theMediaman.com

I’ve got 3 hours of footage to compress for DVD, and I’m on my lunch break. It should be safe enough to write.

My dexterity and general typing skills have really suffered since I’ve cut back on my blogging. Without regular comprehensive typing, even the short emails or IMs I send out result with almost as many hits of the [Backspace] key as there are words in the message. Mavis Beacon! Save me!

Just coming off of four weeks without free time in the evenings as a result of a particularly challenging video editing and DVD authoring project, I’m still in the same mode as I do research into DVD watermarking. There are some clever techniques involved. Some are obvious, like going to grayscale video with “For Your Consideration” superimposed. Some techniques involve the use of inaudible frequencies to give the copy a unique ID. Pretty fascinating stuff.

There’s only two watermarked videos I’ve ever seen. One was a video store copy of Speed 2 on VHS, and another was a copy of The Two Towers, clearly watermarked for Academy Award consideration. I’ve since bought the Two Towers, and I remember deciding while it was in theatres that I would wait for Speed 2 to be broadcast on network TV. I suppose no one was hurt by those two run-ins with watermarked video, but that could just be justification on my part to make me feel better. I’ll apologize to Sandra Bullock if I ever meet her.

Most other “not quite legal” movies I ever watch are DVDs I pick up at First Markham Place. I don’t buy the illegal bootlegs, but I do have a soft spot in my heart for movies I simply can’t get in Canada. They finally released the other films in the Japanese “Ring” series, but I’m the only person I know with a full-quality DVD of the Korean adaptation, “Ring Virus”. Similarly, there’s no legal distribution of Battle Royale in Canada, so I was happy to get my hands on that masterpiece.

However, I could have gone to my grave never having seen Battle Royale II.

Last night I watched “Phone“, a Korean horror that follows a frequently reused template set forth by “Ring”. Every rehash I’ve watched always brings something new to the mix. By ‘new’, I don’t mean the fact that it’s a cell phone and not a videotape. That’s covered in the logline. But in this movie there was a young actress (about 8-10 years old?) who put together the most terrifying little child performance I’ve seen in years. She just looks EVIL!

The rest of the movie is the same Asian horror we’ve seen done over and over and over since “Ring” in 1998. (See my comment on “The Host”)

I’m not yet sure where this watermarking research will take me. It’s clever stuff, and reminds me of cryptography. Now I’m just cleaning up my rudimentary knowledge of NTSC signal so I can see if there’s anything invisible to the naked eye that would also carry an ID signal. Maybe I can find my LotR:TTT SVCD and reverse engineer it to find the signal.

Definitely fun stuff!