my profile | my password | search | faq & rules | forum home

» Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE   » Operations   » Digital Cinema Forum   » Issues with Digital Projection in general (Page 1)

This topic comprises 3 pages: 1  2  3

Author Topic: Issues with Digital Projection in general Monte L Fullmer Film God Posts: 8367 From: Nampa, Idaho, USA Registered: Nov 2004 posted 08-17-2018 02:20 AM                     I'm writing this note to get feedback from locations around the film-tech world on the reason of this topic: At your respective location(s), what kinds of issues has their been with this Digital Cinema now that it has been on the market for a good couple of decades, especially when the huge rollout happened a little over 5 years ago. For Example: Content corrupts, TMS issues, storage drives crashes, rectifiers going out, light engines having their image issues, network failures, where bottom line weekly reboots if units are to stay online due to VPF contracts, .. and the similar. ..just situations that were rare to never happening when we were running film. Thx - Monte  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-17-2018 07:04 AM                        Disclaimer: I don't deal with this stuff on a day-to-day basis. My involvement with digital cinema is largely limited to screenings at festivals and special events. The biggest problem that I have seen is the non-standardization of DCP formatting and delivery. It is possible to make a valid DCP that does not play and to make an invalid one that does Some DCPs will play on some server/projctor combinations, but not on others. Not all servers support all frame rates (24, 25, and 30). All servers will read ext3-formatted drives, while some but not all will read HFS+ and NTFS formatted drives. Homemade DCPs are often made with titles like "My DCP" that can be difficult to find in the list of files on the server. Generated subtitles are still problematic. Many festival movies are mixed as left/right stereo, even though that is not a cinema format. Finally, I have seen a number of festival DCPs where the wrong container size was chosen (such as 2.35 in a flat container). We don't these problems with film or with broadcast videotape formats. Those who work in regular cinemas probably don't have these problems with major-studio releases, either. On the plus side, the equipment has been more reliable than I would have expected, and D-cinema has forced many theatres that previously had substandard sound systems to upgrade to modern equipment. [ 08-17-2018, 09:16 AM: Message edited by: Scott Norwood ]  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 08-17-2018 09:10 AM                        I think the main issue is that this stuff is a black box. With film, if something went wrong you could usually figure out why and sometimes you could do something to make the show work anyway. (I once spent an entire show spinning a platter by hand when the payout motor refused to start.) With the digital setup, if it doesn't work you can't do much other than call a tech and say "It doesn't work"; If you push the button and nothing happens you're already at the end of what you can do to get a movie on the screen. The primary design is intended to not work and nobody is allowed into the inner sanctum of the anti-piracy measures if something fails. The primary focus is on anti-piracy rather than getting a show on the screen for the paying customers. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't, you're stuck.  |  IP: Logged Barry Floyd Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1079 From: Lebanon, Tennessee, USA Registered: Mar 2000 posted 08-17-2018 11:26 AM                        On the lines of what Frank mentioned, the big black box scenario was kinda scary when we first installed it back in 2013, now not so much. You really have to play by the machines set of rules and don't deviate from them. Certain things have to be turned on in a particular order, but that's really not that big of deal. Know your passwords to everything, know how to use your diagnostic software (i.e. Barco Communicator) to diagnose your problems, know where your security keys are and how to use them, and do your preventative maintenance on a consistent schedule. You take care of the machines and they will take care of you. Spending a week in Rancho Cordova, California at the Barco training school really helped ease my fears of the dreaded black box. The only issues we've had related to digital projection has been either an on-board battery die or in one instance a switched mode power supply went out on one of our 23B's. I will say that when the power supply went out, the 24/7 technicians at Barco were able to help me diagnose the problem and had the replacement part flown to me from the other side of the country within 12 hours. The extra money spent for the extended warranties really paid off in that instance. With 35mm, we didn't have to deal with extended warranties as we were dealing with machines older than me, but they were all mechanical and relatively easy to fix. We play mainly (99%) first run features, so we really don't seem to have the issues of non-compatibility that Scott mentioned. Digital projection has eliminated the time consuming build up and tear down of films, and I don't miss that one bit. Film was less forgiving if a metal shaving or speck of something got embedded on a pad roller in the soundhead and destroyed your print on the first run of the night.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-17-2018 12:15 PM                        I have the same feelings about the "black box" thing, but problems have been relatively minimal, although with digital, a real problem usually means canceling the show. In 8 years and two months, we've had the following problems I can think of: One distribution hard drive problem (had to "skip past" the problem area of the drive, causing audience to miss about 20 seconds of the feature each night, but the shows went on) One defective lamp (replaced under warranty - show went on after bulb was changed out) One server failure (upgraded the server to a media block with external storage, paid for by insurance since the failure was caused by an electrical surge - closed for three days while it was fixed) Three server hard drives fail (replaced whole set each time, and lost one show each time) I've had to have technician Mark remote-in numerous times to fix small issues, like clearing an error message I wasn't familiar with or installing updates...things like that. We've had zero problems with keys, drive delivery, etc.  |  IP: Logged Victor Liorentas Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 800 From: london ontario canada Registered: May 2009 posted 08-17-2018 12:46 PM                     A constant nagging depression due to not running film all the time but instead selling tickets and popcorn to stay employed.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-17-2018 04:56 PM                     Monte... I see this stuff happen at places where too many different people have their hands in the mixing bowl. Also in places where not all updates are promptly done promptly, or at the same time. Overall I have almost no problems with TMS, excepting a couple versions of the TMS app. I used very reliable Dell servers and patterned my TMS systems after Cinedigms with the exception of managed switches. No real need for those and they have caused issues of their own at various locations in the past. I've had tech's lose, or change passwords on them, and the little fans in them go bad all the time. All network cabling should also be certified so it is the last thing questioned. Mark  |  IP: Logged Marcel Birgelen Film God Posts: 3357 From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands Registered: Feb 2012 posted 08-17-2018 05:33 PM                     quote: Mike Blakesley I have the same feelings about the "black box" thing, but problems have been relatively minimal, although with digital, a real problem usually means canceling the show. Unfortunately, the "black box" thing is on-purpose as it is the way "Hollywood" wants to protect their intellectual assets. I think the biggest problem is that what used to be mostly minor mechanical failures and simple problems with some electronica has now become a matter of IT problems. IT problems are often caused by bugs, essentially defective software. The problems that arise out of this are often not easily identified nor easily solved. That has accounted for quite some failed shows. Unfortunately, there are no real hard numbers whether or not the number of failed shows has been increasing or decreasing since the exhibition world migrated from film to digital. I also think those numbers would only be fair over a larger timespan, now since the older digital deployments are actually starting to show their age.  |  IP: Logged Martin McCaffery Film God Posts: 2481 From: Montgomery, AL Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-17-2018 05:49 PM                        As someone said, we're all beta testers now. I desperately want to get rid of the machine I have, but do I get a laser machine, or stick with xenon? I'd have to go to my notebook to get most of the problems. I think we are on our 5th IMB. Replaced the prism set, power supply ballast, lamps cannot maintain 14fl for longer than a week (now show at 8.1 and no one has complained), recently lots of ingest problems. Batteries run down. One hard drive in the RAID was bad when we opened the box, since then it has been fine (though the ingest problems could still be related). Weird unidentified aspect ratios. When showing DVD/BluRays, quirkiness about handshaking. As has been said, when they work they are fine (except for the light in my case) but when they have even the littlest problem you're off the screen. Maybe if I were younger I would find them fascinating. Now they are just annoying.  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 08-17-2018 06:09 PM                        It's the only commercial/industrial equipment that I know of that is deliberately designed to not work. Just about any other "mission critical" equipment has bypass modes or some sort of built-in redundancy so it can be made to work in an emergency. Or at the minimum it's designed to be as robust as possible within its price point. Digital cinema equipment comes at a very high price point, and it has failure modes designed right into the equipment.  |  IP: Logged Marcel Birgelen Film God Posts: 3357 From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands Registered: Feb 2012 posted 08-17-2018 06:25 PM                     I agree with you on this one. For the amount of costs involved, Digital Cinema equipment has very little redundancy or at least "bypass" functionality in general. I guess the reason for this is because it's pretty expensive and complicated to do so. But even in the film days there were more bypass scenarios for many potential equipment failures.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 08-18-2018 08:40 AM                     DCinema equipment is towards the "cheap" end of their class of equipment. Look at the cost of an equivalent Rental/Staging projector in any of the brands and the DCinema street price is considerably less. That said, I think it is horrible the amount of "reboot it" solutions. It isn't a solution, it is overcoming a problem. This stuff should be 24/7 capable but sooner or later, it is going to bite you. Reseating boards is another thing I'm sick and tired of. It has happened on all projectors we deal with and mostly the ICP and continues on in series 3 with the likes of the ICMP. Enough is enough with this stuff. Even things as simple as closed captions get overly complicated in DCinema. We've had Closed Captions in TV for decades but in DCinema they go out of their way to make it less reliable. Just this past week I've had to do updates to get things more reliable with it and even then on GDC, you might get the red "caption encoder not found" error though it will still work. We didn't used to get this error all of the time but now we do. The number of issues I have to deal with because of subtitles/captions is appalling. The problems come right from authoring down to how some TMSes or server ingest them, to studios wanting to encrypt them to fonts that are missing or how SMPTE handles them versus Interop. KDMs are another thing...every week I get some sort of KDM issue. Deluxe sends out last week's KDMs or the theatre doesn't realize that if a movie opens on a Wednesday that their keys will likely die EVERY Wednesday, not Friday. Would it be so hard for the studios to, regardless of the opening day to have KDMs for regular releases die on Friday Morning? It is like they go out of their way to have problems.  |  IP: Logged Martin McCaffery Film God Posts: 2481 From: Montgomery, AL Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-18-2018 04:05 PM                        Do most Pop movies have KDM's that are only good for a week? I get week long KDM's for some of my films that are only a week, but we generally only do one week bookings. On the other hand, from the smaller studios I'll get keys that are good for up to a month. To the studios really make you run around for new KDM's weekly?  |  IP: Logged Rick Raskin Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1100 From: Manassas Virginia Registered: Jan 2003 posted 08-18-2018 04:22 PM                     quote: Marcel Birgelen Unfortunately, there are no real hard numbers whether or not the number of failed shows has been increasing or decreasing since the exhibition world migrated from film to digital. Interesting point. I can count on one hand the number of failed shows I experienced running film and still have fingers left over. In my opinion they have taken something that should be relatively simple and turned it into something wholly other. On the other hand, as things evolve further there should be more plug-and-play solutions, better redundancy and better interoperability between vendors.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 08-18-2018 04:33 PM                     Martin, It varies from studio to studio. Some give you multi-month KDMs but most are tight-fisted and have them die weekly and, again, on the same day that they opened. They do KDMs for features that are on Blu-ray already! What is the point? The theatre could run the Blu-ray if they wanted. Why bother KDMing the DCP, at that point? The cat is out of the bag.  |  IP: Logged

All times are Central (GMT -6:00)

This topic comprises 3 pages: 1  2  3

Printer-friendly view of this topic

Hop To: Select a Forum: Category: Operations -------------------- Digital Cinema Forum Film Handlers' Forum Large Format Forum Ground Level Feature Info, Trailer Attachments & REAL Credit Offsets Category: Community -------------------- Film-Yak Film Handlers' Movie Reviews The Afterlife Bob Maar's Joke-A-Thon Category: Classified -------------------- Equipment and Supplies Wanted/For Sale Help Wanted/Seeking Employment Category: System -------------------- Software Beta Testing Forum

The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.