. Gotta save my precious karma [goatse.cx]. *sigh
NOTE TO MODERATORS: PLEASE MOD THE SNOT OUT OF THIS POST.
NOTE TO METAMODERATORS: I ASKED FOR IT.
"You adhere to the random-humor category, attempting to be as randomly goofy as you can and hopeing it's funny."
I encourage you to run -- not walk, run -- to your preferences and add me as a foe.
What is it with you peopl
Infrared light (Score:5, Interesting)
infrared light source. Most video cameras pick up infrared just as good as
visible light. Thus the bootleg copy is just garbage.
However, photography accessories include infrared filters, which may cut down
on quality (hey, what quality???), but enable the bootlegger to continue his
job. Also, to my knowledge there is no study about the medical effects of
beaming high wattage infrared light right into the eyes of cinema visitors
(including children).
Marc
Re:Infrared light (Score:2)
You could filter out IR light rather easily though, and it wouldn't degrade quality much at all.
Re:Infrared light (Score:2)
Actually, hot-mirror filters don't really distort image quality at all. A lot of digital camcorders already have 'em, actually; they're just not 100% effective. Anyway, they're regularly used in photography...they don't distort image quality to the extent you'd even begin to notice on, say, a broadcast-quality digital beta camera.
Also, to my kn
Re:Infrared light (Score:2)
Snow Crash (Score:4, Funny)
How it works (Score:2, Interesting)
So I don't know how this cinema solution works, but if a friend asked me to equip his cinema against "pirates", I would just install a infrared strobe light somewhere - job nicely done.
Couldn't this potentially be a problem? (Score:2)
More Costs and Less Quality - again (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More Costs and Less Quality - again (Score:2)
DVD Players that decide to honor this bit, however, is the problem. But I think most players have a nice hidden menu setting to turn it off nowadays.
Cinea? (Score:3)
Yes, the highly successful encryption system for DVDs! I'd say any individual involved in the creation of that system must be some of the smartest in the world, because we all know how unbreakable that is. Oh woe, if only we could decrypt DVDs, but alas it has proven as hard as breaking all other forms of encryption combined!
*puts on "Got DeCSS?" t-shirt and walks away*
Eh? Cams are usually nuked anyway... (Score:5, Insightful)
This also shows how little the MPAA and their minions know of film piracy culture. Most cams are nuked anyway, since they usually are unwatchable. Telesyncs (a tripodded cam with direct sound source) are a little better (and can be very good if shot properly), but are typically released if they are the only option - for the past six months, most films released eventually have Screener versions released. If the first release is a Cam/TS, that is usually superceded by a Screener within a week or two. Hey Hollywood: fix the leaks in the studios and your post facilities first before you attack the lowest of technologies. A PDA cam with a tiny surveillance lens? Please.
Before Oscar season, almost any popular film was available in DVDRip format, since the studios felt piracy was less important than gathering Academy votes, and they issued tens of thousands of Consideration DVDs to Academy members. If piracy of their most popular and valuable assets was secondary to winning awards, why all the fuss now about Cams?
There are also rips taken directly off the DigiBeta which are absolutely stunning. Again, this is an internal studio problem, and $2 million in taxpayer money will do NOTHING to stop that.
This is like fighting cocaine importation by attacking the kids on the street smoking cheap nickel bag weed.
Re:Eh? Cams are usually nuked anyway... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
who watches CAM versions of movies? (Score:2)
but, really - have you ever see one of these? they suck. even if they were very high quality, they suck. the audio is bad, and, the lighting could be improved a bit.
i think these companies should be more worried about the DVD screeners that are ripped.. you know the ones that say "this movie is owned by XXXX recording studios.. blah blah", but, since they only appear for a
Who cares? (Score:2)
Personally, I don't have that much of a problem with this. I think they're being really silly, but if they really want to spend that much time and money on this, they can go right ahead.
If it negatively affects picture quality though, I'll be pretty annoyed.
Anybody else notice this? (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Screening Foibles (Score:5, Interesting)
They had a list of 'disallowed' items including still cameras, video cameras, and cellphones. In practice, they didn't do anything about cellphones, as most people had them and would be unwilling to leave them at the door.
As for the cameras, I didn't know the restriction at my first screening, and I had my digicam with me. I put it in my jacket pocket and held my jacket in my hand when I held my arms out for wanding. They didn't notice a thing. I didn't use it at all, but it was pretty silly how easy it would be to get a camera in.
The second time around they felt my jacket pockets and found a lump where I kept my paperback book. They peeked in to the pocket and said, "What's that?"
"It's a book." (under my breath, "It's what we used for entertainment before movies.")
Anyhow, it's nice if they can block recording in select theaters. I recall an earlier slashdot story a year ago about this, and how it would be useless unless they got it in *every* theater. At least in prescreening situations, this technology seems a lot more useful.
Release DVD & Movie at same time (Score:2, Insightful)
Good! (Score:2)
I'd like to see... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'd like to see Matrix Reloaded on P2P (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you searched Kazaa et al for "Matrix Reloaded"?
