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I have a handful of USBs with trailers from deluxe that we've collected since we opened.
Do they want these back, or can I keep a couple of them? If I need to send them back, do I just pop them in one of the DCP boxes when I send those back in?
There used to be the occasional memo asking for the return of those drives but I haven't seen one in years, and haven't returned one of those drives in years either. I must have a couple of dozen of them around here. I'm sure they buy them in buik. They always used to say to return them in the shipping boxes, but that was when they were using those huge seahorse cases. You could probably put a layer of them on top of a DCP drive in the current small boxes and they'd ride along fine, but if the box is trashed like most of them seem to be, I would make sure to tape around all the loose edges of the box to keep any drives from worming their way out.
I suspect that they buy them in such huge quantities and pay so little for them (pennies), that they simply couldn't care if they ever see them again. In fact, as the world moves slowly toward online/satellite distribution, they likely don't want the cost and headache of recycling them. Thanks to general Moore's Law / data bloat, 4GB and 8GB sticks are rapidly becoming useless for all practical purposes, anyway. One theater I service has a huge cardboard box containing literally hundreds (and possibly over a thousand) Deluxe and Screenvision USB sticks in a corner of the booth. I doubt if they've ever returned any since the theater went digital.
You could ask Deluxe, but I'm willing to bet that, as a practical matter, the cost to process returns and QC the returned flash drives exceeds the cost of just replacing them with known-good new ones. I would be surprised if they really want to deal with the returns.
What kind of USB memory sticks are they using these days? Are they at least of the USB 3 variety? For DCPs shipped on physical drives are all of those still on the traditional magnetic platter variety? Is anyone moving to the use of Solid State Drives?
I got a trailer from Deluxe last week that's on a Kingston DT50 16gb. I guess it's USB3 but I don't really know how to tell.
I've never yet seen a feature on anything but spinning rust, though.
Yeah it looks like all but one of the Kingston sticks I have are 3.0 (only one that's not is a lil DTSE9 32gb), but I have a couple Sandisk that appear not to be
I guess the cost per gigabyte is still a bit too high for SSD storage. Are any cinema product companies incorporating SSDs into any d-cinema servers? In theory a DCP on an external SSD connected to a server via Thunderbolt 3 (or the new Thunderbolt 4 standard) would be able to injest a 2 hour movie a hell of a lot faster if the target drive was a M2 NVMe PCI Express SSD versus a traditional hard disc with magnetic platters. Even an SSD connected via eSATA would still boast a considerable speed increase.
Then again, how many theaters still manually ingest DCPs from hard drives shipped via snail mail? Is more of that activity happening as downloads in the background via a satellite dish or Internet connection?
The use-cases for SSDs in cinemas are pretty limited right now. If you have a multiplex and a central storage solution based on SSDs and all the screens outfitted with SSDs, you'll see a performance increase, but now your network usually becomes the bottleneck and there isn't a whole lot of server equipment out there that supports 10GE. If you're running a small operation, where you ingest your content directly into the playout server, you're usually importing stuff from old rotating rust: no glory for SSD here either, as the disk you're ingesting from is now your bottleneck.
Cinesend sent me their gadget for downloading movies on the Internet shortly after the "big shutdown". I installed in in my rack but haven't actually used it for anything yet. They sent me a couple of trailers to test it on the day that I got it working, and then I switched it off and haven't turned it on since.
Everything still comes on hard drives, usually delivered delivered by a courier service, occasionally (rarely) by snail mail.
The major studios are still resistant to online solutions such as CineSend, on security grounds. Arthouse and other minority interest titles are now being distributed that way, but AFAIK, not mainstream stuff.
As for SSDs, the industry has already invested in the means to ship spinning rust drives reasonably reliably (Pelican cases, the Deluxe foam boxes, etc.). Also, the bitrate and size of DCPs tends to be trending upwards, thus making the cost of shipping them on SSDs even more expensive. Five years ago, a feature occupying 150GB was unusual. Now, that seems to be around the minimum.
I have a handful of USBs with trailers from deluxe that we've collected since we opened.
Do they want these back, or can I keep a couple of them? If I need to send them back, do I just pop them in one of the DCP boxes when I send those back in?
The do want them back and will come after you eventually. One time a before we switched over to DCDC, they actually called to bug me about it. To be fair, we had amassed quite a few being an 18-screen theater.
You can just pop them in the box with any hard drive return. I think I managed to fit around 25 in one of them the first time around, haha.
We just got through playing Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 at our theatre. Evil Dead 2 came on a hard drive from Deluxe. The original Evil Dead came on a USB thumb drive, enclosed in an zippered ear bud case, wrapped in bubble wrap and sent in a plastic shipping envelope. Never seen that before.
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