There is a technology that inserts an inaudible watermark into audio that's claimed to be impossible to remove. Given the nature of your footage though they could easily just delete the audio.

If you do add a bug make certain it's at 100%, that makes it much harder to delogo it. Apart from that I know of no way to insert an invisible watermark into vision. If there was it'd already be in use.

Bob.

>> If you do add a bug make certain it's at 100% <<
Thanks but not sure what you mean here Bob.

Nick, if you can clearly identify your footage, and specify exactly where your original watermark was placed, why can't your lawyer instigate an action against the offender?

>> Nick, if you can clearly identify your footage, and specify exactly where your original watermark was placed, why can't your lawyer instigate an action against the offender? <<

Yes Peter, in this case the lawyer is confident we can identify the footage visually and prove that to a court. I'm just really thinking of the future and adding an invisible watermark to give extra security as can be done with stills. If it's not possible then no problem. I just though there might be some method out there.

This would be very cumbersome, but scripting and frame serving would help ... Perhaps you could export every 100th or so frame as a still image and use your invisible watermark on them. You could then reimport those frames in place of the originals in the video.

I never thought much about how to watermark video. It sounds like some of you know about something that already exists.

However, if noting exists, I can think of one thing that might work. It would be easy to write a script to do this.

For purposes of explanation, suppose you just have one track of video and one track of audio. Go to some part of the video and for the next six frames (or any number you want), slice the video into one-frame events. Then for every other event, use the levels fX to bump up (or down) the black level. If you take it from legal to below legal, you probably wouldn't see it at all, but it might be taken out by the thief (accidentally) if they applied a "broadcast levels" fX. If you bump it up, you might see it (although it would be very tough to see), but it should survive any future editing.

You then do this every thirty seconds or ten seconds, or however often you want.

Like I said, this would be very easy to script.

The idea is a little like Macrovision, except it works on the visible part of the video rather than the VBI.

Speaking of the VBI, you could probably insert watermark data there, but some video editing software (like Vegas) doesn't pass through that data.

I was looking around a few weeks ago for a way to "invisibly watermark" still images and everything I found created visible watermarks. Makes some sense since you can't see an invisible mark and if a viewer can't see the mark then a thief can represent it as their own.

I'd love to see a reference to an invisible watermark for stills.

If I was to make a guess about how to do this I'd think that you'd want a mark that shows when you layer the stolen media over the original, maybe with a difference transfer mode. It'd have to be pretty strong to show over multiple renderings. You could also fade it in and out as John suggests. This is just an idea, nothing I've tried.

Rob Mack

Google "steganography" (hidden writing) for a lot of solutions.

Will do. Just tried a search again with better results regarding stills, and saw the steganography term.

On the stills front there were two results. One was to use the digimarc filter in Photoshop. Didn't realize it was there. There was also this recipe: [link = http://ocsurfer.deviantart.com/art/Invisible-Watermark-Tutorial-7893736]

This second seems like it'd be possible to use in Vegas and maybe even scripted so that you only do it every X frames (because it'd increase your render times if you did it to every frame). The questions are, how do you view it, and how does it hold up across multiple reencodes?

Rob Mack

There is a Virtual Dub filter from MSU called StegoVideo which encrypts and embed files (like .txt) into video. I think it's for free.

Marco

if someone's paying for something, a water mark like what's shown in that link is pretty darn annoying....

EDIT: don't use to high of a res image on the invisible water mark... a blur eliminates it completely!

but for video here's an idea: are they ripping a whole DVD or are they just copying a specific video? If they're ripping a whole DVD, make a separate audio or video track that has some kind of "code" on it. IE for the video make a separate video where the brightness flickers @ a certain pattern or the audio has a certain freq hum. could be moris code for "this video belongs to..." :)


EDIT: don't use to high of a res image on the invisible water mark... a blur eliminates it completely!

Deluxe does watermarking for movies through their content protection division or something like that. (It's probably expensive.)

They have successfully used it to track down exactly which theatre in which a film was cammed, and I believe they were able to prosecute these folks. Unfortunately, I don't think it has helped to end camming.

I had a few minutes so I "watermarked" three seconds of video using the technique I "invented" and described in my last post. I encoded it to MPEG-2 and uploaded it here:

Watermarked Video

The link is good for seven days.

When I tried to use the Levels fX, I found it was too obvious. So, instead, I used Color Curves and created a custom curve that slightly clips the blacks. I cut the video at some "secret" point furing the three second clip, and cut it into five consecutive one-frame segments. I then applied the fX to frames 1, 3, and 5 in this sequence.

First, can you find where I put the watermark? Hopefully not.

However, if you put it on the Vegas timeline, and use the Waveform setting on the Videoscopes, you'll easily be able to see it. The number of frames and the location of those frames could be varied.

I think this method will hold up to subsequent editing and re-compression. With a script, it could be reduced to a one-second operation, to be performed immediately prior to encoding.

Now, whether this technique can be used to uniquely identify the video as having been created by YOU, I can't say, but it certainly can be identified as having been watermarked, and if you know the secret "code" of how many frames have been changed, you'd have a pretty strong case.

