Anyone care to guess?

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~Manny.

Now...where was I ?
Leonard Shelby, MEMENTO.

Out of all those prints and videos (yes Ken, it is a video) I'd have to say the smart bootleggers are shooting off of DLP since it will give them such a wonderful copy, but the majority of the bootlegging going on right now are still coming from film prints. My guess is 20.

Ted will announce the winners and send out a box of THX swag.

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The wild camera moves don't help. I haven't personally seen the last four reels yet, so I'll reserve comment on those.

I'm also expecting a brand new lens, which I suspect will help to some degree, but not entirely. I'll follow-up in another post.

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~Manny.

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As with most things, "haste makes waste" with excessively tight production schedules. Replacement reel percentages are usually much lower.

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This one time, at Projection Camp, I stuck a xenon bulb....

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Star Wars and other larger-than-life movies have given Hollywood the ultimate weapon against digital piracy: They make people want to go to the movie theater. ...

People who have shown a willingness to download anything from the Internet haven't stopped going to the theaters. Billions of files are shared every month using a handful of file-sharing networks. Pirated versions of Spider-Man hit the Internet the same day it reached theaters, giving millions of people the chance to download Peter Parker and Mary Jane, yet many more endured long lines to watch Spidey careening down the streets.

It seems counter-intuitive to think that anyone would willingly pay for what they can get for free.

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That's just the point. The experience of watching a blurry, pixelated VCD MPEG or AVI is vastly inferior in every way to watching a movie on a big screen with theatre audio. Even though the pirated download is free, the general public is voting with their feet, to the tune of some 8.4 billion dollars per year, according to the article.

Here's why I don't think that file-trading represents any serious near-term threat to the movie industry. The movie industry is giving their customers what they want. They want to see big movies on opening day, and the industry is responding by opening films on thousands of screens at once.

Plus, a movie, unlike a CD, is a story. People don't buy CDs until they are familiar with the music. Seeing a movie, on the other hand, is generally a one-time experience. Very few people want to watch the same movie over and over again. And really, if someone is so excited about a movie that they go through the trouble of downloading it from the net, isn't it likely that they are the sort of fan who is going to see the movie in the theatre anyway, and be first in line to buy the DVD when it comes out to replace their crappy VCD-grade copy?

Those who prefer to watch movies at home, are equally well-served, because the industry makes high-quality DVDs and VHS tapes available for rental, and purchase. They make DVDs more attractive then pirate VCDs by including outtakes and documentaries. They are making DVDs impractical to distribute online by supplying them in a high-quality, high-bandwidth form that is too large to distribute on the internet in optimal quality, and that's the key.

The movie industry could have gone terribly wrong. Had the studios, for instance, decided that DVDs were "too high quality" for sale to the general public, and instead released movies in VCD format, then there would be an enormous piracy problem today, because there would be less incentive to purchase a VCD, if the identical product, of the same quality, could be downloaded for free.

The movie industry probably has a few years before internet bandwidth catches up to the point where downloading a 5 gigabyte DVD becomes practical. If they are smart, they will be ready with a new high-definition format that requires 50-100 gigabytes to store a single feature, and offers a corresponding visual improvement. Copy protection is irrelevant. It will always be defeated. The key to marketplace success is the same as ever -- you must continually upgrade the quality of your product to ensure that your product is better then the pirate alternative. In the world of movies, that means higher resolution and higher bitrates. If, five years from now, the movie industry is NOT releasing movies with at least the quality of contemporary DLP projection "prints", the industry will be in trouble.

It's all about the bandwidth.

The recording industry, on the other hand, is doing it all wrong. They have been raking in money on the CD format since the 1980s, and have waited too long. They should have had DVD-audio on the market at the same time that the movie industry released DVD-video. Now they are compounding their problems on all fronts.

Kids today are spoiled by Napster. They want to listen to songs before they buy them, they want to only buy the individual songs they like, and they want to be able to carry their music around on their MP3 player. The recording industry is responding by shutting down file-sharing services, expecting their customers to purchase albums without previewing them. They have eliminated singles, thus requiring a bulk purchase of a $15.00 album (containing the song the buyer wants, plus 45 minutes of filler), and they are copy-protecting their product, to ensure that store-purchased CDs are unusable on MP3 players -- thus making the legitimate product inferior to the bootleg product. This usually results in a marketplace disaster.

No wonder their sales are dropping.

Personally, I think that the movie industry would do well to keep far away from the internet as a distribution medium for the time being. The movie industry is where the music industry was in the early 1990s. They have two products -- theatrical exhibitions, and DVDs, that cannot be distributed online except in a degraded format. If the movie industry attempts to offer high-quality, low-bandwidth digital downloads of movies, then those will simply be pirated and traded around. It will lower the baseline standard of the industry product at a time when the industry should be increasing the baseline standard of their product, by increasing the quality to a level that vastly exceeds the available bandwidth of even the best internet connection.

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If they are smart, (the movie industry) will be ready with a new high-definition format that requires 50-100 gigabytes to store a single feature, and offers a corresponding visual improvement. (to deter internet piracy)

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On cue, the technology industry provides the necessary infrastructure: http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20020520/20020520b5.html

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Taiwan develops new optical disc

Published: May 20, 2002
Source: The Taiwan Economic News

The National Science Council (NSC) said Sunday that a local research team has successfully developed a new optical disc that can hold more than 100 gigabytes of information.

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