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A cam (camrip or camming, deriving from camcorder ) is a bootleg recording of a film. Generally unlike the more common DVD rip or screener recording methods which involve the duplication of officially distributed media, cam versions are original clandestine recordings made in movie theaters.
The most common type of cam is produced by a theater patron who smuggles a compact digital camcorder into the theater by hiding it in their clothing or in a container such as a handbag or backpack. The filmer then records the movie using the camcorder as unobtrusively as possible. They may try to pick a seat as far back in the auditorium as possible to avoid the attention of other patrons (and to ensure proper framing of the screen) and/or choose sparsely attended showtimes. The filmer may also rely on cinema employees who will overlook infringement activity because of an existing friend or family relationship, collusion, bribery, or apathy to the law.
In an attempt to impede this practice (as well as curb the smuggling in of non-theater food), some establishments now ban customers from carrying bags or other containers into theaters. As an additional form of deterrent, theaters may equip ushers with night vision goggles to discreetly catch a bootlegger in the act of recording. [1] With the improvement in camera quality and storage space of smartphones, it is now somewhat more difficult to detect when a person is recording in a movie theater.
Cams produced in this way use the camera's microphone to record audio, which tends to produce a recording that sounds "muddy". In addition, the microphone may pick up ambient noises in the auditorium, such as the audience's response to the film (e.g. laughter, screaming) or disruptive noises (crying baby, mobile phone ring, people coughing, etc.). A camera situated in the audience area may record silhouettes of other audience members, especially those leaving the theater for the restroom or concession stand. [2] In the auditoria of older or poorly maintained theaters, other sounds such as air conditioning or sound from adjacent auditoria may also be audible. In other cases, a tripod is used in the handicapped sections of an auditorium while plugging the jack in a hard-of-hearing device. [3] These recordings with better sound are called telesync.
Sometimes cam versions are made by projectionists themselves, either for home use or to distribute (with or without profit). This provides several advantages: first, the projection booth window has a central, unobstructed view of the screen. Second, the projectionist can bypass the built-in microphone and link the camcorder directly to the monitor output of the audio rack, resulting in a clear, well-separated stereo recording. The projectionist can also alleviate the frame rate conversion problem described above by speeding the projector up from film's traditional 24 fps to 25 fps and then use a standard PAL video camera to record the film picture. These advantages come with a higher risk: a projectionist, if caught, will almost certainly be fired, and is more likely than the typical audience member to face legal prosecution.
Since 2001, many major motion pictures have been shipped to theaters with watermarks of unique patterns of tiny dots embedded throughout the film, known as Coded Anti-Piracy technology. If the cammer is unable to catch and blur all of these sequences, the studio can determine at which theater the cam was recorded.
The overall quality of cam bootlegs is highly dependent upon the choice of theater (and sometimes the individual screening), the quality of camera used, the skill of the operator in framing the screen and minimizing camera movement, and the method of encoding used before distribution. Cams are generally considered to be the lowest fidelity method for duplicating video and film content, somewhat behind Telesync and markedly worse than DVD rips or screeners. For newly released films, however, cams are often the first bootleg copies available. In the developing world, cam DVDs are often available from street vendors for prices equivalent to US$1–2 (PPP); worldwide, they are swapped or sold on Internet pirate sites.
Around the start of the millennium, many first time camera recordings originated from Malaysia, recognizable by the burn-in Malay subtitles. VCDs often appeared 2 to 3 days before the theatrical release. In some cases, they were even available online 3 months before release. Robert Krulwich sees two possibilities as the main reason for such early availability of these illicit recordings. Someone in Hollywood shows movies a couple of days before they show them in America, or some people get prints sent to them from people in the Californian movie business. [3]
Warez is a common computing and broader cultural term referring to pirated software that is distributed via the Internet. Warez is used most commonly as a noun, a plural form of ware, and is intended to be pronounced like the word wares. The circumvention of copy protection (cracking) is an essential step in generating warez, and based on this common mechanism, the software-focused definition has been extended to include other copyright-protected materials, including movies and games. The global array of warez groups has been referred to as "The Scene", deriving from its earlier description as "the warez scene". Distribution and trade of copyrighted works without payment of fees or royalties generally violates national and international copyright laws and agreements. The term warez covers supported as well as unsupported (abandonware) items, and legal prohibitions governing creation and distribution of warez cover both profit-driven and "enthusiast" generators and distributors of such items.
A movie theater, cinema, or cinema hall, also known as a movie house, picture house, the movies, the pictures, picture theater, the silver screen, the big screen, or simply theater is a building that contains auditoria for viewing films for public entertainment. Most, but not all, movie theaters are commercial operations catering to the general public, who attend by purchasing tickets.
