Cinemacon 2021

[Harold Hallikainen]

There was about 3 minutes of dead air during which I’ll bet there was plenty of behind the scenes panic going on.

The KDM expired?

[Leo Enticknap]

As Mike noted, they established "Taliban checkpoints" for the vax wristbands once show formally opened.

Looking at the trade show floor plan, I see about as twice as many square feet devoted to candy and drinks than cinema technology

They could easily have put us all in the lower hall, which would have benefited everyone. Again, as Mike noted, the big names that did show up (e.g. GDC, NEC, and Cinionic) had suites on the lower floor: the smaller ones, ourselves included, occupied about a quarter to a third of the upper hall, with the result that only those who were specifically interested in the offering of one or more vendors up there made the trek.

Given those circumstances, I was pleasantly surprised at the footfall we had. Most of the interest seemed to be in the Trinnov OV2 (for which we are a dealer, and hosted them in our booth) and our video over IP system. By yesterday morning it was effectively a ghost town, but Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty productive.

[Steve Guttag]

I would consider the major projector/server vendors to be on the middle floor...not the lower floor. There is almost no way to move about Caesars without going up and down a bit. Experienced people can shave quit a bit of time off their trek by knowing where doors that lead in/out of the building are and where the escalators are relative to where one is going. From the lower floor, most will go up the escalator, across the middle level, down an escalator to get to the lobby and then off to the Coliseum or to where they are eating. Alternately, one can go outside and go by the pools and back in near RAOs or the seafood buffet place. Yeah, it's hot out there but you are going to work up a sweat doing it the regular way too.

The word I heard was that those vendors that had booths had really high quality meeting with customers where they were able to close deals...not just set up for follow ups. Things felt less rushed.

If this is how trade shows are going to go...it is a good trend. I'd say there were twice as many people there than I thought there would be. The no shows from the manufacturers were disappointing and a little embarrassing on the upper floor. It really felt like a ghost town up there.

Of note:

• Christie had a rather full suite of equipment. They had a lot of projectors and had one of their Cinelife+ projectors running a demo that was quite impressive. It has warping capabilities as well as a real electronic convergence capability on a color by color and corner by corner basis.
  
  Christie also announced that they are moving select xenon projectors into their S4 platform so xenon is not dead yet...but perhaps it is starting to smell funny.
• Dolby showed had the CP950A (Atmos Card) as well as their new Dolby branded speakers. They made a point of saying that Dolby branded speakers should not be thought of as merely badged SLS speakers...they are new designs and significantly changed construction (they look finished...the SLS speakers looked...tacked together). Their new 3-way speakers as well as a shallow speaker with side firing ports was shown.
• GDC was showing off their new projector for smaller/more boutique type venues. It is small, light and quiet. They had a "theatre" where one could see (and try to hear) it in action with both 2D and 3D (does anyone do 3D anymore?). Its an all-in-one sort of projector in that the server is integral to the projector and is its ICP as well as storage...all inside. So, it is about as plug and play as you are going to get. Rounding out their offerings were their servers (SR-1000 and various high frame rate versions and...a version to put in your aging Sony projector!
• Barco/Cinionic was mostly running demos of the their various S4 projectors as well as one of their Laser Upgraded S2. On the up side, one could see something like 4 models running content right after one another with the top-of-the-line being the SP4K-27HC (their high contrast offering coming in at 5000:1 contrast ratio). I'd say a mistake when trying to show up such a thing was to run different content on all projectors. If one is comparing, it is generally best to see them with the same content. If one was paying attention (good luck) they put up a "black" screen before each presentation (probably to hide the RGB lasers coming up at different rates), you could tell the black levels got better as one went from an SP2K to an SP4K to an SP4K-HC.

Those were the big versions of the products. Strong brought out a compound solid curved screen for their booth that seemed more suited to simulators. MIT had probably the largest tech booth on the floor but I don't recall seeing anything new (Leo could speak to that). There were a smattering of MIT offerings around the perimeter with the Trinnov in the middle island. Harkness had their normal sized space but it was very sparsely filled with anything. There were a couple of other regulars that made it and again, I don't recall seeing anything new.

I did see a few, former, QSC people at the show.

If there was a theme to take away, it was really...expect delivery delays. EVERYBODY is having a hard time getting things made, and shipped...either between countries or even once in country to get it from one point to the next.

