|
|
This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
|
|
Author
|
Topic: Bootleggers.....what can you do?
|
|
|
Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002
|
posted 09-30-2003 09:35 PM
quote:
I know that I have not heard anything in some time that I want to go out and buy.
The Norah Jones CD was pretty good and it actually has sold extremely well. I just bought a CD by Joss Stone, who is a 17 year old, white British waif who sings 60s R&B like a seasoned soul artist. Album is produced by soul singer Betty Wright.
Van Morrison's last CD, "Down the Road," wasn't bad.
quote:
Not only has selection gone downhill over the past 5 or so years, but recording quality has gone to CRAP as well. "They" are recording CDs hotter and hotter to the point that I cannot even stand to listen to the last CD I bought, it is so clipped and distorted. CDs have a 90db dynamic range, so why do "they" only use the top 1db?
They do it for the same stupid reasons they've always done it - so it sounds louder on the radio, even though every radio station already compresses the signal to death.
But there are some good sounding CDs out there:
Standing In the Shadows of Motown soundtrack sounds fantastic.
Some of the ABKCO Rolling Stones remasters sound great - especially Beggar's Banquet. They're dual layer SACD, but I haven't heard them in SACD, only regular CD and even those sound fantastic.
I just bought the remastered Highway 61 Revisited (Dylan) and it also sounds pretty good, although still a bit sibilant. I would bet that Blonde on Blonde sounds great.
quote:
BTW, one of the expenses in making vinyl records, was that vergin vinyl was expensive; CDs are just cheep plastic. Just look in your Sunday paper sales fliers, and see how many stores are GIVING AWAY CD-Rs.
Yeah, but the major labels never used good vinyl. In fact, they frequently recycled it. That was one of the big complaints about US labels in the last 10 years of vinyl's life. That's why you had companies like Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs or consumers seeking out British pressings. Besides, the manufacturing cost of product is almost irrelevant. The major cost is in marketing and royalty advances to the band.
| IP: Logged
|
|
Jim Bedford
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 597
From: Telluride, CO, USA (733 mi. WNW of Rockwall, TX but it seems much, much longer)
Registered: Jun 99
|
posted 09-20-2004 10:55 AM
Story in yesterday's Sunday LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-camcorder19sep19,1,4213948.story. You need to register to read so I've added it below:
Turning the Camera on Movie Pirates
Companies are heeding the film industry's call for help, devising high-tech ways to detect camcorders in theaters
By Jon Healey
Times Staff Writer
September 19, 2004
Hollywood's billion-dollar question landed in Howard Gladstone's e-mail one night: "Can you find a camcorder operating inside a movie theater?"
His company, Trakstar of Weston, Fla., responded by whipping up a camera detector out of technology that soldiers use to spot snipers. That's the answer, Gladstone says — but he may be only half-right.
Portable digital video cameras, or camcorders, lie at the root of Hollywood's global piracy problem. Armed with ever-smaller and more powerful cameras, bootleggers in theaters manage to copy every major film within days of its release. These underground versions soon pop up on pirated disks sold in Los Angeles, London, Berlin and Shanghai — offering people around the world a crude copy of a big-time release for less than the price of a movie ticket.
Trakstar is one of a small but growing number of companies trying to sell Tinseltown a high-tech defense against those pesky cams. But even as these firms answer Hollywood's call, studio executives question whether a single silicon-powered bullet can kill this type of piracy.
Once a digital camera is spotted, who can be relied upon to confront and hold the suspect until the police arrive? A 17-year-old usher making $7 an hour? Beyond that, who will be paying for the detection equipment, which is likely to cost thousands of dollars per movie screen? And how long can any anti-camcorder technology work before the bootleggers find a way around it?
Despite all that, Gladstone is confident that Trakstar has an effective solution: a tamper-resistant device that uses brief bursts of energy to detect camera lenses and digital sensors.
