10 ms·

DRM in the cinema

197 points by mwilcox 14y ago

spdy 14y ago
This is fighting piracy on the wrong level. Some people must be so afraid that someone could copy their "work" that they put a chain on the most trusted place. The KDM unlocks the content of the file and allows the cinema to play the film. It is time sensitive and often is only valid from around 10 minutes prior to the screening time and expiring as close to 5 minutes after the scheduled time. This made me shiver... no delays allowed at all. I dont want to know how many employees got bitten by that.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Well, to be fair, if someone found a way to pirate straight from the projector that would be a pretty high quality copy floating around. It also strikes me that this allows distributors to control for unreported screenings, which allowed for unreported income. Probably not as common as it was way back when, but certainly possible.
  - joezydeco 14y ago
    I could be wrong, but has hasn't the business model for showing films changed as well? Theatres used to rent the 35mm prints by the week or month. Now, studios ask for a cut of each ticket sold, don't they? That's why studios are worried about unauthorized showings that could happen "off the books" and go unreported revenue-wise.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      Yeah, the distributors (often but not always arms of studios) take a percentage of each ticket sold. It's usually a sliding percentage- the distributor gets more at first and then the balance slides in favor of the exhibitor (theater) the longer the film has been out. The big chains are all computerized and report back to the distributors and can generally be trusted to be truthful. It's the mom and pop theaters that might have cheated in the past.
- protomyth 14y ago
  Actually, this is the place to fight a lot of the large scale piracy. Unreported screenings and borrowed film prints are fairly big concerns.
- forrestthewoods 14y ago
  As others have said, this seems to be the perfect place to fight piracy. At present time most movies do not have high quality releases until the blu-ray discs are manufactured. When a movie goes to blu-ray 720p and 1080p copies are instantly released online. Having those movies available online opening weekend, if not before opening weekend, could be disastrous.
  - Groxx 14y ago
    They already are in quite a few circumstances. It hasn't collapsed the industry yet - there are other reasons to go to a movie theater than to see the movie. As a concrete example, there are tens of thousands of seeders of Prometheus right now at a couple sites I just checked. And quite a few people I know, who know exactly how to use torrents, went to see it in the theater.
    - ditoa 14y ago
      Several thousand seeders of a CAM copy of Prometheus not a 1080p BluRay rip. Big difference!
      - Thlom 14y ago
        Audio and video watermarking is soon mandatory and playback will be impossible without it. Guess that will stop much of the CAM business.
        Retric 14y ago
        I don' think you can prevent analog camera's from recording video with watermarking. If you somehow prevent windows from playing back video based on some watermark scheme someone will just write a Linux program that strips / adds watermarks.
        Thlom 14y ago
        I guess a lot of the CAM pirates works in the cinema business. With watermarking the studios can find out exactly which auditorium it has been recorded in. I guess that will discourage a few pirates ...
- Thlom 14y ago
  My experience is that the only time a key unlocks the movie only 10 minutes prior to the screening is for previews. Usually the keys are valid for about a week. BTW, the screen servers will show when a accepted KDM unlocks a feature and for how long it's valid. I have never seen a KDM that is accepted by the screen server and then "doesn't work".
- raphman 14y ago
  The DCI security specification was modeled explicitly to "control lightly, audit tightly" - exactly because technical problems would cause a lot of trouble to the cinemas. Seems like this philosophy has not prevailed in the actual implementation...
smacktoward 14y ago
This is the part that made me cringe: The [DRM key] arrives as an email zip attachment that then needs to be unzipped, saved onto a memory stick and uploaded onto the server. Seriously? That's how we're delivering time-sensitive digital information? In 2012? Ugh, it makes my head spin. Is there some reason that the projector can't be connected to the network directly, so the vendor can push the key straight to it without all the sneakernet nonsense?
- onedognight 14y ago
  Sigh. There is a proposal to do just this in the works. http://isdcf.com/papers/ISDCF-Doc8-TheaterKeyRetrieval-TKR-v0.2.pdf http://isdcf.com/papers/ISDCF-Doc8-TheaterKeyRetrieval-TKR-v...
- simcop2387 14y ago
  Honestly what I love about this fact is that if there's an email delay the movie doesn't play. And if someone learns how to set the clocks back, it no longer matters that it's time sensitive!
  - Thlom 14y ago
