The Reasons for Not Shipping Frames
There are two main areas of concern for us regarding our policy: IP protection and security; and quality control.
IP protection and security:
Dome masters are the most basic, essential pieces of a show producer’s intellectual property. They’re the “camera negatives”, the legal originals. In those olden days, copies made from negatives would be “down a generation” in quality. In these digital times, copies are identical. Once producers let their dome masters “out into the wild”, they’re gone, out of their control. Anyone can do anything they want with them, claim them as their own, modify them, make their own first-generation quality movies from them (with copyright laws conveniently ignored).
If producers want to maintain any semblance of ownership or control over their work, it’s simply irresponsible to distribute dome masters.
Not only does Loch Ness Productions have this policy for the shows we’ve created ourselves, but most other producers have the same policy for their shows we distribute. We’re not the only ones.
Hollywood does not send their camera negatives to theaters for projectionists to assemble. In modern cinema, there are hardware solutions built into digital projectors that prevent unauthorized display of movies. Fulldome systems today don’t have that.
It’s not all about you.
Theater operators say to us, “What, don’t you trust me?” Since you are reading this, of course we know you would never be “part of the problem”. If you had a show’s dome masters, you would never allow unauthorized copies to be made. Indeed, the license agreement you sign states you will ensure that very thing won’t happen.
But, it’s not necessarily you we need to be concerned about. It’s your unsupervised staff, part-timers, volunteers, who make off with hard drives. It’s your successor in the job who will have no idea what you signed in the license; they may not even know a license exists, let alone what the terms are they’re obligated to follow.
We also have to think globally. We do have to keep in mind that other countries and societies hold different cultural attitudes with respect to the intellectual property and copyright laws we operate under here in the United States. Releasing dome masters to sites in some specific countries is pretty much a guarantee that they’ll be copied and distributed. As a correspondent in one of those countries tried to assure us: “We know that our country is famous for its bad people who do not follow the legal ways; we want you to know we are not the bad people.”
Quality control:
“No distribution of dome masters” continues as our policy, although there have been instances when we’ve violated it on our own initiative. However, when we’ve done so, what we’ve usually found is that we probably shouldn’t have.
Quite simply, it’s been our experience that the end-users have simply been unable to assemble frames and soundtrack correctly, or at least to our satisfaction, and certainly to the detriment of the audience presentation.
What kind of problems? The narration channel was offset. The wrong language was muxed. There were inexplicable dropouts. There were what sounded like old analog dbx compression artifacts. The audio was out of sync with the visuals (apparently the old 29.97 vs. 30 fps conundrum still lives). Colors were garish. Contrast and saturation were out of whack. Starfields that looked fine on our dome were blurry.
And you know, sometimes the end-user is the problem. At one festival, we saw on the dome obnoxious gradient banding in our skies and visuals; ugly swatches that popped as fades and dissolves occurred. It turns out the organizers had over-cranked the MPEG compression when making their movies — in order to squeeze more content onto their hard drives, they said to us. In other words, they deliberately chose to make our content look ratty, so they could screen even more content that looked ratty too.
No matter what the reason, something was wrong 100% of the time. It’s that lack of quality control for our work that drives our policy.
All these issues could have been avoided had we been able to ship movies we had made and QC’ed ourselves. Ah, if only we could get movies to multi-channel theaters where they simply “hit play”, like we can for the single-channel theaters.
That brings us to some of the reasons why we can’t.
Page 1 – Masters of the Dome Masters
Page 2 – But…
Page 3 – The Reasons for Not Shipping Frames
Page 4 – It’s the hardware
Page 5 – A Sense of Entitlement
Page 6 – Don’t panic!
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