Macrovision 3 - something is hidden at the screens edge.

The limits of the TV frame become of interest to Rachael, the protagonist in The Ring (2002). While watching ex-boyfriend Noah physically intervene with a VCRs mechanism she begins to suspect there is more to see beyond the screens edge than meets the eye. In a later attempt, upping the assault on the tapes reluctance to give up it's secrets, Rachael uses a more advanced machine to pan across and beyond what is visible to the very edge of the recording.

Both attempts result in a type of overload and failure of the playback media, employing a common cinematic visual trope suggesting the very limits the device or medium have been reached. The build up to the climax of the first attempt, a sort of generic 'she cannae take any more captain' moment is visually represented by the, technically erroneous, manipulation of the tape's transit across the drum head attempted by Noah (which could surely work only in an imagined AV studio. Physically manipulating a video drum head is very unlikely to reveal any surplus image - just a loss of picture) and crescendoed by with the receipt of an electric shock. In the second instance at the higher spec facility, an analogue VU meter, itself a somewhat retro but oft used device, displays overload to the point of failure. 

These markers define the crossing into another space, both for our protagonists journey along a dangerous and uncharted road and more specifically into an area less visited – the fringes and back rooms of the videocassette and VCR technology.

What Rachael finds there is a clue, a pointer towards locating the origin of the tape. Did Samara want to leave a trail that might lead a certain kind of viewer to her location? Had she merely figured out how to squeeze an ultra-widescreen image onto regular tape? We never find out. Instead the discovery adds to the already considerable enigma of the tape, displays Rachael's resourcefulness as an investigator and moves the story on to the next beat. 

 

Caetlin Benson-Allott describes this space discovered beyond the frame in Lacanian terms via Zisek to suggest a sense of paranoia. This revealed position within an image is where the viewer herself is being viewed from by the Other. 'you can never see me from the point from which I gaze at you' ¹

This might might be a fair description the Macrovision experience, the sensation of realising your VCR knows what you have been up to. Punishing you immediately with a weird, spoilt copy and suggesting that you may be in big trouble for breaking the rules. For just as the gaze hides at the side of the screen, so does Macrovision. The Macrovision signal is hidden out of view at the very top of the screen in roughly 45 unused lines. As stated in the 1985 Patent 'Since most television sets are overscanned by 5% to 10%, these pulses would still be invisible.' ² Though normally out of view the signal can be seen as a row of bright undulating bars within black when the image is pulled down on a television or a monitor with manual Vertical Hold adjustment.

Lost Highway's mystery Man, no stranger to dupes, evokes the technological uncanny by occupying two spaces at once. Here he shares the vertically adjusted screen with a Macrovision signal. Lost Highway (1997)

It can also be seen when, during an attempted recording of a protected tape, the image folds, flags and flickers downwards, momentarily revealing the signals presence. Like Samara's recording, the Macrovision signal was not assigned to tape with conventional means. It would be inserted during commercial duplication by sealed electronic units leased from the anti-copy service provider.

Portions of Samaras images and Macrovision exist in areas of a videocassette recording usually hidden from view. (Macrovision can be quite easily located and even analysed on an Oscilloscope, though it appears reluctant to give up all it's secrets³ and most internet based analysis involve some degree of interpretation and assumption. Samara used 'projected thermography' to place her montage on the tape – how and where she located or embedded her curse is never established)

André Bazin stated 'there are no wings to the screen'⁴ and yet it seems within a videorecording there are. Bazin also attributed the painted canvas with centripetal force drawing the world inwards in direct contrast to the cinematic screen which asserted a centrifugal force, casting the 'cinematographic image into infinity'⁵ Perhaps he didn't watch much television because CRT technology always biased what needed to be seen inwards creating a safe area where inconsistencies in CRT performance would not result in a loss of information or image in the non visible overscan regions. In the transference of cinema to homevideo this was exacerbated by the pan and scan telecine process. This biasing inwards suggests but does not reveal an other, a zone beyond what is visible.

'VHS always contained (made visual reference to) more than could meet the eye.' ⁶

 
The sense that something is present, perhaps watching us from a position just out of sight, seems a much valued trope within horror movies, anti-copy systems and horror movies that appear to share the objectives of such systems.

(1) Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of California Press p119

(2)  Method and apparatus for processing a video signal so as to prohibit the making of acceptable video tape recordings thereof  Apr 17, 1985 - https://patents.justia.com/patent/4631603

(3)  The technical specifications of Macrovision anti-copy system were naturally confidential. Online analysis of the signal, such as in the link provided, get very close to a full understanding but there are usually certain artifacts or functions that seem to evade the inquirer.    https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/170667-What-Macrovision-looks-lik

 (4)What is Cinema, Theatre and Cinema part 2, 1967, André Bazin, p105. 

(5) ibid. Painting and Cinema, p166.

(6)Ibid. Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, Caetlin Benson-Allott, p120

 

Macrovision 2 - the strangest sensation of being watched...

Like the tape in The Ring, Macrovision knows whether you are watching or copying a videocassette.

If the horror genre, it's familiar tropes and their ability to evoke anxiety, can convey an anti-piracy message from within the medium perceived to be at risk of illicit duplication – as in the FACT Public information short and, more pertinently, as per Retrotechnophobia, in The Ring (2002) -  couldn't the medium contain a anti-piracy technology that included and demonstrated some of the same tropes? How uncanny and capable of evoking anxiety can video technology be – when things start to go wrong?

