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This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
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Author
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Topic: Shipping out DCP drives after ingestion but before the show - a cautionary tale
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 05-01-2016 04:07 PM
We quite frequently get requests, almost all of them from arthouse and niche title distributors and festival print traffic co-ordinators, to ingest a DCP on receipt of their drive, and then to ship the drive on to another venue before our playdate. I always protest at this, to which their response is that the DCP is on a RAID in our server, so what's the problem?
I had an issue this afternoon which illustrates what that problem can be. We are playing a preview screening of a soon-to-be-released movie for a private rental. The DCP drive was ingested by my co-worker last week, plus the KDM, both of which went in without any error messages, verification fails, or any meowing and hissing from the server at that point.
The KDM opened two hours before showtime. When I pressed play (DSS200), it said "Checking content and licenses...", but then instead of "Selecting..." and then lighting up the transport buttons, it just went back to "Please select a show for playback."
So I checked the server and projector logs - no sign of any weird sh!t. I then tried to play the DCP straight from the distribution CRU drive, which worked - it played fine. After that I deleted the DCP from the server's RAID, reingested it from the distribution drive. That worked, just in time for the show.
The only explanation I can come up with for what happened is that some data got corrupted during the original ingest, which transferred successfully on the second attempt. If so, that raises the question as to why the bad transfer passed verification, but that isn't a question I can answer.
The moral of this story, especially for those of us working in the arthouse/rep/festival world, is that if you are asked to let a DCP distribution drive out of your booth before the actual show, there is a risk involved, even if it has ingested without reported errors, and especially if the show is encrypted and the KDM is not yet open.
A secondary moral is that the ability to play a DCP straight from a CRU drive, while not something that should be done normally, is potentially a show-saving last resort option, and to avoid servers that don't offer this feature.
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Jim Cassedy
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1661
From: San Francisco, CA
Registered: Dec 2006
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posted 05-01-2016 05:46 PM
quote:
Watch the damn thing yourself, by yourself, before playing it for the public.
I remain amazed at how many of you folks seem to operate on the "push
play and pray" principle
Well, gee, Frank. . . in a perfect world it would be nice to do that.
For one thing- - I get paid anywhere from $45 to over $60/hr, (with a 4hr
minimum) depending on the venue, and very few of them are willing to pay
me at that rate just to run something for myself.
Oh, sure. . . if I have an especially big screening with important guests, I'll
arrange to do a pre screening, often 'on my own time' just to insure there
will be no problems.
. . and most of the venues will find some way to make it up to me somehow.
But as a rule- - they don't have the money to do it, and I'm usually busy
enough that I don't have time.
. . . besides - it's digital, so it's supposed to be perfect; first time-- every time.
............What could possibly go wrong? ![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
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Mike Schulz
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 122
From: Los Angeles, CA
Registered: May 2007
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posted 05-01-2016 07:02 PM
quote: Frank Cox
"Film done wrong" is bad and we call out people by name on this forum when they screwed something up, but digital done wrong is just fine and dandy because nobody has time to do it properly?
I'm not sure why you're being so harsh here but I think you must have glossed over everything Leo said about his specific venue. He is at a private repertory house that has many one-off screenings and festivals. If you've never run a festival before, especially an indie festival, then you have no clue what you're up against. If you're lucky, half of the drives sent to you will be CRU but most likely they will come on portable usb drives which can take forever and a day to ingest compared to CRU. On top of that, half of them will be encrypted, and half of them not. You may or may not have time to do a quick spot-check of the non-encrypted content but sometimes the festival scheduling doesn't allow for enough time to do a QC and you just have to press play and pray. The ones that are encrypted can be a crap-shoot as well with timezone discrepancies being the most common culprit. You don't have the luxury of calling Technicolor/Deluxe and have them e-mail you a new key in the next 10 minutes. No, you have to find the festival print coordinator (if there is one) and get the contact for the content distributor and hope they have somebody there who can respond to you. This, by the way, is all happening in the middle of all of your other bullshit going on during the already hectic day.
Anyway, my point is that not every venue is playing only first-run content that always comes on a CRU from a major studio with KDMs distributed my Technicolor/Deluxe. For that matter, I when I did used to work at a multiplex, oftentimes the keys they sent to us unlocked the feature literally 1 hour before showtime. Well guess what? Management has already started seating the house. There goes your opportunity to QC!
When I know I will be working a festival event somewhere, I try to tell the organizers that we need both DCP content *and* Bluray/DVD backup. If shit hits the fan with the DCP whether it be corrupted, bad hard drive, or KDMs that don't want to work, you will at least have a disc to go on-screen with so you don't lose a show.
I've worked with Leo many times and he is *always* on point with these things. You were wrong to judge him.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 05-01-2016 09:20 PM
As everyone above has pointed out, previewing a show in its entirety is usually impossible, because:
1 - The budget isn't there to pay a projectionist to do it, except if it's a really high profile event (e.g. a premiere, or a VIP is doing a Q & A);
2 - For mainstream titles, the KDM often doesn't open until just before showtime (which was what nearly bit me in the ass this afternoon).
3 - For arthouse/rep/festival titles, you're dealing with so many arriving at once that there often aren't the hours in the day needed to do this.
When the DCP replaced 35mm for most releases, its cheerleaders in the arthouse world confidently predicted that it would see the end of minority interest titles being released on a small number of 35mm prints (because the distributor couldn't afford more), being used very intensively for lots of short bookings, and thus wearing out very quickly. Digital stuff can be copied for almost nothing, right? Everyone expected that you would be able to send the DCP to as many venues as you liked, on the opening night, for a one-time outlay.
Ironically, what is actually happening is that these small distributors are only having a small number of DCP CRU drives and cases made of a given title (and if it's really low budget, the drives are consumer USB ones). Although the cost of having a post house make each copy is less than that of a film print, it still isn't nothing. So what will happen is that the DCP arrives in my booth, is ingested, and then a day or two later our programmer emails me: the movie has just been accepted for a fest in Seattle, or an extra booking has come in for a campus theater in Wisconsin, and would I please prepare it for shipping ASAP? You've already ingested it, so it can go out now, right?
It's the same problem as existed in the 35mm days (well, almost: then it would be a case of staying until 2am on Friday mornings breaking prints down), only this time if there's a problem, you don't see a scratchy and dirty print: you see the backup DVD or BD instead if you're lucky and they've given you one, or you lose the show if they haven't.
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