

Over 100 different versions of Avatar were shipped to theaters - trafficlight
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3i68c9747cd968ca8d5b27fcb8619d8b88

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jamesbressi
Did anyone else assume the 100 different versions were for some sort of piracy
identification? Meaning 100 different versions with just a slight change that
no one would notice, but Cameron or the studio would be able to identify and
help round down to what theater or region would have had that copy?

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pierrefar
I thought of that too, but decided it would have been easier to put
"invisible" watermarks throughout the movie stream that can be detected even
after compression. Say imperceptible color variations that a computer can pick
up if it knows which frames to search.

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abentspoon
It seems watermarking with a patern of dots is already popular, but embeding
the watermark in a color histogram might be much less distracting

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_code>

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lanstein
I thought they used telltale sounds to detect the guy who they just caught in
France, no?

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ars
A little background on the problem:

Each type of 3D system has varying amount of cross-eye leak. And the leak
varies by color (for some types of systems).

So you need to adjust the color balance to compensate for how much light of
each color arrives at each eye. The type of screen, and the size of the screen
affects this as well.

Ghostbusting is similar - some light leaks to the other eye, so you reduce the
intensity of one side to balance them out.

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Splines
Kudos to James Cameron for his attention to detail - shows that Avatar was
really a labor of love.

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philwelch
Oh, please. This is just good marketing, and the natural result of releasing
something not only in n languages but also in k formats. Turns out n by k
versions is a lot, and it's easy to make n by k versions of a film when the
film is already digital.

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dood
This was not marketing, easy, or common - this was exceptional attention to
detail and focus on getting the highest quality experience to the customer,
which Cameron should certainly be recognized for (whether you liked the film
or not).

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philwelch
It's hard work and it's innovative, but how is it not marketing?

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pchristensen
Marketing is making people aware of a product.

Product development is making the best product possible.

This was the latter.

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philwelch
You're talking about promotion. Equating "marketing" with "promotion" is a
common misconception. Promotion is part of marketing, but so are place,
pricing, and (at least some aspect of)[2] product development. [1] When you're
talking about adapting a film to different languages and different screen
formats, you're talking about product and place. You're still talking about
marketing.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix#Four_Ps>

[2] Obviously product development in most fields contains a lot of
engineering, design, filmmaking, etc. It's pretty fuzzy, but the kind of stuff
in this article--adapting to different screen sizes and languages--is
definitely on the marketing side.

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pchristensen
Would you consider i18n marketing? That's how I see this 100 version effort.

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philwelch
Internationalizing software is an engineering effort to fulfill a marketing
objective: namely, extending placement into foreign countries.

When you internationalize a film, there's a bit of "filmmaking" (in that you
have to have voice actors dubbing the original film, or you have to have
translators rewriting your dialogue) but unless Cameron's more multilingual
than I thought, I rather doubt directing all those voice actors and
supervising those subtitle writers was any artistic effort on his part. His
input was a marketing input: I want my film dubbed and subbed into dozens of
languages and shown on half a dozen different screen types. (Cameron's not the
first director to film with multiple aspect ratios in mind, nor is he the
first to make the artistic call of having different aspect ratios, but I'm
sure it affected the filmmaking.)

I didn't mean to take away from his studio's technical chops. Avatar's raised
the bar for special effects, distribution, and pioneering new screen formats.
But it's not a "labor of love", it's just well executed business.

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huherto
Before reading the Article I thought it was about injecting special hidden
marks in the movies to be able to detect if the movie was pirated, from which
copy it was pirated. It occurred to me that that may be an interested solution
for a problem we have. But I haven't been able to hit the right keywords to do
the search. Can anyone give me suggestions on what to look for?

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mprovost
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Anti-Piracy>

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protomyth
Wow, I guess having actual digital distribution will save some cash.