[Mike Blakesley]

Of the studio presentations I thought Paramount's was the best. The actually put some work into it -- they had film of a guy jumping a pair of rocket powered theater chairs over the Caesars Palace fountain, Evel Knievel style, and then the screen went dark and their vice president of theatrical distribution came riding out onstage in an identical set of chairs, complete with fog and lighting. It was the only "live" special content all week. They also dazzled us pretty good with their sizzle reel, including about 15 minutes of ultra-impressive making-of footage of Tom Cruise shooting one of the stunts from the upcoming Mission Impossible 8. They followed that up with the first 13 minutes of the new Top Gun movie. On top of that they showed an entire movie, the kid-friendly "Clifford the Big Red Dog" which for a kids movie was pretty good. The aforementioned VP also took part in the Thursday lunch discussion about the movie business going forward, which was very interesting.

They need to make a five-minute version of that Mission Impossible-filming footage and attach it to the new Top Gun as a short (and have it only shown in theaters). It was really impressive.

Second place in the studio presentations would have to go to Sony, which not only showed a slew of previews but also (as I mentioned above) screened "Ghostbusters Afterlife" which was impressive. And they brought on Jason and Ivan Reitman to introduce the film.

Universal takes third, and had some good-looking content, plus they also had a great reel featuring the stars of their upcoming movies talking about their favorite local theater when they were growing up; and then they had employees from those actual theaters introducing the trailers. It was classy. They also had Chris Meladandri onstage.

Disney ties for fourth place place and last place. They get 4th because they also screened a whole movie ("Shang Chi & the Ten Rings," which was my favorite Marvel movie I've seen in a long time because I could actually follow the story, plus it looked and sounded great) and they also get last place because they put absolutely no effort into their presentation. No trailers, swag in the goodie bags, nothing, and nobody from the studio showed up, either. They just beamed the DCP over and that was it. It was cool that they let us see the movie a whole 9 days before it comes out, but it came off as kind of a middle-finger to the industry. Which sucks, considering this industry, you know, made them what they are today and all that.

Lionsgate had some good content including a few faith-based movies that looked pretty good ("American Underdog" looks to have sports-movie-hit written on it), but they didn't really have a standout title. They are featuring Roland Emmerich's latest explosionfest, "Moonfall," which has the premise of the moon (you guessed it) falls to the earth. It looks impressive like all Roland Emmerich movies do, but .... kind of reaching there, I think.

Warner Bros. was easily the noisiest presentation, and the least memorable. They showed some extra footage from the new Batman movie, and debuted a new trailer for it as well. But that footage, plus all the traiilers, was all so loud and overbearing (BOOM, BOOM, ssssssBOOOOOM!!!!, repeat ad nauseum) that it was a relief when it ended.

There was a lot of love expressed for the theatrical experience and the theatrical industry, which resulted in a lot of feel-good applause. Was it genuine? It seemed to be, especially from the various talent that spoke on film. I guess the coming months and years will tell us the answer.

[Elia Orselli]

Of note:
Christie had a rather full suite of equipment. They had a lot of projectors and had one of their Cinelife+ projectors running a demo that was quite impressive. It has warping capabilities as well as a real electronic convergence capability on a color by color and corner by corner basis.
Christie also announced that they are moving select xenon projectors into their S4 platform so xenon is not dead yet...but perhaps it is starting to smell funny.

Did Christie mentioned a new laser projector made in partnership with Cinemeccanica (or is it an IT/EU thing only)?

Dolby showed had the CP950A (Atmos Card) as well as their new Dolby branded speakers.

I've seen documentation on Dolbycustomer portal, but nothing in the pricelist (even if it's updated at August 15). Now they should think about CP950AI (with a nice multichannel analog input board )

[Steve Guttag]

No mention (to me) of Cinemeccanica.

No, the CP950A hasn't quite hit the streets for mass production (there would probably be some supply chain issues with that too) but since they issued 4.9.6.4 for the DSS servers so they would recognize the CP950A as an Atmos processor, I'd suspect it is getting close.

As for audio in on the CP950...I've suggested that they turn the analog inputs on the DMA amplifier into possible analog inputs for the CP950 or IMS3000. If they are using the AES67 protocol, it is a bi-directional pathway. It may be just a matter of software changes or possibly some hardware to get the pathway working.

[Marcel Birgelen]

As for audio in on the CP950...I've suggested that they turn the analog inputs on the DMA amplifier into possible analog inputs for the CP950 or IMS3000. If they are using the AES67 protocol, it is a bi-directional pathway. It may be just a matter of software changes or possibly some hardware to get the pathway working.

