Cams, rips and release dates
Following up on last week’s post about international release dates and subtitles, I’ve been asking around to find more information about studios’ anti-piracy efforts. I didn’t get into any specific numbers — and I wouldn’t know how seriously to take the numbers anyway.
But based on these conversations, I came across a few broad bullet points worth sharing:
Studios have gotten more sophisticated about putting tracking marks in individual prints, often localized by country, to help them determine the source of a leak. It’s not just the ugly brown dots anymore.
For almost every movie, they can trace back bootlegs to one or two “cams” (in-theater camcorder recordings) and just a handful of subsequent DVD rips. They assign letter grades to these bootlegs based on quality. And quality matters: a cam which rates a “C” won’t be nearly as much a factor as a “B.”
For certain countries, studios will delay theatrical release because of a history of cams originating there. They’ll then release the DVD as soon as possible thereafter.
The subtitles issue becomes important because a cam or rip in the wrong language isn’t especially appealing.
In Italy, where custom greatly favors dubbing over subtitles, you don’t see much piracy until the local language DVD rip leaks.
Obviously, this is only talking about feature films. American television is at least as important to many international viewers, and much harder to lock down.
And for independent film, it’s a whole other clustermuck. You’re dealing with local distributors, so trying to coordinate any worldwide effort is going to be extremely difficult.
Last night, I was talking with another friend about 3D. It hadn’t occurred to me that a 3D film is probably more difficult to cam. Possible, certainly — it’s a fun mental exercise — but not as easy to get something usable.
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March 18th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
How I would (in theory) cam a 3D movie: use the proper polarizing filter on the camera to convert it to 2D.
Or you could use two cameras, each with an opposite filter to separate the image into left and right components, then synch them back up and register them to each other. Combine the Red channel from one and the Blue/Green channels from the other so you could watch them with anaglyphic glasses.
That was a fun mental exercise :-)
March 18th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Lex- I think it would work the same as a 2D movie. At a 3D movie you’re still looking at a 2D picture. it’s just presented in such a way that when you put on polarized lenses, you see a 3D image.
I mean, right? So the pirated copy at home just needs 3D lenses as well. Or are we talking about making it viewable in 2D? In that case… squinting?
March 18th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Chris -
Actually, if you’re talking about “modern” 3D viewing, with either polarized lenses or LCD shutters, it’s not a stream of 2D images: there are two streams of 2D images, interposed with each other. If you record it all at once as a flat image, there’s no way to separate them afterward.
Looking at 3D projection without the proper eyewear will look like hell and give you a headache. You’d need a filter/shutter on the videocamera lens in order to isolate one of the “eyes”.
(Recording both streams would be a tricky proposition, because it would require proper positioning and alignment of two separate cameras, each filtered/shuttered for the appropriate eye, and the recordings would then afterward have to be synchronized and packaged into whatever home 3D format. But wouldn’t the goal be to get a film out of infernally unwatchable 3D anyway?)
March 18th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Chris and Lex -
You run into framerate problems. The left eye and the right eye images are shown in alternating projected frames. Left eye, right eye, left eye, right eye, at a rate of a 144 frames per second.
A video camera is going to record 30 frames a second, 60 if it’s an HD camera. So not only are you going to miss some frames, they aren’t even natural multiples of each other. So the rate of miss is inconsistent.
So you can’t just record the video unfiltered, then play it at home wearing your snazzy polarized glasses. And you can’t just filter one eye and record with your camera either – consider, each eye sees an empty screen every other frame – half the time. So you’re going to get partial images, flickering images, or outright blank images at very rates on your camera.
This is ignoring a whole host of additional problems (and solutions, for that matter), of course.
Tricky.
March 18th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Broadly, most pirated films are DVD rips (from screeners, Region 5 releases without image post-processing, or Region 1 releases) or camera-recorded (possibly with audio from TeleSync).
However, it should be noted that there are two other categories that a number of pirated films fall into: Telecine copies that are lifted directly from the celluloid and workprint rips that are leaked by people close to the film.
March 18th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
I didn’t know that RealD projected from a single projector. This makes it easier to do (I think). New procedure:
Using the Panasonic HVX200 (I’m most familiar with this camera, but there could be others that work) set the framerate to 48 fps. Set the shutter angle to 120 degrees or lower, then tweak the synchro scan (I think you can do this in film cam mode – I’ve never tried) so you don’t have a flickering screen.