    The servers have a secure clock which can only be adjusted 6 minutes each year. If it goes out of this limit you will need a special package or code from the manufacturer to adjust it back or in worst case you will have to change the mediablock.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Live by the sword, die by the sword. If you ask a bunch of hackers how to make a mission-critical application secure, one of the top answers is going to be 'air gap.' In economic terms, security has greater value (to the publishers) than the mild inconvenience of a few shows starting late.
  - geon 14y ago
    The actual transmission of the key could be done over a custom channel, like a serial connection only used to read the drm key. It would be even more secure than using a usb stick.
trimbo 14y ago
Ex-VFX guy here again. I feel like I have to comment on these threads because I'm thrilled to see 35mm film die.[1] The DRM sucks but.... > There are instances in the US already where some studios are refusing to freight 35mm film prints to cinemas. Yeah, because it's crazy expensive. It costs ~$1500 to strike and ship a 35mm print[2]. Also, did you know that prints are delivered by some specialized delivery company? They're not just shipped around by FedEx. I can't remember the name of the company right now. This incident sucks for them but I feel like this move to digital is great for the environment and a better moviegoing experience. I love the rock-solid picture with awesome contrast, and not to mention the lack of nasty chemical process in order to create it. [1] - My original comment on "RIP Movie Camera": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3114120 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3114120 [2] - http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digital-Hollywood/ http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digita...
- wahnfrieden 14y ago
  You don't think there's a place for it in smaller / specialized venues for some time? It makes sense for mainstream Hollywood not to bother with it anymore, but I for one would appreciate to be able to see Bela Tarr on 35mm or Antonioni on 70mm again. I know many of these older prints are passed around too rather than struck per showing.
  - trimbo 14y ago
    This is interesting, my interpretation of what they were saying was for _new_ prints. But in the case of old prints, I see your point. Long term, I hope this is self-correcting. People still like vinyl, and although you can't find a Tower Records anywhere on earth, you can find vinyl shops that are still doing really well. The same could end up being true for film-projecting theaters. My bias for digital probably clouds my judgment now so I have a question: would you be interested to see these on film if you could see a cleaned up, perfect, version on a 4K+ digital projector? What about the film version appeals to you?
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
tantalor 14y ago
The story links to an "https" URL, which is odd for several reasons, 1. Since when does a blog need to be secure? 2. The certificate is issued to "*.wordpress.com", which is useless. Each subdomain under wordpress.com should have a distinct certificate since they have a distinct author. The certificate should be specific to the author, not the host. - I realize it is not realistic to assign unique IP addresses to each wordpress.com subdomain. I just don't like it. 3. The page loads insecure content from gravatar.com and googleservices.com, which throws up annoying errors.
- 46Bit 14y ago
  Mixing insecure content makes it stupid, but as someone who uses https on my blog, it comes down to why not to use it. For the time being there's no reason, especially when Gandi give free certificates with a domain. The one quirk is that I'll always have to have something to redirect to unsecured should traffic ever get so high it becomes an issue. Although I certainly don't expect that any time soon.
- ajross 14y ago
  Certificates don't go with "authors", they go with domains. They are only (!) a promise that some grown up at a cert factory decided that the admin of the host you are connecting to was the proper owner of that domain. Now sure, there might be value in having per-subdomain certs in wordpress (though that would be rather complicated for wordpress to administer). But there's nothing wrong with that wildcard cert -- it provides proof that you've reached a blog hosted at wordpress, and not a MitM ready to lift your account password when you try to leave a comment.
- mwilcox 14y ago
  Sorry, this was my fault. I have a Chrome extension that forces everything to https, and forgot to remove it when I submitted the link.
tantalor 14y ago
> the projectionist can’t test to see if the KDM works or that the quality of the film is right before show time This seems like a simple and critical feature. If the distributor wishes to impose these extreme constraints on the projectionist, then the projectionist needs to know its going to work well in advance. The projectionist shouldn't even need to be in the room when the movie starts. I've run into this pattern a lot in web development. If you want a feature to go live at 6:00pm, you don't release it at 5:59pm and just hope it works. You program it to go automatically flip at 6:00pm and release the code early. The pre-programmed time can be overridden in the production environment, so you can easily test and know for sure (or as close as possible to sure) whether it will flip at 6:00pm or not. (I'm not saying my solution is perfect, just better than the naive solution.)
