In my mind, pirate dvds are made by pirates. Real ones. Like the one in this photo...

Last time on “Pirate dvds and you: a love hate relationship”, we took a look at the first of 3 different types of pirate movie dvds, The Cinema Copy. And what a copy it was. An experience best saved for when you’re least interested in the movie itself, cinema copies are the stalwart of every self respecting dvd shop out there with the standards of a $5 street escort and the looks to go with it. And I hated it.

Moving on, the next category in the pirate dvd quality section is:

The Clear Cinema Copy

Wait – what? A clear cinema copy? Didn’t we just examine the crucial downfalls of such an abomination in the previous post? How is a clear, let alone steady cinema copy even possible? Is there even anyone else in the cinema when it was tape – err screened?

/shrug

If we have the technology, it can be done. Steady hands and all.

Movie: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Image Quality: Well now, we’re starting to get into the good stuff. The Clear Cinema Copy has a slightly wider spectrum of image quality, depending on how willing you are to forgive slight…discrepancies. On the one end of the quality meter, you’ve got the infamous “awesomely steady” hand, which, at beginning of the movie, starts out quite terribly, adjusting the camera to get the whole movie into view. Then, after the film is framed as best as can be, by some small chance of a miracle, the camera stays. Still. You almost forget you’re watching a pirate copy, it’s that good.

On the other hand, some pirates take that extra step and get access to a better vantage point then in the audience moshpit. A telesync works “…with a professional camera on a tripod in the projection booth and a direct connection to the sound source…” , so you get all the juicy, lovely movie goodness in one shot, the way it was meant to be viewed, minus the $5.50 (or however much you would have paid to see it in the cinemas, prices may vary from different countries…). Thus, you end up with an image quality that is close to its original, clear version:

The obvious pitfall to this method of film extraction however, is that the colours will sometimes come across as a little odd, and some scenes tend to slide towards washed out hues then the proper colour vibes it was meant to be seen in. This can be attributed to the quality of the camera, or the light leaks from the projector which the camera would be positioned next to.

If you’re finicky about picture quality, then give these versions a miss, as the (if you have the ‘awesome steady hand version’) camera adjustment issue at the beginning of the movie will most likely throw you off, as well as the (if you have the ‘i’ma just put my camera next to your projector’) washed out colours which do tend to happen almost throughout the movie.

Score: 3.5/5 (make it a 4 if you’re happy with what you’ve got)

It’s good. Not crystal blue skies great, not totally badly doctor horribly bad, just good.

Sound Quality: The copy that I had was terribly terrible. Which was ironic since the visuals erred on the side of a dvd rip. But, as we all know, a movie is two sides to a coin; visuals, and sound. And while the CC variety may be of somewhat improved quality visuals-wise, sound is almost always a hit & miss. In my case, I was the unfortunate receiver of a copy that had the sound placed in as an after thought, or after the visuals were done, or both. First it was low, so I had to crank up the volume to the ‘I hope there isn’t a sudden big explosion’ level. Secondly, the music was louder then the dialogue. Go figure =_= Right now I’m torn between a muffly, noisy, hollow and crowd murmur sounding recording of the Cinema Copy, and the messed up levels of the Clear Cinema Copy. Of course, there are always instances where the Clear Cinema Copy is of relatively good sound quality (God bless whoever was in charge of outputing that particular dvd), but again, they are often far and few between.

Score: 3/5

Overall: 3/5

Its less of a gamble then a Cinema Copy, but with the downside of slightly awful to goddamn awful sound quality to deal with. Worthy only if you’re (a) ok with straining your ears and potentially missing out on important plot developments via dialogue and (b) too impatient to wait for a proper dvd ripped quality version to come out, and you’ve judged it just about right so that the movie you’re after is a few months old from its release date, but is still quite awhile away from its original dvd retail release day, hence allowing the pirate distributors the chance to release a CCC.

Next: The “Original” Copy! (Inverted commas inserted to signify the ‘air quote’ use)

The modern pirate arr

Welcome to the land of all that isn’t original or bought from the bargin bin! Piracy is a way of life here in paradise, it permeates every aspect of our entertainment needs, from video games to the standard of slow evenings at home – dvds. Countless entrepreneurs hawk pirate dvds anywhere and everywhere, from the quickest corner set up in town, to the most seemingly legit of businesses i.e. Comsol. Actually, I take that back. Comsol as a company is legit. As for their now defunct (well, publicly anyways) dvd section, I have my doubts. While Comsol wasn’t the only pirate dvd seller in Fiji, they were the most prolific, and at times, worthy of rockstar status, thanks in part to their features on the national news due to bootlegging local content, which always gets the media and police attention.