Now your camera should be recording the movie at 48 fps, with alternating left and right eye frames. Separate them by using something like the posterize time effect in After Effects (set to 24 fps), offsetting the start times by one frame, then take out the red channel and blue/green channels appropriately.
Piece of cake.
March 18th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
I really meant this last part as a consider-for-yourself, not a show-your-work.
Bottom line, I’m sure there are ways to do it which are passable. But for this brief moment, the gap between 3D in a theater and something you can buy three days later on a street corner in Bulgaria is significant.
March 18th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
The difficulty of bootlegging a 3D film is one of the reasons some industry folk like James Cameron are pushing so fervently for it.
March 19th, 2009 at 12:50 am
Warner Bros delayed the release of “The Dark Knight” in Puerto Rico to a week after the US release due to the vast amount of cams originating from here. It was torture to have to wait that extra week. I almost hopped on a plane to see it in the states.
March 19th, 2009 at 2:25 am
Do you also know why sometimes the DVD is released “BEFORE” the film has hit the theaters? I just found that out about J. Lynch’s “Surveillance”. I bought the DVD a couple of weeks ago (in Germany) and was even more surprised to find it among the Apple trailers which set it for release in June 2009.
March 19th, 2009 at 3:48 am
Isn’t piracy the real reason the studios are pushing 3D? It’s harder to pirate, creates a sense of an event and during it’s rollout has a certain buzz about it which will ensure extra attendees. Will audiences conclude that it’s just another gimmick that costs another 5 bucks?
Note: 20% of the male population are red/green colourblind, so the 3D won’t work perfectly for them. Instant audience isolation.
March 19th, 2009 at 4:46 am
I remember years ago, when RETURN OF THE JEDI was still playing in theaters, a theater in the Southwest was actually held up and the print stolen, apparently so the thieves could make their own pirated copies of the movie. The joke was on the thieves, though, since the print was a 70mm print of the movie, which was (and still is) very hard to project, much less make videos. (Videos are pretty much always made from 35mm prints.) The thieves must not have known that.
(In the 70s and 80s, films shot on 35mm were sometimes shown on 70mm because the sound was better…digital sound on movies has pretty much made this obsolete.)
March 19th, 2009 at 6:38 am
An independent film I wrote was all over the internet about a month before the release date. It only had a handful of screenings in festivals and we’d been careful about handing out screeners, so in this case it appeared to have been leaked from individuals at the various distributors in various territories. What’s scary was how quickly it spread once it happened. At that time I was googling the film pretty much every day anyway – one day there was nothing, the next day there were pages and pages of links to torrent sites. It’s annoying that it happens in the first place, but what’s worse is people don’t give films a chance when they’ve got them for free so we started to get a lot of reviews on forums and film websites before the film had been released from people saying they had given up on the film after the first 10 minutes. I’m not sure how much it hurt the film in the end but it’s annoying all the same.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:39 am
If you don’t care about preserving the 3D-ness of the film, you could just use one camera with the proper polarizing lens, so that you’re just recording the image shown to one eye. Then you’ll have something quite watchable, you just won’t get the full effect of the 3D gimmicks. Like when a gun is pointed at the camera and in 3D it looks like it’s right in your face.
March 19th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
So, just out of curiosity. Why push a new technological medium like 3d to prevent piracy. And, instead, release all formats at the same time? I don’t recall the name of the film but I seem to remember hearing about how there was a film released in the theater, on IFC, and as a DVD simultaneously. (With some success) Don’t get me wrong, a good 3d movie will be awesome to watch. I’m just not sure that a technological arms race could ever be won.
April 1st, 2009 at 5:55 am
I don’t know why studios don’t come down harder on countries where make no attempt to stop the process. In Sweden, Pirate Bay has been continually dragged through the Swedish courts to absolutely no effect. Moreover, local polls show 75% of the population “against” laws that penalize ISPs of users who download illegal media! Under these circumstances, its like trying to get the turkeys to vote for Christmas!
Studios should just abate any and all “legal” distribution through TV, DVD and Cinema. Sure the same people will download, but the law abiding members of the public might just get off their apathetic arses and say “you know what, these illegal downloaders are fkg it up for all of us – let’s change the law now!”
As a footnote, I’d guess that any return for the studio/producers on local distribution is pretty marginal.