I finally got to see “Master And Commander” the other day. Great movie.
I believe I caught a glimpse of some sort of marking on the film. Not the old reel-change “cigarette burns,” either. The marks were a series of orange dots in a regular pattern, sort of like this:
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...
Like a reflected and sideways letter “L”. They appeared at apparently random places on the screen. Each time they appeared, it was only for the blink of an eye. The scenes in which I noticed them were scenes with lots of sunlight or fog - scenes in which much of the frame was filled with relatively light color, making the dots pretty easy to see. During those scenes, I noticed them about once a minute, I think.
Does anyone know what those are? A new sort of copy-protection marking (like the circle clusters on modern currency)? A common form of film damage? A figment of my imagination?
Yes, it’s copy protection; the pattern, position and timing/distribution of the dots is (I think) unique to eache movie and cinema, so that if a bootleg copy with the dots turns up on eBay or some such, the copyright holder can build a case (I believe it is true to say that bootleg copies are quite often the work of conema employees).
Called, I believe, CAP codes, or more frequently, crap codes. They’re used to identify each individual print, and also as a big “fuck you!” from Jack Valenti and the MPAA to the movie-going public, which I suppose is not considered sophisticated enough to notice. Unfortunately, I’ve found that once you notice them, you keep noticing them, and I really wish they could find a less obvious method for marking film prints.
But apparently, a few folks trading movies over the internet is going to be the death of cinema itself, and so we’d better do all we can to fight it, even if we eventually make movies completely unbearable.
you know its shit like this, along with bad movies, overpriced tickets, the screaming babies, Etc… that keep me from going to the movies. about the only films i see in theaters these days are really epic films like LOTRs, B/C its just not worth it.
Very interesting. Thanks for an accurate and speedy response.
A little Googling on CAP codes shows that the system was originally developed by Kodak in the early 1980s, and was unobtrusive enough to be commonly and stealthily used since then.
The newer variations on the technique are apparently much more obnoxious, using larger dots, in order that the codes will survive the video-taping and data-compressing that a pirated movie goes through to be swapped on P2P networks. There is a Roger Ebert “Movie Answer Man” column on the subject available in the Google cache, but STMB seems to be choking on the long URL.
This is really too bad. I thought the marks were pretty distracting. I’m just the sort to go looking for them now that I know they’re there. One more distraction from the movie itself.
Another example of “hurting all your customers to possibly inconvenience a few pirate copiers”. Like Microsoft Registration schemes, etc.
Seems like it would not take much to program modern copy software to recognize “a series of orange dots in a regular pattern” and remove (or randomly change) them.