At least one other company — Sentek Consulting, a San Diego start-up run by two former Navy SEALs — is offering a competing camcorder detector. Meanwhile, two companies are modifying movie projectors, trying to interfere with camcorders without damaging the picture on the screen.
To stamp out illegal recording, the technologies would have to be installed in a significant number of the 100,000 movie screens around the world, and that wouldn't be cheap.
On the other hand, the stakes for Hollywood are much higher than the equipment's price tag.
The Motion Picture Assn. of America estimates that studios lost $3.5 billion in potential sales last year to bootleggers.
Although pirates have been leeching profit off the movie industry since the advent of the videocassette recorder in the 1970s, digital video recording and high-speed Internet connections have magnified the problem exponentially. Pirates these days can duplicate their bootlegs in minutes, make unlimited numbers of perfect copies and send their wares electronically around the globe.
Typically, a movie is recorded in theaters only a handful of times, creating enough raw material to feed thousands of bootlegging operations worldwide.
For example, the same version of "Hidalgo" popped up on street corners, in malls and at flea markets on four continents shortly after the film's U.S. release in March. And all the early bootlegs of "Seabiscuit" last year appear to have come from a single illegal copy.
That's why studios see defeating camcorders in the theaters as crucial to choking off the entire supply line of pirated movies.
The main element of Trakstar's Pirate Eye system is a shoebox-size device mounted next to the movie screen, facing the audience. An emitter inside the box bounces energy waves off the seats one small group at a time, and a sensor records the reflections. The reflections are analyzed using software from Apogen Technologies Inc. of McLean, Va., a government contractor best known for image-processing gear. The software was designed to pick out a camcorder in a sea of bodies, seats, popcorn tubs and soda cups.
Typically, pirates don't rely solely on the darkness in a theater to camouflage their mischief. They also will cover their camcorders or stick them in obscure places they hope ushers and other moviegoers won't see.
But to record a movie, they have to expose the camcorder's lens and point it steadily at the screen. And that's what Trakstar's system looks for — the reflected image of a camera lens.
One advantage to Trakstar's approach, Gladstone said, is the involvement of defense contractors such as Apogen.
"They never design a system without understanding what the obvious countermeasures would be," he said. "The war against piracy is an ongoing battle of measures and countermeasures."
Gladstone successfully demonstrated the detector in February to industry executives at the Digital Cinema Laboratory, a project of the Entertainment Technology Center at USC. But several studio executives told Gladstone that they wanted one more feature: the ability to spot "pinhole" cameras with lenses a fraction of an inch wide.
Trakstar went back to Apogen, which added a feature to the detector. Using a different wavelength of energy, it found a way to detect the electronic sensors, called charge-coupled devices, inside digital cameras no matter how small the lens.
With the modifications complete, Gladstone asked the Motion Picture Assn. of America this month to conduct a feasibility study of his technology. The studios are still reviewing the proposal.
Rival Sentek was initially in the business of selling sniper detectors to U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then Mike Massa, Sentek's vice president for government services, read this year about studios using night-vision goggles at screenings. He wondered: "Why don't we use our technology to help these guys?"
Sentek President and Chief Executive Eric Basu wouldn't comment on how the company's technology worked, other than to say it generated a distinct signal when encountering camcorders, including pinhole cameras. The underlying technology, he said, was powerful enough to detect lenses almost a mile away.
"Anybody that's trying to film the movie is going to have to point their [camcorder] at the screen," Basu said. "When they point their device at the screen, they're going to give off a hit."
Although there may be some takers for Trakstar's or Sentek's devices, there are plenty of skeptics as well, who see a host of potential problems with any type of camcorder detector.
For example, one Hollywood executive who asked not to be named said theater owners would insist on having control over any detectors that were in their buildings. And if you give theater personnel control, bootleggers would almost certainly pay for undetected, unauthorized screenings.
"Whoever has access to the projection booth and the film … is certainly going to have access to this" camcorder detection equipment, the executive said.