Comsol as a pirate dvd shop (they actually sell heaps of other stuff as well such as computers and homeware) had an unusual naming convention when it comes to the quality of their dvds. This naming policy is prevalent amongst other dvd sellers, and seems to be almost standard fare. Basically, pirate dvds are classed into 3 categories: Original, Cinema Copy (or its short form as CC) and Clear Cinema Copy (CCC). Quality varies widely between these 3 sections, and in this post, to celebrate the crapiness that we’ve all had to put up with for the past few hundred eons, Failed Paradise is going to explore the wonderful world of oft misleadingly titled pirate dvds, examining various versions and seeing how much of a difference cinema copies actually are to the real deal.

Each category is going to be tested and given a score out of five on several criterias including: picture clarity, sound quality, and lastly how close to an actual dvd original it is. While it would be nice to compare the pirate movie to its original original counterpart, obtaining an original original for a movie thats say still in the cinema is next to impossible, so we’ll just go by general quality. Arrrightey let’s get down to fighting.

Cinema Copy

Denoted by the two letters CC, cinema copied dvds are the bane of pirate quality versions. As its name suggests, the copy of the movie was made guerilla style with a hand held camera brought into a cinema and used to film the screened film. This is the first and oldest form of piracy, and doesn’t seem to be in decline, although these days movie houses are upping the ante with regular patrols, night vision goggles, bag checks and high security. Cinema copies are almost always of movies that are just released, having had its premier filmed/stolen somewhere else and distributed before you can say “Holy Handheldcam batman!”

Movie: The Haunting in Connecticut

Image Quality: Fact. You can tell straight away if what you’re watching is a cinema copy, and that’s right at the beginning when the titles show. First off, the camera swings wildly as it attempts to get a good frame of the projector. Also, almost always, the text gets cropped as shown in this example:

Cropped movie is cropped

The camcorder, by virtue of piracy law, must always move up and down to try and get a good picture and fail. Badly. Like, on a boat in the middle of the Perfect Storm badly, all the while struggling to focus on the picture. Speaking of  focus, pirate cameras are your average hand held camcorders, with auto-focus turned on. And because auto-focus can only work if there’s a picture, at times when everything goes dark then comes back, it takes a short while to focus. And therein lies the most annoying factor. That and unstable cameras. And people walking across the view. And crowd noise.

Yeah.

But the camera’s failure to focus is the most annoying.

Here’s an example in the movie where the main character is spazzing out on the bed with the mother trying to hold him down/comfort him. The light flickers on and off, and each time it comes on, there’s a spooky guy approaching the camera. Except that you can’t really make out said spooky character when lame handicam takes a bit to focus…and then the lights go out again:

Before the lights go out

After the lights come back on

This happens, I kid you not, about six times. Usually (I use the term ‘usually’ with much familiarity, since I was basically brought up on pirate movies >.>) the handicam loses focus now and then, but the scene wasn’t that all too important i.e. during dialouge scenes etc. However, in this movie, the whole moment was built on freaky undead guy approaching the main character/you only when the lights would come back on. Having the auto-focus spazz out in this crucial part basically spoilt the whole ‘scare’ factor for me.

Score: 2/5

If the image quality were any worse, it would strain your eyes to the point of near blindness. Not to mention the insane amount of trying to figure out what’s on the screen when it blurs out.

Sound Quality: Take a handicam with a built in mike. Stick it in a cinema. Play the movie, and listen to how the camera struggles to take in the audio richness that you inadvariadly miss out on. The dialogue at times (and usually at crucial moments) struggles to keep up if there are sound effects galore. Or loud music. Or sound effects and loud music. Also, if the crowd is very verbal i.e. many lols, many cheers, you’d better hope you paid attention in lip reading class.

Score: 2/5

If this movie was shot in a bus that was driving through the Andes mountains during an earthquake with volcanoes sprouting in the distance and dinosaurs beating on the roof of the bus, I’d have given it a 1. For effort.

Overall: 1/5

Cinema copies are good for two things only: if you want to watch movies that have just opened in the cinema but are too cheap to pay for the real thing, and for torturing prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Or in hell. Bottom line: Watch CC’s at your own peril.

Oh and on another note, don’t bother asking the seller if a cinema copy is good. It’s not like they’ll tell the truth and risk failing the monthly sales quota.

Next: The Clear Cinema Copy!