In The Ring, the protagonist, Rachel figures out the cursed tape offers different outcomes for those who copy it from those it merely watch it – effectively, it knows which you are doing - and so did a system called Macrovision.

Macrovision was an anti-copy technology developed in the 1980s during the home video boom. A rented or purchased pre-recorded tape with Macrovision installed could be watched on a television or monitor without issue but any attempts to copy the recording on a second VCR would be 'rendered unacceptable' ¹

As a device installed by video distributors, Macrovision naturally wants you to watch the tape but doesn't want you to copy it. Macrovision expects that the viewer will ignore the FBI or similar warning at the start of the tape because no matter how threatening, it was believed to have no further agency or knowledge of whether it's warning was being observed within the privacy of the video users home.

Macrovision enters said home concealed within the tapes interstitial spaces where it sits in wait until activated by a deviance from guidelines. It may be watched a dozen times without incident or error but any attempt to copy it will reveal the presence of the signal.

VCRs contain Automatic Gain Control circuits (AGC) that monitor an incoming external video signal and adjust aspects of it to a suitable, stable level for recording. Macrovision contains pseudo pulses ² that sweep across a range of amplitudes that confuse the VCRs AGC forcing it to attempt correction and to struggle to maintain a commensurate recording level. This results in distorted images, undulating brightness and colour, flickering, and image tearing.³

In effect, the Macrovision signal tricks the VCR's AGC into reacting as if the incoming video was wildly unstable thus causing a circuit originally intended to maintain a stable recording, into creating an chaotic, unstable one. A television or monitor has no such circuitry and the Macrovision signal is ignored, the protected recording is displayed without distortion.

As stand alone, non interactive playback media, VHS tapes were never considered to be aware of what we were doing with them. The unease generated by discovering a mysterious agent within a inanimate object may evoke the shades of the eerie as described by Mark Fisher. Something is present that should not be there.⁴

This is the first stage of a tape copiers encounter with a tape containing Macrovision.

Unlike contemporary platform based technologies, Home video (read for our purposes VHS) quickly peaked in it's ability to diversify, emerge, and 'wow' the user with new innovations located within the pre-existing medium.

VideoPlus, 4 heads, 6 heads, stereo sound, for many these developments may have appeared more gimmicks and the stuff of salesman's patter than any generational evolution or development. There were some improvements and additions but there was certainly no Moore's law for VHS.

The tapes played and recorded more or less the same. For twenty years the capabilities of the format barely changed and the greatest development would appear to have been the race to lower the price per unit – perhaps further degrading ownership status, removing the glamour of the luxury item and upon achieving market saturation and ubiquity, consigning it to the ranks most mundane of household consumer items.

Home Video's potential to amaze wore off quickly as it was soon taken for granted, perceived to be an inferior conduit to other media, cinema, television, etc. Video's ability to inspire or drive utopian strategies and rhetoric, just as the internet would in the 90s, peaked early in video utopianist spaces such as Radical Software ⁵ and by the time consumers were watching sell-through copies of Videodrome or The Ring, the medium's chances of asserting real change had often appear to have become all but forgotten.

Perhaps for this reason, suddenly discovering that a tape knows what you are doing with it must have provoked a frisson of anxiety. Having mysteriously transgressed from inanimate container to intelligent observer how would the copier have known where the tapes knew found agency would end? Not only does Macrovision, like Caetlin Benson Allott's description of the character Noah's frustration with the tape's timecode, 'reduce the viewer's agency within the video apparatus' ⁶ it, on it's production of an abnormal copy, informs us, we are moving towards the previously unknown, that 'something has not worked out' ⁷

As a medium on which to view movies, videotape may have lacked in resolution but it performed very well in terms of privacy and isolation within systems of distribution. The material had to be acquired - rented, purchased or traded but once obtained it could be viewed, usually in the comfort of the home with anonymity pretty much guaranteed. Before even considering ISP logs or malicious internet trackers, we could contrast the fact that all our Youtube and Netflix user interfaces regularly remind us that they know exactly what we watched and when. With this in mind, one could argue that never before or since has viewing audio visual material, in certain regards, been as discreet as it was with VHS. ⁸

Although a tape copier might not immediately know it, Macrovision's capabilities were limited, and stopped far short of, for example, reporting back to Warner Home Video that Blade Runner was being duped, including such information as where and by whom (we'd have to wait for the digital revolution for that)

But what it could do, as well as achieving it's primary objective of ensuring that any illicit copy of a Macrovision protected tape was rendered unacceptable by generating unacceptable pictures, was to elicit, just as Samara's tape did initially for Rachael, confusion and unease and demand the question – where the hell is this coming from and how can it know what I am doing?

(1) Method and apparatus for processing a video signal so as to prohibit the making of acceptable video tape recordings thereof
Apr 17, 1985 - https://patents.justia.com/patent/4631603
(2) ibid.
(3) a video error that sees the top of image appear to distort and fold downwards
(4) Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (Repeater, 2017)
(5) Radical Software was a magazine concerned with the work and aspirations of videos first experimenters, artists and activists. https://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/index.html

(6) Retrotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring, published in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 2013, Caetlin Benson-Allott, University of California Press p116
(7)    ibid p125
(8) clearly watching the flow of analogue television would be hard to beat here – for much of the VCR era, in the UK and Europe anyway, television channels were very limited (just four in the UK until the late nineties) and so when one viewed TV the was always a least one in four chance of guessing what was being watched.