THE EVOLUTION AND POTENTIAL OF DIGITAL FILM

An Investigation into the Evolution and Potential of Digital Film Impact on Multimedia Projects

Abstract

A digital home network is a cluster of digital audio/visual (A/V) devices including set-top boxes, TVs, VCRs, DVD players, and general-purpose computing devices such as personal computers. The network may receive copyrighted digital multimedia content from a number of sources. This content may be broadcast via satellite or terrestrial systems, transmitted by cable operators, or made available as prepackaged media (e.g., a digital tape or a digital video disc). Before releasing their content for distribution, the content owners may require protection by specifying access conditions. Once the content is delivered to the consumer, it moves across the home network until it reaches its destination where it is stored or displayed. A copy protection system is needed to prevent unauthorized access to bit streams in transmission from one A/V device to another or while it is in storage on magnetic or optical media. Recently, two fundamental groups of technologies, encryption and watermarking, have been identified for protecting copyrighted digital multimedia content. This paper is an overview of the work done for protecting content owners' investment in intellectual property.

Digital Filmmaking: An investigation into the evolution and potential of digital film impact on multimedia projects

Introduction

In the entertainment world, original multimedia content (e.g., text, audio, video and still images) is made available for consumers through a variety of channels. Modern distribution systems allow the delivery of content to millions of households every day. Although legal institutions exist for protecting intellectual property (trademarks and patents) owned by content creators, complimentary technical measures are needed to sustain financial returns and to ensure incentives for new creations.

In order to see the increasing importance of protecting copyrighted content, one should understand an essential difference between old and new technologies for distribution and storage. Prior to the development of digital technologies, content was created, distributed, stored and displayed by analog means. The popular video cassette recorders (VCRs) of the 1980s introduced a revolutionary way of viewing A/V content, but ironically allowed unauthorized copying, risking the investments made in intellectual property. An inherent characteristics of analog recording, however, prevented piracy efforts to reach alarming proportions. If a taped content is copied on a VCR, the visual quality of the new, i.e., the first-generation, copy is reduced. Further generational copies result in noticeably less quality, decreasing the commercial value of the content. Today, reasonably efficient analog copy protection methods exist, and have recently been made mandatory, in consumer electronics devices to further discourage illegal analog copying. An example of such a system was developed by Macrovision2 whereby features of the analog composite video signal are modified to prevent copying.

With the advent of digital technologies, new tools have emerged for making perfect copies of the original content. A quick review of digital representation of data will reveal why generational copies do not lose their quality. A text, an image or a video is represented as a stream of bits (0s and ...