Did I just see the serialization markings at the theater?

[FredThompson]

Tonight I saw the film, "The Passion of the Christ." At two points in the film, I saw, very distinctly, sets of equally-spaced bright red dots in the frames. These were NOT colors used in the film and jumped out at me, appearing almost as if they were laser projections onto the screen.

I saw one set in the scene where Mary takes a side route to get ahead of the crowd, right where she's watching the crowd move along the intersecting street.

Another set was in the scene where the man is pulled from the crowd and forced to carry Jesus' cross.

The dot grouping was in the middle of the screen in the vertical direction and about 1/3 of the way in from the right edge.

I suppose it's possible someone in the audience was messing around with a laser pointer. Some now have patterned caps to project something other than a simple dot.

I also asked the people I was with if they saw it. I'm not the only one who saw this happen.

All the colors in the film are earth and flesh tones so the bright red dots were very visible.

If this IS the serialization marking, other copies would have these added marks in a different manner, perhaps timing, color, location, and/or arrangement.

Can anyone else confirm the presence of these dots? I couldn't tell if it was 3 equally-spaced dots or 3 and a 4th to form an "L" shape, similar to Braile dots.

[Selur]

Lately the distributors have started putting small marks on their films, like a red dot seen for only an instant, to try to distinguish which theaters a Cam copy might have come from.
source: http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=813

Thought this was a hoax. :)

Hmm,.. seems like they have also ben spotted in other movies:
http://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?t=5983

Here on can see a picture:
http://www.vcdquality.com/image.php?id=18919

Cu Selur

Ps.: these spots are called 'cap codes'

[Tuesday]

Now, call me silly...but how the hell do they get away with this cr*p? If i pay good money to watch a movie in the flicks then i want to see it in as best quality as is possible, not with tags all over the screen, even if it is just for a few frames.

Why should the customer have to suffer becasue the movie industry can't properly control its own employees?

Another thing, surly these marks could easily be nicely removed by any would-be pirate quite easily with tools such as DeKafka or any of the other logo removing plugins available for avisynth/virtualdub, thus making them entirely pointless ASWELL as annoying!

Sorry, this kinda thing just narks me...

[Doom9]

not quite related because it's an old movie, but in Matrix I, when Neo enters the police station, at some point before the shooting erupts there's a completely out of place white (or black, I'm not sure anymore) dot in the central upper part of the frame and I've always wondered what it is doing there.

[Manao]

And I thought watermarking was meant to be invisible... The worst is that meanwhile, they say they are doing it for our own good.

[FredThompson]

There was also a whining segment during the previews along the lines of "pirates bad, us good." Some stunt man complains that it takes a lot of people, time and money to make a movie and people shouldn't just click a button to get a free copy. Well, grow up, resources expended doesn't automatically mean profit. Blair Witch was a good movie, Gigli...

[fccHandler]

Originally posted by FredThompson
Another set was in the scene where the man is pulled from the crowd and forced to carry Jesus' cross.

The dot grouping was in the middle of the screen in the vertical direction and about 1/3 of the way in from the right edge.
I can confirm those. As the projectionist, I was watching that scene from the booth, but I distinctly remember a flash of dots on a Roman soldier's face! It's the same scene you are speaking of here.

[communist]

Originally posted by Manao
And I thought watermarking was meant to be invisible... The worst is that meanwhile, they say they are doing it for our own good.
All they need to do is download a copy of one of those cam rips and look at certain frames / points (they probably have a time list of watermarked spots) and check for dots. Now they find them in scene X and scence Y - boom they have traced the ones leaking stuff coz they do know who got which watermarked copy.

Since films these days are quite long (90 min film already has over 100000 frames) you have enough places to put the watermark in.
Even if someone made the effort of erasing / dropping the watermarked frames I think they would still be able to determine who leaked it coz they probably exactly know about the places they have watermarked.
If you know where to look its a lot easier :p

@Doom9 I think these are the typical dots / circles you see in movies shot on FILM.

[mf]

*cough* temporal median anyone?

The more obvious these watermarks are (and thus annoying to the theatre visitors) the easier they are to remove. If it's only for 1 frame you could even photoshop it into perfection. I know I'd surely do that to save my ass from being arrested.

