I’ve seen a few throughout my life at friend’s houses as a kid during the age of Limewire. Typically they were pretty good quality even though you’d see the odd person get up from their seat or hardcoded subtitles. Lately I’ve been curious about the history behind them and how they came to be.
Have there been well known release groups similar to the game cracking scene?
Have they always been mostly from one region?
Are they released strategically for one reason or another?
Have there been hidden methods to bust groups after a release such as steganography?
I’d be down to hear any facts about it you find interesting, stories, and if you have any articles or videos about the subject.
Well you see, when a pirate and a camcorder love each other very much, they go to a movie theater…
̶B̶o̶w̶ ̶c̶h̶i̶c̶k̶a̶ ̶w̶o̶w̶ ̶w̶o̶w̶ Bow chicka record now.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone in this thread mention Telecines at all. It’s a machine that captures the video and audio from the film print directly to digital. A lot of good Cam rips were filmed from the projection booth, and could conceivably be done by a projectionist surreptitiously. Telecines though, required a large piece of equipment and time with a print outside of hours. Likely you’d need to be a manager or owner to get away with it, or have their blessing.
I remember the excitement of finding a Telecine for a movie in theatres rather than a Cam. It felt like striking gold. I bet the people releasing those in scene groups would be treated like gods back then.
Also, Telesyncs, which would be labelled TS, is when you have that high quality cam recording and sync it to a direct recording of the audio. The audio often came from the FM microbroadcast that are designed for hearing-aid users.
Don’t even get me started on how audio is included on a 35mm film print. Dolby Digital is an image of a digital signal (basically a QR code) that is between the cog-wheel holes on one side. Good Telecine machines are able to record the full surround track from this. That used to be the absolute best you could get while something was still in theatres. Often better than award copies, they had no stupid watermarks.
This actually sounds like a great topic for a documentary
I’d watch a two hour YouTube video on that
I’d put it in “Watch Later” and never actually end up watching it.
There’s so much I should finally watch.
Significant part of camrips now is sponsored by non-licensed gambling operators who literally pay tens of thousands dollars to bootleggers who can film latest releases and bring recording to them on exclusive basis. There’s even some habitual bootleggers who film camrips for their living. So when you watch camrip of the latest hollywood title which is spammed with gambling ad watermarks then most likely this casino/betting operator has paid someone to record the screening.
In Italy between the movies were screening in the cinemas and dvd releases there was a wait time of 3 months. Exactly three months. The most common way of piracy was streaming websites (like cineblog nowadays) pestered with ads. Before the age of WEBDL most people who couldn’t pay for the cinemas and everybody who wanted to have lots to talk about pop arts and trends was watching cam rips. The quality of cam rips were ever increasing every year with specialized forums discussing hardware to do it. I remember you could find everything from low quality phone cams (we are talking 2006 phone cameras) rips to tv quality cameras pointed to the screen from inside the cinemas with tripods.
Project X was such a hyped up movie in Italy that I personally witnessed a bunch of people recording it in the cinemas and everybody at school was sharing the phones on which the movie was recorded during lessons.
To be honest camrips started to disappear during and after covid, but even now for very famous movies like Barbie and Hoppeneimer of Marvel stuff people are still downloading those.
For reference:
- avg ticket price in italy: 6.25 euro in 2022, 5.75 euro in 2016. If you count inflation, price basically decreased over the years
- most cinemas do many cheap ticket nights like for students or young people aimed at 2-5 euro range for tickets once a week or once a month
- more realistically, most cinemas have tickets for 8 or 9 euros, 10 to 12 euros in big cities
- around 60% of people earn less than 1300 euro net per month. That is an hourly pay of ~5 euros. You can understand how much a movie night for a family with popcorns and various extra may cost for a family.
I also find these fascinating, mainly because I have absolutely no idea why anyone watches them. They look and sound awful and if you maintain just a modicum of patience you can have a significantly better experience a few months later.
The image quality is better than what it was, and the sound can be okay if captured directly instead of the theater room’s audio (some theaters offer audio jack for accessibility purposes).
I watched one by accident a few weeks ago. It was the audio that threw me off. You could hear people chatting. But the video looked not half bad - I figured it had just been transcode poorly or something.
I remeber downloading a cam version of Hunger games without realising at the time and the sound was fine, but the video was so shaky it felt I was hunger gaming myself
What you want is a Cam with Telesync, at least you don’t get the background noise.
There is a social aspect to it. For corporate workers, people are almost ostracized and excluded for not ‘being up with the latest big thing’. It’s toxic, and I hope starting to change, but I imagine these would be the primary audience go ogling “barbie movie stream free” and clicking the first ad-ridden site they find.
Which corporate workers can’t afford to see a movie in the cinema?
The more you can afford with money, the less you can afford with time.
In regards to your question about hidden methods to catch people, back before digital each film print sent to a theater had a unique “CAP Code” printed directly onto the 35mm film. This was a series of dots in a unique pattern that would show up several times on screen. So when a cam rip would show up somewhere this could be used to narrow down which theater it was recorded at and identify trends after several films.
I don’t know if this was ever successfully used to prosecute anyone though.
I was a projectionist years ago and it would have been very easy to cam rip films on “print build nights.” Was always a Wednesday, we’d all come in late and built the reels into full prints for our big horizontal platter projectors. We’d all then separate off and watch the movies after the theater closed to note any defects or other issues before those movies launched that week.
If a film was DTS audio (the film had a time code and that would sync with CD audio tracks), you could have even run a sound recorder to the headphone jack on the DTS tower that handles the audio for those prints.
In the last 10 years, I stopped in this gas station off a busy road in my home town. They have bootleg dvds just on the counter.
I can’t believe that place didn’t get shutdown. There is a police station just a few blocks away.
Cops don’t care about those. That’s for lawyers to deal with.
That’s fair.
Have you seen the Seinfeld episode?