Trakstar's system tries to guard against tampering by connecting the detectors to a network that would be monitored remotely. If someone unplugged a detector, the monitors would know immediately, Gladstone said.
Even if everything worked as designed, there would be at least one other problem: Only the District of Columbia, California and 17 other states have specifically outlawed using camcorders to record movies in theaters. In recent months in other states, police have released several suspected recorders because they didn't know what charges to file against them.
"We're certainly interested in any solution that could be relatively easily installed across the exhibitor base, that would require minimal maintenance, was difficult to circumvent and reasonably priced," said Darcy Antonellis, senior vice president for worldwide anti-piracy operations at Time Inc.'s Warner Bros. Entertainment. "What we've seen to date … [starts] to get into higher levels of complexity that may or may not work on a large scale."
An anti-camcorder strategy doesn't have to start with a huge deployment. Most camcorder use for bootleggers has been done in and around New York and Los Angeles, so the first detectors could be concentrated in those cities. The detectors also could be shifted from screen to screen within a multiplex to deter bootleggers at less cost.
In the long run, though, the strategy will be effective only if every screen can be protected, said Brad Hunt, chief technology officer for the Motion Picture Assn. of America.
"The pirates are smart enough to figure out and find the one theater where you're not deployed," he said. "As soon as they know there's one theater that's not using it, it's on the bulletin board [online]; everyone's talking about it."
Rather than trying to catch pirates in the act, Cinea Inc. of Reston, Va., and Princeton, N.J.-based Sarnoff Corp. are working on technology that would quietly sabotage their recordings.
The companies' research, which is supported by a $2-million federal grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, focuses on a crucial difference between human vision and camcorder recording: Humans see the world in continuous scenes, but a camcorder captures the action in front of its lens as a rapid series of frozen images. The goal is to project a digital version of a movie studded with extraneous marks that moviegoers wouldn't notice but that camcorders would capture and unwittingly transform into annoying patterns, pulses or other distortions.
It may take another year of work, however, before the companies know whether they can pull it off.
"There's a trade-off there," said Christos A. Polyzois, senior director of commercial systems for Sarnoff. "The easier I make the marks on the eye, the less distraction they cause on the camcorder. And the more distraction they cause on the camcorder, the more likely … they may be viewed by the human eye."
If Cinea and Sarnoff succeed, their technology could be incorporated into the digital projection systems that the movie industry is expected to deploy in the next decade as replacements for film projectors. Although several other companies have been exploring ways to alter film projectors to defeat those using camcorders, digital projection seems to be the most promising route, said Charles S. Swartz, executive director of the Entertainment Technology Center.
Switching to digital projectors also would eliminate some of the current sources of piracy — for example, there would be no canisters of film for bootleggers to grab and copy. But there are many technical details and financial arrangements that must be worked out by studios and theater owners before the industry can shift to digital on a broad scale.
"We're not going to have a 10,000-projector rollout tomorrow," said John Fithian, president of the National Assn. of Theatre Owners. "It's going to take us a little longer to get there."
Several of the major studios are trying to attack the camcorder problem on multiple fronts, rather than relying on a technological fix.
The MPAA started a reward program in June that promised theater employees as much as $500 for detecting, stopping and turning in camcorders. Duly motivated, multiplex workers have caught at least 23 people with camcorders, cameras or tape recorders since the program went into effect. Their actions have led to nine arrests so far — including that of a 16-year-old in Chatsworth who was accused of trying to capture "Spider-Man 2" on opening night in June. At least nine employees have collected rewards.
"Offering employees at theaters a $500 reward if they catch somebody camcording may ultimately be the best tool," the Hollywood executive said.
Studios also are beefing up their ability to trace the sources of bootlegged movies so they can try to plug those leaks directly. In addition, they are pushing for more enforcement of existing laws, lobbying for new federal and state laws against recording in theaters and trying to convince the moviegoing public that piracy is a bad thing.
