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--"That's my story and i'm sticking to it!"--

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CAP Codes and digital watermarking are only a few of many tools the MPAA uses to catch and convict the criminals who prey upon the industry. The job you save may be your own.

BTW, the MPAA does have a generous reward program for anyone that provides information leading to the conviction of movie pirates:
http://www.mpaa.org/anti-piracy/
http://www.mpaa.org/anti-piracy/contact/index.htm

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
e-mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

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Would I send out screener tapes of, say, Spike and Mike's Animation Fest? Sure! Would I send out screener tapes of Star Wars or Spiderman? Hell, no!

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Any moron can make a near perfect video transfer from a DLP screen!

Yes folks let's think about this for a minute. With a regular 35mm film projector, there are 2 or 3 shutter blades. So in essence there are either 48 or 72 images per second. Video shoots at 30 images per second and 30 does not divide into 48 or 72 without a fraction, thus a very horrible flicker will result in the taped copy. With DLP, there is no shutter, just 24 images per second. What this means is that any bonehead can take any old crappy video camera, point it at the screen (preferably on a tripod of course) and walk away with potentially a much better copy than that person could generally achieve when trying to copy a DVD because of DVD's MacroVision copy protection! Now sure the audio would sound echoey if the built in microphone was used, but many monitors have headphone jacks on them, and for those that don't, it wouldn't be rocket science for some determined low life to patch into the sound system directly.

No I do NOT advocate piracy and I have personally caught several bootleggers red handed in my theaters and confiscated their tape and scared the pants off of them, but let's be honest here, digital cinema is an open invitation to piracy.

CAP code? No I don't think so, for I've never seen the marks on a DLP presentation and it's not that effective anyway. As it stands right now, there is nothing to prevent someone from copying a DLP presentation to video. I have come up with a few ideas on my own and passed them along, but I am not sure if they will implement them or not. I'll post a couple of them here for your reading enjoyment:

*Do the "ET" trick. When ET was released in 1982 I noticed that the ending scene where there is no dialogue, but random shots of everyone staring at the ship in awe as ET leaves Earth that the shot order varied between prints. Very sneaky and very effective! Such a thing should be easily able to be accomplished with DLP, for it would just be a matter of modifying the digital files between "prints".

*Do the Yoda thing. When Empire Strikes Back was released some of the audio was changed. The most obvious example is when Luke first meets Yoda. Luke says "Hmmm, I feel like" and then Yoda replies "feel like what?" Luke does a quick turn around and in half of the prints Yoda moved his stick in front of his face and in the other half of the prints Yoda does the same movement, but says "eeeeeeeehgh!" Little audio changes like this should also be changed easily enough.

*Change a number on a door. This is my favorite and to my knowledge has not been implemented. Let's say Jar Jar is running down a hallway trying to escape death from an attacker. (Let's hope the attacker wins!) As he stops in front of a door that door could have a number on it or the nearby wall. How hard would it be to make that number the "DLP print number"? Not too hard I wouldn't think.

*Even more subtle, but highly effective would be to take a shot that is long to begin with that the director wouldn't mind shortening, such as an establishing shot, and chop frames out of it to signify the print number. Let's say there is an establishing wide shot of a landscape that holds on the screen for 8 seconds, but the director is willing to cut it down to 4. That right there would mean that with simple 24 to 30 FPS math you could make about a hundred specific "DLP prints" and the other prints could use a different long shot like this to get another 100 or so more markings. Simple!

Why am I not working for the MPAA?

Regardless, the bottom line as things currently stand:
Film = good
Digital = evil