Oscar Screener Leak Traced

[cypher_soundz]

Found this over on /.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/13/film.oscar.screeners.ap/index.html

guess its the new water marking?
Regards
cyph

[int 21h]

Yes, I am sure a 69 year old man is a member of OBUS.

[cypher_soundz]

lol, my guess is the delivery driver or cleaner?
or maybe the butler did it?
Regards
cyph

[JustinH]

probably one of his kids or stepkids.

[thop]

What invisible marks make it through compression, especially on VHS! Also, do they watermark all the hundreds of screeners manually? That's quite a frikkin effort for videocassetes! Instead of just having them copied at some copy plant they have to make every copy with a slightly different watermark themselves? Not sure i believe that story.

[int 21h]

Believe it. They've already started marking individual theatre reels with identifying circles or dots during certain scenes. Different states and regions in the US get different sequences or patterns of dots to identify them, so that cams and telesyncs can be more easily traced.

Tons of watermarking techniques survive a A/D conversion and a DCT compression.

[mf]

Note to self: when stealing reels from the cinema and telecining them, make sure to use the temporal median filter on it :D.

[Doom9]

Believe it. They've already started marking individual theatre reels with identifying circles or dots during certain scenes. Different states and regions in the US get different sequences or patterns of dots to identify them, so that cams and telesyncs can be more easily tracedAnd I bet they even charge extra for this "feature". But it seems quite an effort to keep track of copies. The number of academy members is limited, but each requires a different DVD. Now imagine they accidentally switch two DVDs and end up kicking out the wrong guy.

I wonder how they do it.. you have to modify the source and compress again for each member, and then they need a different stamper for each screener (unless they use DVD-5 in which case the result could be burned). While the compression can be automated, making hundreds if not thousands of stampers to press only one disc sounds prohibitively expensive, and so does keeping track of which disc goes where (this most likely requires human intervention which is usually more expensive than automated labor).

[mf]

Originally posted by Doom9
I wonder how they do it.. you have to modify the source and compress again for each member, and then they need a different stamper for each screener (unless they use DVD-5 in which case the result could be burned). While the compression can be automated, making hundreds if not thousands of stampers to press only one disc sounds prohibitively expensive, and so does keeping track of which disc goes where (this most likely requires human intervention which is usually more expensive than automated labor).
The news article mentions videotapes, not DVDs.

[thop]

Originally posted by int 21h
Believe it. They've already started marking individual theatre reels with identifying circles or dots during certain scenes. Different states and regions in the US get different sequences or patterns of dots to identify them, so that cams and telesyncs can be more easily traced.
Well but those are visible for everyone, so you can just blur them out. What kind of invisble technique is used i'm wondering. Probably not marks but tiny differences in hue or brightness in a few key scenes? I imagine those would make it through compression. But then again they'd have to be subtle enough to go unnoticed.

Or maybe it is even a lot simpler and they just cut out 2 seconds without speech in each movie, at a different position for every tape.

[mpucoder]

Again, this article is about VHS tape. It is very easy to put both visible and invisible marks into an analog video signal using equipment found in any television station post-production edit bay.

The visible marks can be anything from the obvious lower-right corner watermark we all hate, to tiny dots. They're mage with a DSK (DownStream Keyer), a device for overlaying graphics.

The invisible marks are most probably VITC or LTC timecode, which besides the familiar hh:mm:ss.ff contains "user" bits, allowing for serialization. The timecode appears on line 20 (just above Closed Captions), and would get copied by a VHS to VHS copy, but shouldn't survive a good digital capture (why would you want to capture that annoying sequence of bars?). Timecode generators are built into professional video tape decks.

I even have an edit controller that can do both timecode and watermark insertion on 4 seperate (not synched) video signals simultaneously (that function is for on-location recording of 4 cameras)

[fccHandler]

Two more found today:

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/15/oscar.screeners.copies.ap/index.html

[thop]

Kruglak told the newspaper he didn't know how a copy of his tape was posted for sale online, saying, "I firmly believe someone at the duplicating house made themselves a copy before the studio sent it to me."
That actually makes sense to me.