No idea what I'm talking about? See my rant below.
Comments? Movie titles to add? Mail me.
Recent release (November 2003 onward):
CAP codes, says Means, were small red dots put on certain frames during a movie. The pattern was unique to each print, so piracy could be traced back to the theater that had that print of the movie. Okay.
Roger Ebert (or more precisely, one of his correspondents) says that the studios are now using much larger, more intrusive versions of this scheme. They'll be visible when videotaped, or on compressed copies that make their way to filesharers online.
They're also exceedingly annoying! If I pay good money to watch a blockbuster in the theater, I expect to be able to watch the blockbuster, not some annoying pattern that intrudes every few minutes. And they do intrude. These marks are placed right in the "sweet spot" of the viewing area--in my experience, they're in the center of the horizontal field and in the upper half of the screen. If you're watching the action, you can't help but see them.
(I understand why they are placed where they are. If they were on the edges, a pirate could just crop them out of the video. But I can't imagine they'll do much good for long. I'm a bit naive about video editing, but I bet it won't be long before software exists to identify and remove the frames that have these markers on them.)
My point is not to rant, however. My point is information. I want to know what movies have these annoying patterns in them. They greatly diminished my enjoyment of Trilogy Tuesday, a showing of all three Lord of the Rings movies I was lucky enough to get tickets for.
Truth be told, I'd have attended even if I'd known these dots were going to be annoying me all day. But for any lesser movie, they'd drive me to wait for it to come out on video.
So tell me --on what films have you seen these dots? I'm going to keep a list, and I'm going to avoid seeing these movies in theaters. You do what you like.