I have, and found many different file-sizes near 700 MB. So I decided to download a few (cable modem is very nice), and the titles I got were:
Someone is having fun poisoning the network -- but they're poisoning
Why they want to cut back on pirated copies... (Score:2)
I can't believe you people. (Score:5, Insightful)
This technique doesn't involve subpoenas to ISPs to get the identities of p2p users.
This technique doesn't involve scare tactics targeted at network admins.
This technique does not involve arrests, fine, or prison sentences.
This technique does not involve some cockeyed "protection scheme" that renders the product absolutely useless in certain circumstances.
What the fuck do you guys want?
Re:I can't believe you people. (Score:3, Insightful)
This technique is a deadly risk to epileptics.
They will spend MORE to implement this than they are losing from this type of piracy. Pirating DVDs is one thing, but are they really that stupid to believe that people who would watch a crappy camcorder copy are otherwise willing to pay the price of a movie ticket?
Re:I can't believe you people. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's pretty serious. Do you have any proof? I'd be suprised if you did, considering the technique isn't actually implemented anywhere yet.
From the article: "The disruptive flickers would be unseen by the human eye in the movie theater."
Believe it or not, it just might be possible that they are telling the truth about this, and it won't impact anyone other than the people who wanted to rec
Re:I can't believe you people. (Score:5, Funny)
Free movies, of course
Re:I can't believe you people. (Score:3, Insightful)
What the fuck do you
Let's just hope.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Handheld cameras are not the problem.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Video cameras in movie theaters are now obsolete. The process of pirating movies has been perfected with social engineering.
Publicity? (Score:2, Insightful)
As mentioned before spending all this time/effort/money to try and stop cam movie rips, while at the same time distributing massive amounts of screeners which are then ripped at close to dvd quality is ridiculous. It seems more likely that they'll use this as a political tool the next time they try
Bah, that's useless (Score:2, Insightful)
gimme a break (Score:2)
they need to make a statement to combat their losses every week or so. so they mumble some insane thing. related or not to their losses.
most of the good video are copies of 'for review only' are they are just copies of a vhs tape to me in quality. and the groups release them before the movie is actually out which hypes up the demand.
i still think thi
Film motion picture cameras for bootleggers? (Score:2, Interesting)
If this becomes a problem for the bootlegging market, I see some demand emerging for motion picture film cameras (if they can find one on eBay that's quiet and small enough) as they would not be effected by FPS rates or sneaky scrambling techniques. They film the thing in the theater, maybe at a really late night showing on a Monday night when it's not too crowded, leave, get the thing developed, and capture the pirate-able motion picture onto their computer one way or another.
They could possibly accompli
Same old story... (Score:2, Insightful)
We've heard about RIAA making up glued discmans and similar stupid things to prevent reviewers from ripping the preview CDs and putting them on the net before public release. We've also heard about MPAA effectually strip-searching reviewers to make sure they don't carry recording devices into a preview show, and now they want to invest time and money
"Imperceptible" (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like flourescent lights have an imperceptible flicker?
Just like security cameras have an imperceptible high-frequency audio hum?
Just like mp3's have imperceptible audio distortion?
Just like city water has an imperceptible aftertaste?
Just like Microsoft has imperceptible security flaws?
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does."
Metal Detectors? Hah! (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, it doesn't concern me. Last time I was in a theater was to see "Bowling for Columbine." Which is, as far as I'm concerned, about the only movie worth seeing this year. I'm not sure anything that I've seen in the past about 3 years has been affiliated with the MPAA (Brotherhood of the Wolf, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) but I'm definitely not contributing to the blockbuster machine. I'm not seeing the next Star Wars flick (Didn't see the last one either) not seeing Lord of the Rings, not seeing the next X-Men flick and I'm not seeing the next Matrix flick because I don't like the MPAA and I don't like their tactics. And if I waver on the whole MPAA thing there's still always the fact that you go and drop $9 on a movie and have to sit through half an hour of commercials before the movie starts.
For a few dollars more I can go see a live play and be much more entertained. The play won't have some corporation trying to ram its merchandise down my throat either.
Great Siskel's Ghost! (Score:3, Funny)
But Hollywood already makes too many unwatchable movies!
Re:Digital Projectors (Score:5, Insightful)
If film artifacts are removed from the original film before it's encoded onto the disc, then they're gone for good. No degredation of the film over the period from release date to final showing due to handling and the simple running of the reels through the machine.
Plus, and this is totally unresearched, it seems to me that digital projectors would eventually pay for themselves. Imagine if the theater could hire just one person to que up the discs for movies to be played in a theater over the course of a day, week, or month. Then, that same person sits in one central 'control room' and presses a button to start and stop movies. This means no one sitting in the projection booth, forgetting to switch reels, or forgettiing to change the audio levels, or God only knows what else (Fight Club, anyone).
Re:Digital Projectors (Score:2)
Re:Digital Projectors (Score:2)
Re:Digital Projectors (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Digital Projectors (Score:2)
Heheheehhee you actually think the whole thing about digital projectors is quality? Theaters don't care what the picture quality is, the
Re:Epileptic attacks? (Score:2)