Also, afaik the "cigarette burns" are to indicate a reel swap, as in the cinema you also see the frame alignment screwing up for about 4 frames.

[Doom9]

I kinda thought the idea of digital watermarking was to add something you cannot see or hear. Maybe after the crash with the audio watermarking the RIAA tried, that was cracked in no time, now they'll just go for the obvious. How long will it take before they insert "the mpaa is watching you" frames into videos at random points?

[r6d2]

And if we are getting it all wrong and it is just a Miracle? :)

[Neo Neko]

Originally posted by Doom9
I kinda thought the idea of digital watermarking was to add something you cannot see or hear. Maybe after the crash with the audio watermarking the RIAA tried, that was cracked in no time, now they'll just go for the obvious. How long will it take before they insert "the mpaa is watching you" frames into videos at random points?

Kinda like Fight Club only without the porn? I remember seeing the audio tracks at a movie one time. The film was poorly threaded and every once in a while would slip to the right just enough that you could see the audio track being projected on the left edge of the screen.

[fccHandler]

Originally posted by Doom9
I kinda thought the idea of digital watermarking was to add something you cannot see or hear.
That might be possible for DVDs and CDs, but how do you watermark film? Obviously the purpose of "crap code" is to visually mark any copies made by someone in the theater with a video camera. IMHO the idea is stupid, especially since most of the pirated movies I hear about don't come from theater prints at all. Besides that, I find the dots very distracting (particularly when they appear on actor's faces!) and if I was a paying customer, I might even demand my money back.

The targets of anti-piracy efforts should not be the people in the theater. They actually bought their tickets (thus supporting the film industry) and they deserve the best possible movie experience. It isn't fair that they should be subjected to random flashes of dots and FBI warnings and such.

[MfA]

Dont most movies make a detour through telecining into the digital realm for processing? Easy enough to add "invisible" watermarks I would say.

Hell what is the point of putting a watermark in that visibly? You can simply mask it out by eye alone.

[FredThompson]

The really stupid thing is they don't put the marks in a somewhat obscure area. I hadn't been to the theatre in about 2 months and now I see red dots on the film and a whining complaint message at the beginning.

This reminds me of the whining and talk of jamming cell phones (which is big time illegal in the U.S.) so people wouldn't tell their friends a movie stinks. The MPAA really sounded stupid with that one, "Movies cost us a lot of money to make, we can't have people telling others it's no good during the first showing!" Funny, they're all too eager to take our money but not so eager to create a quality product. Next thing you know, they'll try to get something like the Canadian media tax ("We charge you the money we would have made if you'd bought a legitimate product because the only reason people get recordable CDs is to steal music.")

[vio]

I've seen these markings on just about every movie I have seen in recent times.

Mostly they occur at least twice during the movie and last for several frames, less than a second though.

I realised what they were as soon as I first saw them but they were strangely placed, I thought the best place would be on a keyframe or likely keyframe, but all were in the middle of a slow motion scene with likely low quants in an encode, if I was the bad guys I would do it different. And they dots were in the middle of the screen, a non obvious location or hidden in a static background would be less noticable and easier to mask.

If its for identification purposes then it could be easily circumvented, and its a strange that some groups are not actively complaining about it. Could you imagine buying a CD and hearing a scratch or tone in the middle of a song?

Read some of the comments, there were no warnings before the movies about piracy or the like. I live in Australia btw so no MPAA.

[ppera2]

It all looks for me as desperated tries. Same stupidity like when gov. increases taxes because 'there is so many people which doesn't pay them'.
Of course that marks are visible - goal is to track where is made shot with video camera - no other way.

Even bigger stupidity is that about cellar phone ban. Is first showing so important?

[MfA]

Why would you want to use a phone in the cinemas cellar anyway?

[FredThompson]

Originally posted by MfA
Why would you want to use a phone in the cinemas cellar anyway? There's more to this thread than the last post...

[ppera2]

Originally posted by MfA
Why would you want to use a phone in the cinemas cellar anyway?

Some people feels itself so important that answers on calls during the movie projection instead to turn off it.
If movie really sucks, I will go out in middle of projection and what then?