[Edit] I just played with the VirtualDub MUS StegoVideo filter. Worked really well. I even encoded from AVI to MPEG-2 and then encoded that MPEG-2 back to AVI. I was still able to recover the hidden copyright message. This is definitely a much better solution than my hack. It looks like it does exactly what everyone is asking for here.

In regards to the original problem... isn't it really easy to figure out if they copied your footage? If they copy your footage, it's going to look the same...

In regards to the original problem... isn't it really easy to figure out if they copied your footage? If they copy your footage, it's going to look the same...

I think the issue is determining who copied your footage. If you send out 100 DVDs, and then you find your footage being used by someone other than those 100 clients, you then need to determine who leaked it. True, the person in receipt of the stolen goods is guilty, even if they didn't know the stuff was stolen, but tracking down the original culprit is often the goal of the exercise.

Perhaps others have additional reasons for why a watermark is needed to help determine ownership.

I was about to suggest the MSU StegoVideo filter for Virtual Dub, but I see John Meyer has already beaten me to it. StegoVideo is the only application of which I am aware that performs this task.

http://www.compression.ru/video/stego_video/index_en.html

Actually, several others suggested it before me, earlier in this thread. All I did was to actually try it out, and make sure the watermark text stayed intact through two different codecs and two renders.

What I didn't do was to see what it takes to make sure the watermark is spread out over the entire file so that, for instance, if the thief only uses thirty seconds of a ten minute video, the watermark would still be recoverable.

We had tried a method of placing data in the User Data Field of the MPEG file.
This even passed through DVDA. However, after a file is snatched from the DVD
and re-encoded, say with QT, the info was lost.

Johnmeyer I liked the example video you posted. If it was the spots I was looking
at. (won't say outloud) it passed QT re-encoding.

Glenn makes a good point. We just had an incident where an internet tech site (one we've all probably read) published private support training material that we had created for our client. There was a copyright notice on each and every page, a password was required to access the website, and our client has plenty of people to handle the press in a timely fashion. This publication wrote product reviews of a product that wasn't public yet.

Would an invisible watermark make the slightest difference? No. How about a visible watermark or bug? Nope. How about a lawyer? Well, the cat's out of the bag by then.

So, back to your footage. If someone steals it you're going to have to go to a lawyer. I don't think the courts need to make a big TV trial out of this because if you produce the original footage it should be obvious that the shot has more head and tail than the thief stole. At that point the question is not over whose media it is but probably a question of whether you made any claim to protect it. Did they pay you for it? Was there a copyright notice anywhere in the piece? It seems to me that they can't claim a right to it and the best they've got to offer is that they received it second hand and were unaware of the copyright.

An invisible copyright notice doesn't do much. It might be helpful if you've thrown out the source media but in general a legal action just doesn't need to get that twisty-turny.

Now, if you're Matthew Barney selling a limited number of copies of the Cremaster series then you might want to embed a serial number in the image stream somewhere to assure the collector that they've got a one of a kind copy.

Would an invisible watermark make the slightest difference? No. How about a visible watermark or bug? Nope. How about a lawyer? Well, the cat's out of the bag by then.Yes, enforcement is the sticky point. How much is it worth to prosecute someone, compared to the damage done? If they had asked permission to use your footage, how much would you have charged? $100? $1,000? If they copied someone else's DVD instead of buying yours, how much did that cost you? $20? $30?

So, I think rmack's point is very valid.

However, if you ever did get into litigation, then everything you can do to show that you tried to protect your property would probably help your cause. For instance, if you leave your front door open and someone steals your TV, they certainly have committed a crime, but the story you tell to the judge or the jury will have a different impact if instead you have the door bolted with three locks, and your TV chained to the wall.

BTW, since I was intrigued by the technology used in the stego watermark, I tried cutting and editing the footage and then tried to recover the watermark after re-encoding. As long as I had more than ten seconds of uninterrupted footage, it worked. However, if I inter-cut scenes from different parts of the video, I couldn't retrieve the hidden text. You have to have at least ten seconds (or whatever length was used in the encode) of uninterrupted video, exactly as it was originally shot.

I also suspect, now that I understand how the process works, that if you added a bunch of fX, then the hidden text would be lost.

Well, before going to a lawyer you could try contacting them and asking them to cease and desist. That'd be the cheapest course.

"Thanks but not sure what you mean here Bob."

If you add a logo or station ident (aka "bug:) or whatever and it's say 50% transparent there's a filter for virtual dub that can remove it. If you make it 100% solid white you've totally obliterated what was there before and it's then very hard to impossible to remove.


My understanding of your business is you sell stock footage and you may sell it under limited rights. A typical problem is the client forgets about the limits and proceeds to use it for anything or on sells programs that contain your footage. I really don't know how you can prevent this apart from unleashing the legal hounds.

Your problem is not unique. I've only recently struck a similar problem with music. I own the rights to a library of Smartsound music and some of the Cinescore music. One client has used that music that I used in one of his productions in another production. Both of us are technically in breech of copyright, him for doing it and probably me if I don't persue the matter. All in all an unpleasant situation.

Bob.