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This topic comprises 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
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Author
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Topic: NEW, LOWER DTS DRIVE KIT PRICE
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John Pytlak
Film God
Posts: 9987
From: Rochester, NY 14650-1922
Registered: Jan 2000
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posted 08-14-2000 02:55 PM
Rory:Good observation. Having something work reliably 12+ hours a day, 365 days a year, is a challenge, especially for something as delicate as a disk drive. Unfortunately, the only "repair" is often buying a new one. ------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
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Rory Burke
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 181
From: Burbank, CA, USA
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted 08-14-2000 03:14 PM
I can see it now... The next future thread titles:"DTS hard disk plays wrong movie track!! HELP!"
-lost one nowhere,USA Wasnt there a thread where leaders' timecode were mimicking and forcing the DTS units to play? RORY
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 08-14-2000 03:28 PM
To expand on the earlier post, here's what I'm thinking about the DTS idea:
requirements: the idea here is to save wear on the CD drives and improve reliability while making everything totally transparent to the user. Presumably DTS units could be built with, say, 8-gig IDE disks as standard equipment, each of which could have four 2-gig partitions (since DTS runs DOS and, presumably, FAT filesystems, the 2gig partition limit applies). Each disk partition could represent enough space for a single program (defined as trailer disc plus feature discs).
When you play a given film, the DTS reader sees the timecode and the DTS player compares the timecode with its own local mini-database to see if the timecode for that movie exists on its local hard disk. If it does exist, then the DTS unit plays the movie soundtrack directly from hard disk without looking at the CDs at all. If the movie's soundtrack is not on the internal hard disk, then the DTS unit plays the soundtrack off the CDs and copys the information from the CDs over the oldest (longest time since last use) disk image so that the next showing of that movie can be done from hard drive.
The beauty of this is that it doesn't require operator intervention, other than the usual disc-changing ritual that is done now and it can even compensate for someone who forgets to change the discs if the disc-less movie has played recently in the same auditorium. Since the DTS unit can play the soundtrack off the CDs in real time, there is no need for the operator to consciously transfer the information from CDs to hard disk. If the soundtrack is on the hard disk, the DTS unit plays it from that source; if it is not, it plays from the CDs. If the hard disk fails, it can fault to reading from CD.
All of this rests on the assumption that the timecode values are unique to each print, which may not be the case. Perhaps there should be a mechanism for the operator to over-ride the default to play from the hard drive in the unlikely event that he has two films with the same timecode track.
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Dave Cutler
Master Film Handler
Posts: 277
From: Centennial, CO
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted 08-14-2000 05:08 PM
Scotts idea sounds similar to what IMAX uses for their newest soundsytem. They load the soundtrack for the show onto a harddrive, tell the show program what file to play, and don't have to think about it again. Very nice. I thought it was very cool when I was actually sent a IMAX soundtrack with a trailer and it was shipped on a DVD-ROM. Too bad a couldn't use it.The DTS-P8 (8 channel DTS) can use a harddrive, although I have never seen one. My DTS-P8 uses two CD-ROM drives, but I really wish that it had a nice big harddrive. About the original topic. The price of a DTS upgrade kit would depend heavily on your supplier. Different suppliers can offer different prices, it depends on how much business they do with DTS.
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 08-14-2000 05:41 PM
Data rates and sound quality shouldn't be an issue. Remember that a DTS CD-ROM holds about 600 megs of information and runs for over an hour of film (witness the number of 90-minute movies that come with only one disc). Let's be conservative and assume a data rate of 10 megs/minute. That's nothing...you can do that over 10Mbps ("slow") ethernet. If standard CD-ROM drives can keep up at that rate, then a cheapo IDE hard disk should be able to deal with it easily and there should be no loss of sound quality.
I suppose that there could be a way to manually load the CD contents onto the hard disk, but that would take away from the simplicity and convenience of the "look for the sound on hard disk; if it's not there, play it from CD and then copy to the hard disk" approach.
Removable hard drives might work, but, for the same reason of simplicity, probably aren't such a great idea in a typical theatre environment. First, there's the problem of fragility: do you really want an 18-year-old popcorn-popper/"projectionist" who can't keep the port glass clean to be running around the booth with fragile electronic equipment? Also, there's the reliability issue: hard drives last longest when they are kept spinning. In general, repeatedly power-cycling a given drive will speed the wear on the bearings and cause premature failure. That would defeat the entire purpose of this concept, which is intended to improve the reliability of DTS.
One "issue" that did occur to me was the problem of having multiple soundtracks for a given movie. It probably is not uncommon for areas with large numbers of foreign-language speakers to run the same print with different soundtrack discs in different languages. I don't know of the best way to accommodate this in the system that I'm proposing. Maybe there should be some code on the CDs to indicate whether the sound on the CD matches the optical track on the film (different timecode could be used for different optical tracks); if the sound on the CD is different from the sound on the optical track, then perhaps the system should not attempt to copy the CD to the hard drive...
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