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Topic: Talking to Jack Valenti about CAP codes
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John Hawkinson
Film God
Posts: 2273
From: Cambridge, MA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 08-13-2004 01:09 PM
(I'm sorry for the late nature of this post).
On April 8th, Jack Valenti came to MIT to speak at the MIT Communications Forum, as part of his tour of college campuses to talk about piracy. The Forum is an interactive venue. Valenti talked for about half an hour and then the audience had the opportunity to ask questions for the next hour and a half.
I had the opportunity to ask Mr. Valenti about CAP codes and the MPAA's stance on them. His response was quite interesting. My takeaway was that Mr. Valenti (and thus top MPAA management) was not aware of the shift from the Kodak -style CAP codes to the newer CAP codes, and was not aware that this was a problem for audience members.
In many ways, this was quite heartening to me. It suggests that it is indeed possible to educate those who are in power, and perhaps to make progress. As Valenti said to me, "You're telling me something I didn't know about, I'm grateful for the information."
I followed up to this conversation by sending him 9 letter-sized color reproductions of various frames of CAP codes, and asked him what we can do to stop ruining theatrical presentations.
After that, it was quite some time before I heard back from him, and he is a difficult man to get ahold of. He recently returned my call and we talked briefly about the issue. Valenti told me he did think it was "something of importance," and I'm in the process of establishing a dialog with the MPAA's technical people about these issues.
Of course, now it is Friday the 13th and it is Valenti's effective last day at the MPAA.
You can find a RealAudio recording of the forum at http://web.mit.edu/smcs/commforum/mit-commforum-08apr2004-16k.ram. My conversation with Mr. Valenti starts about 46 minutes in.
Here are some quotes, with in-between stuff trimmed out for coherency:
quote: MIT Communications Forum; April 8, 2004
jhawk: I'd like to speak to the question of anti-piracy, versus quality presentation. Specifically I refer to the CAP codes, which are patterns of black brown and red dots that appear for 40 to 100 milliseconds every few minutes during a twenty-minute block of a movie. And, you know, they present a unique pattern so you can identify exactly which film print a pirated copy was made from. And in the past two years they've become far more visible. And they went from from subtly invisible to extremely prominent; any careful person who's looking at a movie can see them and easily be distracted.
There seems mounting evidence that piracy of movies doesn't really come from prints in movie theatres. It comes from all sorts of other places.
So, my question to you is, when can we go back to movies without these really ugly distracting dots that aren't really serving a useful purpose?
Valenti: And I'm going to be honest with you, maybe it's my aging old eyes; I never see those dots.
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jhawk: ...you know about the distinction I'm referring to, the new ones versus the old ones?
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Valenti: I'm not aware of that.
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Valenti: I'll go to a movie theatre every Saturday and Sunday. And I can't wait to see those dots now.
Audience laughter
Valenti: I'm going to really look for 'em!
jhawk: Well, do talk to you technical people about it, because it is a real issue.
Valenti: You're telling me something I didn't know about, I'm grateful for the information.
I imagine it will be several months before I have any useful further information to post.
--jhawk
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 08-14-2004 04:28 AM
Interesting. I recently met a French archivist at a conference who used to work in a Paris lab, and once the conversation got onto that I asked her why French labs tended not to put changeover cues on their prints. Her answer was that they stopped in the early '90s because they got a regular trickle of complaints by cinema operators that audiences were noticing the cues and finding them distracting. Given that, by that stage, only a small fraction of cinemas ran changeovers, they took the decision not to punch cues out of the internegatives they used for printing.
Shortly after that I did my own straw poll by asking friends and colleagues (ones who I was sure did not know what a cue dot was) whether they had ever noticed momentary marks appearing in the top right hand corner of the screen. A surprising number had, and wondered what they were for.
Ironically, given that the measure was supposed to improve presentation, LTC's and Éclair's 'no cue dots' policy has had exactly the opposite effect here. Becuase the prints from French labs which cross the channel are almost exclusively of arthouse titles, they tend to get shown in the few places which do still run changeovers. So the projectionists there put their own cues on, which range from chinagraph slashes to scratching away the emulsion to punching holes out of the film using a hole punch designed for putting paper in ring binders. Once such a print has done the rounds a bit, you're likely to see a blizzard of DIY changeover cues for about 30 seconds at the end of each reel.
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