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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: Screening of Avengers Deleted
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Martin McCaffery
Film God
Posts: 2481
From: Montgomery, AL
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 05-01-2012 08:25 AM
You KNEW it had to happen:
quote:
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AVENGERS
BY KYLE WAGNER APR 30, 2012 2:00 PM 88,812 218 Share
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Avengers Screening Delayed Because Some Dunce DELETED THE FREAKING MOVIE
And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth's mightiest heroes and heroines found themselves united against a common threat. On that day, the Avengers were... deleted? Yes. The copy of the film being used for a screening last week was accidentally wiped from the server, and delayed a room full of angry nerds (and film critics) from seeing the Avengers assembled. But how does something like that even happen?
As it turns out, it's surprisingly easy to delete a digital film:
Slate asked Steve Kraus, whom Roger Ebert has called one of "the best projectionists in the nation." Kraus told us that it's as easy as deleting any important file from your computer. "It's click to delete from the server and an ‘Are you sure?' confirmation," he explained over email.
Thankfully, the issue was eventually resolved. But it set off a debate over the digital cinema packages that are replacing old fashioned film reels. Without the move to digital, the reasoning goes, you wouldn't be able to delete the movie you are supposed to be showing. That's a lot of headache for a process that's supposed to be as "easy as creating a playlist and pressing play," and that costs up to $150,000 per screen to install.
And all that is true. But traditional film has its drawbacks, too; it's easy enough to say, drop the reel and ruin the film, play the wrong reel, light the reel on fire with a flamethrower, or ruin the film in any number of other idiotic ways that are analogous to deleting it. Idiocy works just as well in analog as it does in digital.
Just keep reminding yourself of that the next time some slack-jawed teen wipes your local theater's only copy of Prometheus this summer. [Slate]
http://gizmodo.com/5906353/the-avengers-screening-delayed-because-some-dunce-deleted-the-freaking-movie
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Monte L Fullmer
Film God
Posts: 8367
From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004
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posted 05-01-2012 12:44 PM
Keys for "Hunger Games" were issued out weekly for renewal and renewed the morning the beginning of the new week (this feature was the most protected film I've seen released), whereas some feature's keys can have a much longer duration -including months - from activation to expiring.
Usually, depending on the servers and their functions,there is a flag that appears next to the feature content of three conditions: playable, expires soon, and expired content.
I've played a feature that wasn't encrypted, thus no keys were needed...like trailer content.
But, have done the same: accidently deleted feature content, but managed to reingest the content within the two hour timeframe since ingest time really slows down while the server is being used during playback.
(If it's a SONY, you simply wait until it not being in use - thing freezes up if an ingest is performed while the IMB is being used)...
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 05-01-2012 09:27 PM
quote:
And all that is true. But traditional film has its drawbacks, too; it's easy enough to say, drop the reel and ruin the film, play the wrong reel, light the reel on fire with a flamethrower, or ruin the film in any number of other idiotic ways that are analogous to deleting it. Idiocy works just as well in analog as it does in digital.
Drop a hard drive down the stairs, hit it with a flame thrower or do other idiotic things and you won't be able to play the digital movie either.
The point, here, is not that digital is better or worse than film. The point is that both formats are equally vulnerable to stupid people doing stupid things. Each has its own vulnerabilities and pitfalls.
The bottom line is that people who have been saying or implying that digital is free from pitfalls are now being proved wrong.
P.S. The RM command is not a command for digital media servers. It is a command for the Linux/Unix operating systems on which those servers are based. As such, I hypothesize that would be possible to set file permissions in a *nix system such that only an administrator of a certain level can delete files. That would not totally eliminate the risk but it would help keep the mutton heads from screwing things up as easily.
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 05-01-2012 10:25 PM
I once had a movie on DVD hang up half way through a movie. I put the disc in the player and successfully played it all the way through for a paying audience. Two hours later, the same disc in the same player stopped working without warning. I turned the power off after the first show then powered on and pressed "play" for the second show. Nobody ever touched the disk or even opened the drawer. The disk just stopped playing.
I was the one who got reamed because of it. My boss was yelling at me, "It can't JUST break!"
You and I both know that it certainly is possible for any machine to "just break" and that there is nothing anybody can do about it. Bad things just happen.
My boss thought that digital is just better and that it is always perfect, just because it is digital. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth. A digital player can "just break" as easily as a piece of film can "just break." Neither is free from random chance. Nothing is.
The problem is that my boss was bound to discover the man behind the curtain, sooner or later but was unwilling to admit that he was wrong. Consequently, it MUST be somebody's fault.
Frank is right. Movie theater management is always going to try to do things with as few people and as cheaply as possible. They always have but, in the case of digital movies, I think they are subject to the same illusion that my boss was. They stubbornly believe "digital is better" just because it is digital.
What I am saying is that the curtain is being pulled away and, now, people are slowly discovering that their illusions just aren't true.
Like my old boss, they are just going to try to find somebody to blame it on, whether that person is actually responsible or not.
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