I guess that's highly dependent on how the analog inputs are routed, but for modern designs it almost makes sense to first pass them through an AD converter, so all audio exits the same path. If they can route it back into AES67 may depend on where that signal enters the processing chain and also if the hardware is performant enough to process both incoming and outgoing streams simultaneously...

Still, they could put an analog multi-channel input on their "All Digital" amplifier, but none on their most modern audio-processor...

Regarding the CP950A:
Apparently, the CP950A comes with a beefier PSU than the CP950. So, in order to upgrade a vanilla CP950 to a CP950A, you not only need the expansion card, but also a new PSU?
And what about the blue LEDs on the frontpanel, can't miss those.

I guess for CP850 owners, there are zero incentives to upgrade... heck, the CP850 supports redundant PSUs and Atmos without an extra card.

[Leo Enticknap]

That's what I was told in the CP950 training class: upgrading it consists of adding the card and swapping out the PSU. I'm guessing that there will also be a new firmware to flash in, too.

[Marcel Birgelen]

You probably also need an Atmos license, although you could expect that to somehow come with the Atmos card, but even in the CP850, the Atmos feature is under a separate license.

[Harold Hallikainen]

How cost effective is the CP950 compared with rendering in the IMB? It seems that if there is enough processor power and a way to get all those audio channels "out of the box," internal rendering would be a lot more economical. With internal rendering, you don't need a separate security module, don't need to transfer the IAB bitstream between boxes, don't have to deal with synchronization of the externally rendered audio, etc. The CMS-5000 did internal rendering, forensic marking of all channels, and output 68 channels over Q-LAN. The Dolby CMS-3000 does similar. So, what are the advantages of using external rendering?

[Marcel Birgelen]

The advantage is that you can have "ATMOS Rendering" without a Dolby IMS.

Also, there are still quite a few setups out there without rendering support inside the IMS. Barco's Alchemy for example, doesn't do any "Immersive Sound Rendering" as of yet and I'm not sure if it really is in the pipeline. They do, however, have their own "Immersive Audio" processor in a box.

Part of the selling point of the CP950 was that it would be upgradable to ATMOS later on, the non-A version is also a lot cheaper than the CP850. I have yet to see definitive pricing for the CP950A and the non-A to A upgrade package to get a clear picture on how viable it will be.

[Steve Guttag]

Harold, with the CP950A, I think you'll see the CP850 go EOL. The CP950A's market will primarily be for ANY server other than the IMS3000. So, any brand server, including Christie and Barco, or 3rd party like GDC...or even the DSS line of servers, can be Atmos serves with the CP950A. I'd think there would be a very small market that would opt to use an IMS3000 in Server Mode and then outboard to a CP950A. Possible exceptions may be screening rooms or festival type systems were they may want outboard processing with multiple servers.

Thus far, all of my Atmos rooms have used the IMS3000 for rendering. Thus far, I have not wished for an outboard processor on top of that considering that I already have QSYS on all of those systems.

[Leo Enticknap]

Agreed. I can't think of any reason to keep the 850 in production once the 950A, and 950 to 950A upgrade kit, is properly available (by which I mean not having to wait four months for delivery). I guess they'll price the out-of-the-box 950A at a similar point to the 850 with an Atmos license, and the upgrade kit at roughly the difference between the cost of a barebones 950, and an 850 with the Atmos license.

As for the license, I presume that'll be baked into the 950 option card, given that the hardware capability simply isn't there in the 950 without it (whereas it is in the 850 and IMS3000).

[Steve Guttag]

Speaking of which, Dolby has already issued 4.9.6.4 for the DSS servers (except the DSS100, of course) so one can specify the CP950A as their sound/Atmos processor.

[Leo Enticknap]

I was a bit surprised to see that. Everything else Dolby has done recently seems to have had the objective of driving the DSS line out of service and into retirement, most recently the abrupt cessation of recertification service for the cat745 IMB. And now they're releasing a software update that facilitates extending the service life of the DSS200 and 220. My guess would be either that they know that lead times for new IMS3000 orders are going to be long for the foreseeable future, and therefore don't want to dampen CP950A sales while that situation is resolved; or that there is a big customer (e.g. one of the megachains) that is contemplating a volume order for CP950As, who has made it clear that this is contingent on full integration with the DSS line being available. The fact that the 4.9.5.2 to 4.9.6.4 update doesn't offer any other fixes or feature additions leads me to suspect the latter.