A camcorder is a self-contained portable electronic device with video and recording as its primary function. It is typically equipped with an articulating screen mounted on the left side, a belt to facilitate holding on the right side, hot-swappable battery facing towards the user, hot-swappable recording media, and an internally contained quiet optical zoom lens.
Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone was the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one that was widely used and commercially successful. The soundtrack was not printed on the film itself, but issued separately on phonograph records. The discs, recorded at 33+1⁄3 rpm and typically 16 inches (41 cm) in diameter, would be played on a turntable physically coupled to the projector motor while the film was being projected. It had a frequency response of 4300 Hz. Many early talkies, such as The Jazz Singer (1927), used the Vitaphone system. The name "Vitaphone" derived from the Latin and Greek words, respectively, for "living" and "sound".
A movie projector is an opto-mechanical device for displaying motion picture film by projecting it onto a screen. Most of the optical and mechanical elements, except for the illumination and sound devices, are present in movie cameras. Modern movie projectors are specially built video projectors.
A telesync (TS) is a bootleg recording of a film recorded in a movie theater, often filmed using a professional camera on a tripod in the projection booth. The audio of a TS is captured with a direct connection to the sound source. If a direct connection from the sound source is not possible, sometimes the bootlegger will tape or conceal wireless microphones close to the speakers, as it is better than a mic on the camera. A TS can be considered a higher quality type of cam, that has the potential of better-quality audio and video.
A workprint is a rough version of a motion picture, used by the film editor(s) during the editing process. Such copies generally contain original recorded sound that will later be re-dubbed, stock footage as placeholders for missing shots or special effects, and animation tests for in-production animated shots or sequences.
Coded anti-piracy (CAP) is an anti-copyright infringement technology which marks each film print of a motion picture with a distinguishing pattern of dots, used as a forensic identifier to identify the source of illegal copies.
A projectionist is a person who operates a movie projector, particularly as an employee of a movie theater. Projectionists are also known as "operators".
CineAlta cameras are a series of professional digital movie cameras produced by Sony that replicate many of the same features of 35mm film motion picture cameras.
AVCHD is a file-based format for the digital recording and playback of high-definition video. It is H.264 and Dolby AC-3 packaged into the MPEG transport stream, with a set of constraints designed around the camcorders.
Pirated movie release types are the different types of pirated movies and television series that end up on the Internet. They vary wildly in rarity and quality due to the different sources and methods used for acquiring the video content, in addition to encoding formats. Pirated movie releases may be derived from cams, which have distinctly low quality; screener and workprint discs or digital distribution copies (DDC), telecine copies from analog reels, video on demand (VOD) or TV recordings, and DVD and Blu-ray rips. They are seen in P2P networks, pirated websites and video sharing rarely on websites such as YouTube and Dailymotion due to their copyright systems.
A cue mark, also known as a cue dot, a cue blip, a changeover cue or simply a cue, is a visual indicator used with motion picture film prints, usually placed in the upper right corner of a film frame. Cue dots are also used as a visual form of signalling on television broadcasts.
Who Makes Movies? was an advertising campaign run jointly by several international associations looking to crack down on copyright infringement of motion pictures, most notably the MPAA, as part of the larger "Respect Copyrights" campaign. The campaign was endorsed by several motion picture workers' guilds, including the Directors Guild of America, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts, the Motion Picture Editors Guild, the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America.
R5, in the film business, is a DVD of a movie sold in Russia very soon after the first screening in cinema, at reduced wholesale prices. It is made with a telecine machine from an analog source and is typically of a lower quality than other retail releases.
The term telecine refers both to a film-to-tape transferring machine, as well as the process by which film is transferred to tape. The telecine process is frequently used by filmmakers to transfer production footage to video, which can then be captured by various non-linear digital editing systems.
Operation Site Down is the umbrella name for a law enforcement initiative conducted by the United States' FBI and law enforcement agents from ten other countries which resulted in a raid on targets on June 29, 2005. Three separate undercover investigations were involved, based in Chicago, Charlotte and San Jose. The raid consisted of approximately 70 searches in the U.S. and approximately 20 others in ten other countries in an effort to disrupt and dismantle many of the leading Warez groups which distribute and trade in copyrighted software, movies, music and games on the Internet.
The analog hole is a perceived fundamental and inevitable vulnerability in copy protection schemes for noninteractive works in digital formats which can be exploited to duplicate copy-protected works using analog means. Once digital information is converted to a human-perceptible (analog) form, it is a relatively simple matter to digitally recapture that analog reproduction in an unrestricted form, thereby fundamentally circumventing any and all restrictions placed on copyrighted digitally distributed work. Media publishers who use digital rights management (DRM), to restrict how a work can be used, perceive the necessity to make it visible or audible as a "hole" in the control that DRM otherwise affords them.
A projection booth, projection box or Bio box is a room or enclosure for the machinery required for the display of movies on a reflective screen, located high on the back wall of the presentation space. It is common in a movie theater.