Arrr

When the zompocalypse arrives, staying alive requires supplies, a shotgun and this guy, L.Cass. A PhD at zombiecology (the study of over 9000 ways to kill a zombie), L.Cass is no stranger to all things alternative, strange and just plain wierd. His blog (Zombies in Zen) is a collection of said strange things, drawings, musings, and whatnot. Today, he guest blogs with us, and has something to get off his chest. (Insert zombie moan).

So I read today that one of Fiji’s biggest pirate movie chains is asking the authorities to give them more time to clean out their stock of pirated DVDs, and replace them with new ones.

Their argument is that original DVDs cost too much, and that they need to secure funds to acquire original DVDs to replace their ‘copies.’

I have but one question…

“Whose fault?”

Starting a home video business with a tag line that is “A commitment to quality” and then filling out their 14 branches across Fiji with Pirate DVDs could only have ended one way…

…Badly

What did they expect to happen?

Cause no matter how you may try to defend it, pirating is basically… at the very heart of it… a very naughty thing to do.

It’s cheating.

And like cheating, it’s so easy to do. That is why video pirates came in and literally took over the home video market…

We can’t really blame them though. They saw an opportunity to make money and like any good businessmen, they cashed in on our tolerance for cheating.

In fact, they cashed in on our tolerance for a lot of things.

Do you remember how many times you’ve taken a pirate DVD home and found it to be a cinema copy? What do you do with it? You will either take it back the next time you visit the pirates and ask for a replacement, or you would say to your self “meh… it’s just a dollar” and then toss the DVD into some deep, dark drawer and pretend it never happened.

It is after all only a pirate copy… you’d have to be idiotic to complain to someone about the pirate DVD you bought from them.

“It’s just a dollar.”

Would you throw away a dollar?

We even went as far as acquiring a fancy new set of skills when it came to purchasing said pirate DVDs.

We’d walk into the store and see a movie listed on the wall, and if the movie came out last week… it would have to be a cinema copy.

“Wait… this movie was out a month ago. That should be sufficient time for them to acquire an ‘original copy’.”

Look at all the terms we had to learn.

Now there is an entire generation of youths out there who have never rented a legit movie in their life. The idea of renting is so foreign to them, it’s like we’re talking crazy.

“You want me to bring this movie back? WTF… I just gave you five bucks!”

Pirate DVDs took off… They spread so far and so wide that you couldn’t turn a corner in your neighborhood without walking into a pirate store.

So far the people who seem to be openly suffering from pirates, are the legit retailers. Sure you can argue we are depriving our selves of quality… but if we’re fine with it… why not leave us to it?

I buy originals for DVDs I like.

But I guess it involves the ethics of it…

But we saw what was happening. If anything, this should have been stamped out a long time ago. It’s all very unfair on us… It’s like a bunch of cops watching some guy sell crack to kids and not doing anything about it. Now that we’re all addicted, the authorities are like: ‘Stop buying that crack… here rent this weed’

Wait… I’m loosing the point…

It never really bothered me at a moral level until I watched a good friend of mine close off his legitimate video store.

He had a video store that operated out of Samabula, and it had the maddest collection of movies from the classics to the recent hits. I’d be over there every Friday to grab movies that the pirates wouldn’t copy. That’s one of the many down sides to these pirate outlets; they only stock the recent movies that are popular at the time. Their back catalogue is all but non- existent. But even my friends collection of classic movies didn’t save his shop from going under.

Like other legitimate dealers, these guys spent heaps of money investing in originals, which wasn’t worth it when they couldn’t recover the cost…

Because sadly it’s just so much easier to forego renting a movie, and to simply buy it… watch it… and then make a huge pile of cheap DVDs behind our DVD player.

But is there hope for us?

Can we switch back to renting? Can we pump out the pirate venom from our movie hungry brains?

Well… to put it bluntly: We’d better.

I’m sure the change won’t be too harsh if the legitimate suppliers make it worth our while. A decent costing of DVD rentals would be a start. I like the good old days when I’d rent a movie for a dollar if it’s an old flick or two dollars if it’s brand new. I could live with that.

Paying five bucks for a three night rental would be something I’d have to get used to. But I only feel this way because currently I have cheaper alternatives… Once the pirates are out of the picture, I’m sure we’ll have lines of people bitching and moaning on their way to the legitimate video store.

No more going home with 50 different movies you don’t know shit about. Now people we have to get back to carefully selecting their evening viewing. No more drawers full of those damn plastic DVD covers. No more ‘four for one dollar’ deals.

Look out for ‘over due fines’ and penalties for scratched disks.

It will be a painful process, but like all bad habits; we’ll soon overcome it.

I hope.