- quanticle 14y ago
  Except that in this case, you can't test. The only way to test is to load the movie, load a key and play the movie. No key? No movie, and no test. In addition, there is no way the distributor will let you have a "test" key. One of those would be manna from heaven for any unsavory projectionist who wanted to make high quality copies from theater prints.
  - tomsaffell 14y ago
    No test key required. Inputting the actual key prior to the scheduled slot should cause the projector to show a randomly chosen 30 second segment of the movie, with an overlay message at the bottom saying, "Test projection - key valid starting at HH:MM on dd/mm/yy". This should work around 10 times. The overlay should be background-color: #000; opacity: 0.6; color: #fff.
    - pilif 14y ago
      In order to get an accurate prediction whether the presentation is going to work or not, the key must be valid for decrypting the whole movie. If it is, then it can provide no more piracy protection because then you would use it to decrypt the movie independently of the projection system. If the key is only good to decrypt a random part of the movie, then the test says nothing about the success or failure of the key to decrypt the rest of the movie. Tangentially related: what is to stop a technically inclined projectionist to use the key during the time it is valid to decrypt the movie? I would assume that at presentation time, there is enough of decryption key material available to the projection system to cover all of the movie, otherwise a presentation would have to be interrupted as the cinemas internet goes down.
ken 14y ago
This is why I love analog, and not just in the sense of "I'm an old fart and old things are better" (though I'm sure there's a good dose of that), but because there's a whole spectrum between "working" and "not working". (Environmental issues aside, that is -- I recognize that the chemicals needed to manufacture and develop traditional film are pretty nasty.) With digital, if it works, it's 100%, which is great, but if it doesn't work, it's 0%, and that can make it hard to even get a grip on what the problem is or which direction to go to find a solution. (DRM just makes this worse.) I've got some weird routing to my TV because the obvious HDMI connection doesn't work, and how do you troubleshoot that? I once went to a theatre where the projectionist came out and announced that they had just broken a lens (apparently they had the largest lenses in town at the time) and couldn't project the film as they wanted to. They offered a refund, but for those who stayed, let us vote on what to do: use a smaller lens and see the film normally but smaller, or use the proper size lens but put up with 3-4 minute pauses every 20 minutes. Everyone stayed, and we chose the latter (who wants to see a small movie in a theatre?), and I don't think it was the wrong choice, but I learned that changeovers are not like commercial breaks: some of them are in really inconvenient places in the film, plot-wise! That's a situation that could never happen with a new digital projection system. The odd thing is that even though we groaned at how poorly-timed the changeovers were, in my mind the whole event is an overwhelmingly positive memory. I learned something about how projection systems work, and we got to interact with the projectionist, and it was a unique movie night we got to talk about, and I even enjoyed the movie still. We sometimes act as though the only goal of cinema is to reproduce every pixel and soundwave perfectly, but my most enjoyable movie experiences don't correlate to that, and in this case is almost the polar opposite. I suppose I'm a bit weird like that.
- shabble 14y ago
  I once went to a theatre where the projectionist came out and announced that they had just broken a lens (apparently they had the largest lenses in town at the time) and couldn't project the film as they wanted to. They offered a refund, but for those who stayed, let us vote on what to do: use a smaller lens and see the film normally but smaller, or use the proper size lens but put up with 3-4 minute pauses every 20 minutes. Everyone stayed, and we chose the latter (who wants to see a small movie in a theatre?), and I don't think it was the wrong choice, but I learned that changeovers are not like commercial breaks: some of them are in really inconvenient places in the film, plot-wise! I might be misunderstanding something about cinema projection, but how does a broken lens lead to 20-minute segmentation? The only things I can think of are perhaps it has some sort of cooling mechanism (I know the bulbs do emit massive quantities of heat) that needed a chance to cool off, or they were somehow playing it on a different projector which couldn't handle a full film-reel? Certainly a more interesting experience than the few glitches I've encountered including "Yes, we know you've been complaining since the 3rd minute of playback that we had the aspect ratio wrong, but we're only going to fix it now, 70% of the way through the film"
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
