Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Cinema staff to patrol screenings with night-vision goggles to combat movie piracy

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Topic: Cinema staff to patrol screenings with night-vision goggles to combat movie piracy

Jay Glaus
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 123
From: Pittsburgh, PA USA
Registered: Dec 2010

posted 12-01-2015 12:51 AM

I can actually speak with some experience to the drive-in situation.

Apparently what a lot of pirates do, it record the video in an auditorium, and get the audio from a drive in, then put the two pieces together.

Apparently you get much better quality filming in an indoor opposed to a drive in. I suppose the screen is generally smaller, no outside lights, headlights. But the audio can be tricky as people are moving around, talking at times, cracking wrappers. That is where it is better to get the audio at a drive in, if you can. A feed right from your car's stereo system sounds just as good even if you are yaking away on your cell phone or an airplane is passing over.

How do I know this? This happened for a little while at the drive in. The pirate was finally caught, but he was recording audio and mashing it up with video that others in the group captured. It was a large ring with video sometimes even coming from other countries.

We were one of the first drive ins in the area to start processing our sound with a Dolby, and the pirate even admitted he liked ours best to the cops. (Hey folks, come to our drive in! The sound is so good even the pirates love it!)

Apparently, we were told, when he was taken in he gave up a lot of others in the group obviously in exchange for a lesser punishment. But since then we haven't heard of any piracy from any of our shows (knock on wood).

When I was at CinemaCon I know they use that PirateEye or whatever it is called in the Colosseum that detects camera lenses from a camera on top of the screen, but I'm sure that is expensive.

Just my two cents.

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Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 12-01-2015 05:21 AM

Why would anybody want to invest in something like a "pirate eye"?

And if the movie industry wants this, they should pay for the installation, the maintenance and other operational costs, including the gazillions of false positives this will produce and the fallout for the affected customers from handling those false positives.

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David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004

posted 12-01-2015 05:01 PM

never having heard of PirateEye, I thought I'd google for it...

One possible reason an exhibitor might invest in this sort of this is so that they don't need to ask staff to go poking around with night vision kit, and perhaps more importantly, risking confrontation with an angry punter.

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