Over 100 different versions of Avatar were shipped to theaters | Hacker News Reader

Over 100 different versions of Avatar were shipped to theaters

hollywoodreporter.com

41 pointstrafficlight22 comments

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?

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.

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

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

then why stop at 100?

At some point you'll be spending more to stop piracy than you're losing because of it.

well, you might assume that once you get past some number (less, i would think, than 100) you can automate the process sufficiently to make each one distinct (if we are talking about "watermark" changes and not labour-intensive things like translations).

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.

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

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.

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).

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

Marketing is making people aware of a product.

Product development is making the best product possible.

This was the latter.

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.

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

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.

Yeah.. he's the Steve Jobs of film. No doubt about it.

I always thought Steve Jobs was the Steve Jobs of film. Or at least John Lasseter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar

Sure technically speaking he would be =) I'd say that Cameron is just a 'tad' more involved in film making though.

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?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Anti-Piracy

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

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