Hollywood's lack of trust in anybody will be the doom of the cinema, so they need to tread carefully here. If going to the cinema (differentiating that from the megaplex) means crap like this, the cinema will die. When enthusiasts are pushed away, the lifeblood dies. If your fervent supporters lose faith, you are in trouble.
beloch 14y ago
On the one hand, digital distribution has many advantages over film distribution, but I can't help but feel it's being rushed when it's not quite ready. DRM muck-ups like this are, of course a problem. However, the quality of the product isn't up to snuff yet either. e.g. Digital IMAX is terrible. The whole point of the IMAX format is to project a massive image with incredible detail. It's supposed to feel more real because so much of your peripheral vision is engaged while you're still able to focus in on one spot and see very fine detail. Digital IMAX gets the size right, but the detail is lacking. In every digital IMAX theater I've been in I was able to see individual pixels on the screen. This of course, leads to all sorts of digital artifacts like shimmering (especially noticeable during credit crawls). IMax film is still breath-taking and superior to anything digital. I hope it sticks around in at least some theaters until digital IMAX gets its act together. I also hope to see some of the great 70mm classics (e.g. Lawrence of Arabia) on film before it's too late.
drawkbox 14y ago
Actually this is a better situation than getting a bad reel or worse not receiving the movie at all the day or two before release on film. I used to manage a theatre and sometimes had issues (more often re-releases than new releases) for instance our copy of Pulp Fiction was missing a reel, had to wait days for another one to ship rather than just making a call. Sometimes movies came reeled backwards, missing reels, missing entire canisters with multiple reels, scratched reels etc. Digital removes all those distribution problems (and that is some heavy material). And not to mention the times when a platter would break and drop the entire film on the ground every now and again. I'd say digital has less problems. I did have fun building movies on Thursday nights and watching them for quality but digital is much better in terms of distribution. The reel feeling will be missed though.
sparknlaunch 14y ago
Totally interesting insight into the cinema world. My only questions is why they waited so late to test if the film would play? (I am sure there is a technical reason.)
- lambada 14y ago
  FTA: "The KDM unlocks the content of the file and allows the cinema to play the film. It is time sensitive and often is only valid from around 10 minutes prior to the screening ..." Without the KDM being unlocked they can't test it, so the earliest opportunity is 10 minutes before the screening.
cdooh 14y ago
All that just to ensure a film doesn't get copied and pirated...and yet it still does
- megablast 14y ago
  Nope, as it says in the article, it is also to track how much the film is being played, to ensure that they are being paid correctly.
  - abruzzi 14y ago
    The odd thing though is that (at least in the US) film payments are based on a percentage of ticket sales, not number of showings. I used to work at a repertoire theater, and we added late night showings at the last minute on sever occasions based on audience demand.
rmc 14y ago
I hate DRM and hope it dies, but I can't support the authors love of physical films. It strikes me as too much like hipster luddistism, and failing to see the disadvantages of physical reels. Remember this cinema is in Melbourne, Australia. Australians (like the rest of the non-US world) are sick of delays in films being released. Piracy has done a bit to help get rid of the stupid regional delays (Matrix №2 was released at the same time globally). Digital film distribution would do wonders to help the Aussie cinema industry!
ropers 14y ago
> the industry is shifting – not only its medium, not only its focus, but with it – and most significantly for theatres like us – it’s shifting the element of control That's a bingo. Like with so many things DRM, where rights are no longer balanced and only the concerns of one side, the DRM-issuing side are ever taken into account, this is a power-grab.
JackC 14y ago
This was the important part for me: What I’d really like to leave you with here is the essence of how last night made us feel: the industry is shifting – not only its medium, not only its focus, but with it – and most significantly for theatres like us – it’s shifting the element of control. We’re in relationship with you, our audience, but it seems to me as though someone is trying to break us up. So much of the problem with DRM, and the weirdness of copyright-based business models, is not logistic ("I want to watch the Matrix in HD now!") but aesthetic, artistic, moral: it feels wrong on a basic human level to thread your engagement with the culture through a maze of technical, legal, bureaucratic obeisance. I've decided, personally, to do my best not to violate IP laws, because I don't want the moral hazard of arguing against a law while financially benefiting from violating it. I want my vision clear. But I can say with clear vision that there's something inhuman and anti-human about the scenario described in the article, and I hope we find a better way.

197 points by mwilcox 14y ago

spdy 14y ago

This is fighting piracy on the wrong level. Some people must be so afraid that someone could copy their "work" that they put a chain on the most trusted place. The KDM unlocks the content of the file and allows the cinema to play the film. It is time sensitive and often is only valid from around 10 minutes prior to the screening time and expiring as close to 5 minutes after the scheduled time. This made me shiver... no delays allowed at all. I dont want to know how many employees got bitten by that.

waterlesscloud 14y ago
Well, to be fair, if someone found a way to pirate straight from the projector that would be a pretty high quality copy floating around. It also strikes me that this allows distributors to control for unreported screenings, which allowed for unreported income. Probably not as common as it was way back when, but certainly possible.
- joezydeco 14y ago
  I could be wrong, but has hasn't the business model for showing films changed as well? Theatres used to rent the 35mm prints by the week or month. Now, studios ask for a cut of each ticket sold, don't they? That's why studios are worried about unauthorized showings that could happen "off the books" and go unreported revenue-wise.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    Yeah, the distributors (often but not always arms of studios) take a percentage of each ticket sold. It's usually a sliding percentage- the distributor gets more at first and then the balance slides in favor of the exhibitor (theater) the longer the film has been out. The big chains are all computerized and report back to the distributors and can generally be trusted to be truthful. It's the mom and pop theaters that might have cheated in the past.
protomyth 14y ago
Actually, this is the place to fight a lot of the large scale piracy. Unreported screenings and borrowed film prints are fairly big concerns.
forrestthewoods 14y ago
As others have said, this seems to be the perfect place to fight piracy. At present time most movies do not have high quality releases until the blu-ray discs are manufactured. When a movie goes to blu-ray 720p and 1080p copies are instantly released online. Having those movies available online opening weekend, if not before opening weekend, could be disastrous.
- Groxx 14y ago
  They already are in quite a few circumstances. It hasn't collapsed the industry yet - there are other reasons to go to a movie theater than to see the movie. As a concrete example, there are tens of thousands of seeders of Prometheus right now at a couple sites I just checked. And quite a few people I know, who know exactly how to use torrents, went to see it in the theater.
  - ditoa 14y ago
    Several thousand seeders of a CAM copy of Prometheus not a 1080p BluRay rip. Big difference!
    - Thlom 14y ago
      Audio and video watermarking is soon mandatory and playback will be impossible without it. Guess that will stop much of the CAM business.
      - Retric 14y ago
        I don' think you can prevent analog camera's from recording video with watermarking. If you somehow prevent windows from playing back video based on some watermark scheme someone will just write a Linux program that strips / adds watermarks.
        Thlom 14y ago
        I guess a lot of the CAM pirates works in the cinema business. With watermarking the studios can find out exactly which auditorium it has been recorded in. I guess that will discourage a few pirates ...
Thlom 14y ago
My experience is that the only time a key unlocks the movie only 10 minutes prior to the screening is for previews. Usually the keys are valid for about a week. BTW, the screen servers will show when a accepted KDM unlocks a feature and for how long it's valid. I have never seen a KDM that is accepted by the screen server and then "doesn't work".
raphman 14y ago
The DCI security specification was modeled explicitly to "control lightly, audit tightly" - exactly because technical problems would cause a lot of trouble to the cinemas. Seems like this philosophy has not prevailed in the actual implementation...

smacktoward 14y ago

This is the part that made me cringe: The [DRM key] arrives as an email zip attachment that then needs to be unzipped, saved onto a memory stick and uploaded onto the server. Seriously? That's how we're delivering time-sensitive digital information? In 2012? Ugh, it makes my head spin. Is there some reason that the projector can't be connected to the network directly, so the vendor can push the key straight to it without all the sneakernet nonsense?

onedognight 14y ago
Sigh. There is a proposal to do just this in the works. http://isdcf.com/papers/ISDCF-Doc8-TheaterKeyRetrieval-TKR-v0.2.pdf http://isdcf.com/papers/ISDCF-Doc8-TheaterKeyRetrieval-TKR-v...
simcop2387 14y ago
Honestly what I love about this fact is that if there's an email delay the movie doesn't play. And if someone learns how to set the clocks back, it no longer matters that it's time sensitive!
- Thlom 14y ago
  The servers have a secure clock which can only be adjusted 6 minutes each year. If it goes out of this limit you will need a special package or code from the manufacturer to adjust it back or in worst case you will have to change the mediablock.
anigbrowl 14y ago
Live by the sword, die by the sword. If you ask a bunch of hackers how to make a mission-critical application secure, one of the top answers is going to be 'air gap.' In economic terms, security has greater value (to the publishers) than the mild inconvenience of a few shows starting late.
- geon 14y ago
  The actual transmission of the key could be done over a custom channel, like a serial connection only used to read the drm key. It would be even more secure than using a usb stick.

trimbo 14y ago

Ex-VFX guy here again. I feel like I have to comment on these threads because I'm thrilled to see 35mm film die.[1] The DRM sucks but.... > There are instances in the US already where some studios are refusing to freight 35mm film prints to cinemas. Yeah, because it's crazy expensive. It costs ~$1500 to strike and ship a 35mm print[2]. Also, did you know that prints are delivered by some specialized delivery company? They're not just shipped around by FedEx. I can't remember the name of the company right now. This incident sucks for them but I feel like this move to digital is great for the environment and a better moviegoing experience. I love the rock-solid picture with awesome contrast, and not to mention the lack of nasty chemical process in order to create it. [1] - My original comment on "RIP Movie Camera": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3114120 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3114120 [2] - http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digital-Hollywood/ http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digita...

wahnfrieden 14y ago
You don't think there's a place for it in smaller / specialized venues for some time? It makes sense for mainstream Hollywood not to bother with it anymore, but I for one would appreciate to be able to see Bela Tarr on 35mm or Antonioni on 70mm again. I know many of these older prints are passed around too rather than struck per showing.
- trimbo 14y ago
  This is interesting, my interpretation of what they were saying was for _new_ prints. But in the case of old prints, I see your point. Long term, I hope this is self-correcting. People still like vinyl, and although you can't find a Tower Records anywhere on earth, you can find vinyl shops that are still doing really well. The same could end up being true for film-projecting theaters. My bias for digital probably clouds my judgment now so I have a question: would you be interested to see these on film if you could see a cleaned up, perfect, version on a 4K+ digital projector? What about the film version appeals to you?
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago

tantalor 14y ago

The story links to an "https" URL, which is odd for several reasons, 1. Since when does a blog need to be secure? 2. The certificate is issued to "*.wordpress.com", which is useless. Each subdomain under wordpress.com should have a distinct certificate since they have a distinct author. The certificate should be specific to the author, not the host. - I realize it is not realistic to assign unique IP addresses to each wordpress.com subdomain. I just don't like it. 3. The page loads insecure content from gravatar.com and googleservices.com, which throws up annoying errors.

46Bit 14y ago
Mixing insecure content makes it stupid, but as someone who uses https on my blog, it comes down to why not to use it. For the time being there's no reason, especially when Gandi give free certificates with a domain. The one quirk is that I'll always have to have something to redirect to unsecured should traffic ever get so high it becomes an issue. Although I certainly don't expect that any time soon.
ajross 14y ago
Certificates don't go with "authors", they go with domains. They are only (!) a promise that some grown up at a cert factory decided that the admin of the host you are connecting to was the proper owner of that domain. Now sure, there might be value in having per-subdomain certs in wordpress (though that would be rather complicated for wordpress to administer). But there's nothing wrong with that wildcard cert -- it provides proof that you've reached a blog hosted at wordpress, and not a MitM ready to lift your account password when you try to leave a comment.
mwilcox 14y ago
Sorry, this was my fault. I have a Chrome extension that forces everything to https, and forgot to remove it when I submitted the link.

tantalor 14y ago

> the projectionist can’t test to see if the KDM works or that the quality of the film is right before show time This seems like a simple and critical feature. If the distributor wishes to impose these extreme constraints on the projectionist, then the projectionist needs to know its going to work well in advance. The projectionist shouldn't even need to be in the room when the movie starts. I've run into this pattern a lot in web development. If you want a feature to go live at 6:00pm, you don't release it at 5:59pm and just hope it works. You program it to go automatically flip at 6:00pm and release the code early. The pre-programmed time can be overridden in the production environment, so you can easily test and know for sure (or as close as possible to sure) whether it will flip at 6:00pm or not. (I'm not saying my solution is perfect, just better than the naive solution.)

quanticle 14y ago
Except that in this case, you can't test. The only way to test is to load the movie, load a key and play the movie. No key? No movie, and no test. In addition, there is no way the distributor will let you have a "test" key. One of those would be manna from heaven for any unsavory projectionist who wanted to make high quality copies from theater prints.
- tomsaffell 14y ago
  No test key required. Inputting the actual key prior to the scheduled slot should cause the projector to show a randomly chosen 30 second segment of the movie, with an overlay message at the bottom saying, "Test projection - key valid starting at HH:MM on dd/mm/yy". This should work around 10 times. The overlay should be background-color: #000; opacity: 0.6; color: #fff.
  - pilif 14y ago
    In order to get an accurate prediction whether the presentation is going to work or not, the key must be valid for decrypting the whole movie. If it is, then it can provide no more piracy protection because then you would use it to decrypt the movie independently of the projection system. If the key is only good to decrypt a random part of the movie, then the test says nothing about the success or failure of the key to decrypt the rest of the movie. Tangentially related: what is to stop a technically inclined projectionist to use the key during the time it is valid to decrypt the movie? I would assume that at presentation time, there is enough of decryption key material available to the projection system to cover all of the movie, otherwise a presentation would have to be interrupted as the cinemas internet goes down.

ken 14y ago

This is why I love analog, and not just in the sense of "I'm an old fart and old things are better" (though I'm sure there's a good dose of that), but because there's a whole spectrum between "working" and "not working". (Environmental issues aside, that is -- I recognize that the chemicals needed to manufacture and develop traditional film are pretty nasty.) With digital, if it works, it's 100%, which is great, but if it doesn't work, it's 0%, and that can make it hard to even get a grip on what the problem is or which direction to go to find a solution. (DRM just makes this worse.) I've got some weird routing to my TV because the obvious HDMI connection doesn't work, and how do you troubleshoot that? I once went to a theatre where the projectionist came out and announced that they had just broken a lens (apparently they had the largest lenses in town at the time) and couldn't project the film as they wanted to. They offered a refund, but for those who stayed, let us vote on what to do: use a smaller lens and see the film normally but smaller, or use the proper size lens but put up with 3-4 minute pauses every 20 minutes. Everyone stayed, and we chose the latter (who wants to see a small movie in a theatre?), and I don't think it was the wrong choice, but I learned that changeovers are not like commercial breaks: some of them are in really inconvenient places in the film, plot-wise! That's a situation that could never happen with a new digital projection system. The odd thing is that even though we groaned at how poorly-timed the changeovers were, in my mind the whole event is an overwhelmingly positive memory. I learned something about how projection systems work, and we got to interact with the projectionist, and it was a unique movie night we got to talk about, and I even enjoyed the movie still. We sometimes act as though the only goal of cinema is to reproduce every pixel and soundwave perfectly, but my most enjoyable movie experiences don't correlate to that, and in this case is almost the polar opposite. I suppose I'm a bit weird like that.

shabble 14y ago
I once went to a theatre where the projectionist came out and announced that they had just broken a lens (apparently they had the largest lenses in town at the time) and couldn't project the film as they wanted to. They offered a refund, but for those who stayed, let us vote on what to do: use a smaller lens and see the film normally but smaller, or use the proper size lens but put up with 3-4 minute pauses every 20 minutes. Everyone stayed, and we chose the latter (who wants to see a small movie in a theatre?), and I don't think it was the wrong choice, but I learned that changeovers are not like commercial breaks: some of them are in really inconvenient places in the film, plot-wise! I might be misunderstanding something about cinema projection, but how does a broken lens lead to 20-minute segmentation? The only things I can think of are perhaps it has some sort of cooling mechanism (I know the bulbs do emit massive quantities of heat) that needed a chance to cool off, or they were somehow playing it on a different projector which couldn't handle a full film-reel? Certainly a more interesting experience than the few glitches I've encountered including "Yes, we know you've been complaining since the 3rd minute of playback that we had the aspect ratio wrong, but we're only going to fix it now, 70% of the way through the film"

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

Hollywood's lack of trust in anybody will be the doom of the cinema, so they need to tread carefully here. If going to the cinema (differentiating that from the megaplex) means crap like this, the cinema will die. When enthusiasts are pushed away, the lifeblood dies. If your fervent supporters lose faith, you are in trouble.

beloch 14y ago

On the one hand, digital distribution has many advantages over film distribution, but I can't help but feel it's being rushed when it's not quite ready. DRM muck-ups like this are, of course a problem. However, the quality of the product isn't up to snuff yet either. e.g. Digital IMAX is terrible. The whole point of the IMAX format is to project a massive image with incredible detail. It's supposed to feel more real because so much of your peripheral vision is engaged while you're still able to focus in on one spot and see very fine detail. Digital IMAX gets the size right, but the detail is lacking. In every digital IMAX theater I've been in I was able to see individual pixels on the screen. This of course, leads to all sorts of digital artifacts like shimmering (especially noticeable during credit crawls). IMax film is still breath-taking and superior to anything digital. I hope it sticks around in at least some theaters until digital IMAX gets its act together. I also hope to see some of the great 70mm classics (e.g. Lawrence of Arabia) on film before it's too late.

drawkbox 14y ago

Actually this is a better situation than getting a bad reel or worse not receiving the movie at all the day or two before release on film. I used to manage a theatre and sometimes had issues (more often re-releases than new releases) for instance our copy of Pulp Fiction was missing a reel, had to wait days for another one to ship rather than just making a call. Sometimes movies came reeled backwards, missing reels, missing entire canisters with multiple reels, scratched reels etc. Digital removes all those distribution problems (and that is some heavy material). And not to mention the times when a platter would break and drop the entire film on the ground every now and again. I'd say digital has less problems. I did have fun building movies on Thursday nights and watching them for quality but digital is much better in terms of distribution. The reel feeling will be missed though.

sparknlaunch 14y ago

Totally interesting insight into the cinema world. My only questions is why they waited so late to test if the film would play? (I am sure there is a technical reason.)

lambada 14y ago
FTA: "The KDM unlocks the content of the file and allows the cinema to play the film. It is time sensitive and often is only valid from around 10 minutes prior to the screening ..." Without the KDM being unlocked they can't test it, so the earliest opportunity is 10 minutes before the screening.

cdooh 14y ago

All that just to ensure a film doesn't get copied and pirated...and yet it still does

megablast 14y ago
Nope, as it says in the article, it is also to track how much the film is being played, to ensure that they are being paid correctly.
- abruzzi 14y ago
  The odd thing though is that (at least in the US) film payments are based on a percentage of ticket sales, not number of showings. I used to work at a repertoire theater, and we added late night showings at the last minute on sever occasions based on audience demand.

rmc 14y ago

I hate DRM and hope it dies, but I can't support the authors love of physical films. It strikes me as too much like hipster luddistism, and failing to see the disadvantages of physical reels. Remember this cinema is in Melbourne, Australia. Australians (like the rest of the non-US world) are sick of delays in films being released. Piracy has done a bit to help get rid of the stupid regional delays (Matrix №2 was released at the same time globally). Digital film distribution would do wonders to help the Aussie cinema industry!

ropers 14y ago

> the industry is shifting – not only its medium, not only its focus, but with it – and most significantly for theatres like us – it’s shifting the element of control That's a bingo. Like with so many things DRM, where rights are no longer balanced and only the concerns of one side, the DRM-issuing side are ever taken into account, this is a power-grab.

JackC 14y ago

This was the important part for me: What I’d really like to leave you with here is the essence of how last night made us feel: the industry is shifting – not only its medium, not only its focus, but with it – and most significantly for theatres like us – it’s shifting the element of control. We’re in relationship with you, our audience, but it seems to me as though someone is trying to break us up. So much of the problem with DRM, and the weirdness of copyright-based business models, is not logistic ("I want to watch the Matrix in HD now!") but aesthetic, artistic, moral: it feels wrong on a basic human level to thread your engagement with the culture through a maze of technical, legal, bureaucratic obeisance. I've decided, personally, to do my best not to violate IP laws, because I don't want the moral hazard of arguing against a law while financially benefiting from violating it. I want my vision clear. But I can say with clear vision that there's something inhuman and anti-human about the scenario described in the article, and I hope we find a better way.