"I'm not going to put all my eggs in one basket," a studio executive said. "Pirates are really creative."
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004
|
posted 09-21-2004 01:50 AM
The recorded music industry that exists today grew out of the need to distribute recorded music, which once upon a time was a hard job. All that vinyl, weight, distribution. Urgh. Sounds awfully familiar to 35mm vs ![[dlp]](graemlins/dlp.gif) , but unlike , the digital alternative has sufficient customer satisfaction today.
Today and tomorrow, music can be distributed down wires, requiring no physical distribution. The need for CD distribution is receeding.
What normally when this kind of revolution takes place is that the old guard dies, and a new champion rises to take its place. However, the RIAA although stupid are not that stupid, and to defend their position they are (cleverly and fairly sucessfully) using congress to protect them.
But heres the rub. Record companies think that pirates and P2P downloaders are their enemy. How wrong they are. The real enemy of the record music industry is Digital Rights Management. Once DRM works and is "out there", established artists will sell their material from their own web sites, bypassing the recorded music industry altogether. Exactly when Tower Records will close its doors is uncertain, but it will happen. Dont invest in the recorded music industry, one day your shirt will be lost.
UK readers can draw a parallel in this from the UK coal industry. In the late 60s, the UK had a coal industry employing over 100k people. The sight of the coalman delivering coal for the fireplace was common throughout the land. Most power stations were coal fired. Coal miners strikes meant big trouble for the whole country. The coal miners union leader, Arthur Scargill, was a big man with a big job, with much influence.
And then came natural gas from the north sea.
Less than thirty years later the coal industry had gone. Entire towns in Wales where most of the menfolk worked down the mines were (and generally still are) decimated.
But the UK still has heat, and power.
Imagine if Arthur Scargill had managed to pull off the same trick the record companies are doing. The Government would not allow piped gas for house heating or power generation. There would still be a coal indsutry. The UK landscape would be very different from that of today...
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004
|
posted 09-25-2004 06:29 PM
Night vision glasses? What a joke, that'll never happen here.
Or so I thought....
Theatres hunt pirates and audience bounty
Piracy is not the only problem for New Zealand's plump and profitable cinema industry. Add cannibalism to the list of woes.
Holiday moviegoers engrossed in the latest box-office hit Shark Tale this weekend may miss the strange eye-pieces worn by theatre staff watching the audience watching the screen.
Village Sky City has issued theatre staff with night goggles to spy for patrons using camcorders to illegally record the film.
Village chief Joe Moodabe said the company Kiwi audiences at Shark Tale were getting a two-week jump on US viewers.
"We're always vigilant for piracy, but we're taking extra precautions this time," he said.
I note in the USA the distris are quite fanatical about hanging on to their prints. It works differently in NZ. As far as I can tell, the distributor is a girl in an office with a PC. SOmehow, prints arrive in NZ and make it to the first run houses. After that, prints live in cinemas. We're an end of the world part time community cinema, so we get prints kind of late. But once we get them, they stay with us forever. We have a room full of boxed prints, and they just stay there 'till someone wants some movie yonks after release, and then we dig it out and ship it on. So if you want a print to telecine at your leisure, of a well released film, come to us. Of course, if Hoyts have had it, it'll be rogered, but thats life I guess.
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004
|
posted 09-25-2004 11:13 PM
I bow to your superior local knowledge - all I know is I have a room with about two dozen prints in it. They arrive, we show them, just once (ok - LOTR was an exeption, we showed it twice), we keep them, until instructed to ship them somewhere, which doesnt happen all that often.
And that LOTR - here it (still) is, waiting for the LOTR revival, I guess...
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
All times are Central (GMT -6:00)
|
This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
|
Powered by Infopop Corporation
UBB.classicTM
6.3.1.2
The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion
and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.
|
Home
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
:
![[evil]](graemlins/evil.gif)
Have you seen a doctor yet? Is your friend still alive? ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic