Red dots for anti-piracy getting out of hand?

[hdeck]

yay for DVDS!

 

[Ns1]

i saw the red dots but didn't know what they were until i got home

 

Originally posted by: NeuroSynapsis
i saw the red dots but didn't know what they were until i got home

I read about them right before the movie and its noticable to me, and VERY annoying.

 

[Chadder007]

Anyone going to contact Miramax and request a refund??

 

[CaseTragedy]

i noticed the red dots and knew what they were. they flashed fast enough to not bother me.

 

[abaez]

Yes it is getting out of hand.. here is a little bit of background and how it looks like from a post on a projectionist forum:

http://home.comcast.net/~a.baez/ubb1018.jpg

I took this off of a piece of clear tail leader where the CAP code was still printing before the machine turned off. See the number on the edge of the print? That's the number. Look beside the number at the frame. You will see 4 identically colored dots, three of which are near center in a triangle shape and the last one towards the bottom left corner in this pic. These dots repeat themselves every 11 times and apparently it takes all 11 sample frames to derive a sum of dots to equal the print number. The prints I have looked at repeat the next code every 100 frames. This means the MPAA only needs to manually find one frame on a video transfer with a CAP code and from then on they can simply forward the VCR by 100 film frames to get to the next one. (These figures apparently vary from lab to lab.) I'm not sure how these dots are decoded, but clearly it has to do with the placement of the dots within the frame. Perhaps each frame is divided up into a dozen sections and each section is given a value and then the sum of all 11 codes equals the actual print number, I'm not completely sure but that is definitely how it is being done and it proves the CAP code does indeed exist.

That is old CAP code.. the ones you couldn't see very well unless you really really looked.. the newer ones of course suck and are huge.. while you think those dots are tiny in the picture remember a frame of film is magnified many many times so any little thing looks huge onscreen.

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

It takes HOURS to encode a movie on a decent system. That gives the encoder plenty of time to pull those frames completely or edit them in Photoshop.

 

[Miramonti]

I see red people.

 

[draggoon01]

sample dots:

http://www.film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141b.jpg

ironically, the copy of kill bill floating around the net doesn't have those dots because it was an insider job, but of course piracy hurts/annoys the good consumer more than the bad one...

 

[v3rrv3]

Correction, they don't have dots because it is a screener I imagine it probably has other watermarks hidden in it so they can try and send people to jail. Here is a sample pic from an actual cam here

- Kevin

 

[anxi80]

Originally posted by: v3rrv3
Correction, they don't have dots because it is a screener I imagine it probably has other watermarks hidden in it so they can try and send people to jail. Here is a sample pic from an actual cam here

- Kevin

thank you the previous 2 posters, i mentioned this topic in the Kill Bill movie thread because i noticed them, and the link above is a very good and accurate way to display it. of course, i knew about them before heading in, but i still noticed a few flashes, but not too many. Still kind of annoying though.

 

[Nitemare]

Originally posted by: v3rrv3
Correction, they don't have dots because it is a screener I imagine it probably has other watermarks hidden in it so they can try and send people to jail. Here is a sample pic from an actual cam here

- Kevin

You are not authorized to view this page

 

[isaacmacdonald]

hell yes the red dots are getting out of hand. isn't there some other clever watermark they can use to secretly track prints? Also, why are there so many of them? They were way too noticeable in kill bill.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Edit: copy/paste (like Geocities stuff) the vcdquality URL

 

[isaacmacdonald]

BTW, if I was pirating a major release for a major group (deviance, etc.), I would take the extra 5 minutes and rubberstamp the dots out of the offending frames. It would add 15 minutes of work, but it wouldn't be very hard.

 

[MikeO]

Originally posted by: Nitemare
Saw them in the movie theater version but not the one on P2P. I think the encoding takes them out or something.

*This message brought to you by the anti-RIAA/MPAA foundation

The one on p2p is a workprint (unless something else has surfaced in the last couple of days). I'd guess they don't put the dots on a workprint.

 

[Miramonti]

Originally posted by: draggoon01
sample dots: http://www.film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141b.jpg ironically, the copy of kill bill floating around the net doesn't have those dots because it was an insider job, but of course piracy hurts/annoys the good consumer more than the bad one...

Interesting. I wonder if someone will develop a filter to hide them when encoding.

 

[kami]

I saw them in Freddy Vs. Jason and Kill Bill.

 

[Bootprint]

Originally posted by: jjsole

Originally posted by: draggoon01
sample dots: http://www.film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141b.jpg ironically, the copy of kill bill floating around the net doesn't have those dots because it was an insider job, but of course piracy hurts/annoys the good consumer more than the bad one...

Interesting. I wonder if someone will develop a filter to hide them when encoding.

Probably wouldn't be that hard to do, just borrow scene information from frames before and after the dots.

 

[Instan00dles]

where were these red dots, I never did see them when I saw Kill Bill and I was looking for them, I wanted to see what everyone else was talking about.

 

[MAME]

I saw Kill Bill and they were quite noticable

 

[amcdonald]

I saw 4-6 sets of these dots during kill bill.
It was really annoying to me because I had no idea what they were... I assumed they were intentional.
Also annoying was that no one with me noticed the dots, but I guess thats a good thing.

 

[JackBurton]

Ok, I'm not getting the purpose of the red dots. So you encode the movie with red dots. Who cares? Is there something I'm missing?

 

[Gunbuster]

So what do they intend to do if they find the theatre that the pirated movie was shown at? set up a sting? at best throw a couple of kids in jail and fine them 10k?

yea that really helped with the warez and the music

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

Originally posted by: kami
I saw them in Freddy Vs. Jason and Kill Bill.

Freddy vs Jason was released onto the net MONTHS before the release date. They had been removed before that time.