Accidentally putting 3-D content in a 2D playlist - GDC server

[Mike Blakesley]

I found out the hard way tonight that if you accidentally put 3D content in a 2D playlist on a GDC SR1000, the picture in your entire program (not just the misplaced 3-D content) will look like a scope film played through a flat lens, sorta. Aspect ratio fouled up, picture cut off on the top and bottom. The only way around it is to remove that 3-D content.

On our old SX3000, this situation would make the colors all wonky, but at least the aspect ratio would be right.

The GDC playback web interface as featured in the SR1000 leaves a lot (A LOT) to be desired, and in their defense their IS a tiny li'l "3D" logo on the playlist next to the 3-D item, which I should have noticed but didn't. Personally I think 3-D listings should be different colored, or something, to make them more noticeable for us busy operators.

I don't quite understand why having that "wrong" content in the 2D playlist fouls up the playback for the WHOLE playlist, but that's what happens.

[Frank Cox]

I found out the hard way that putting a 4k trailer into a 3D playlist causes it to stop playing as soon as it hits the 4k trailer.

[Mike Blakesley]

Good to know! But, you are running an SX 3000, is that correct?

[Steve Guttag]

Mike...the reason why ANY 3D content in a show puts the entire show in 3D is that the player (and projector) have to make the switch to 3D...which, effectively has it running at 48fps since it has to put up both left and right eyes in the same time frame as it would 2D. It is a benefit that it does this too. Imagine having a 3D feature and a mix of 2D and 3D previews...do you really want to cue the projector and have it go between 2D and 3D?

So, if any clip is 3D, the show is 3D. Did you select your 3D format on the projector and just run that show as 3D? If you keep the 3D apparatus out of the light path, it should play fine. Then, on the next show, worry about purifying your show with just 2D content.

The best server for announcing that the show has 3D content was the Dolby DSS series, by far. But they had the best UI, by far. On its scheduler page, if there is any 3D content in the show, it gets the 3D blue dot.

Screen Shot 2022-11-12 at 9.45.50 AM.png

In its build section, the 3D notification is front and center on the name and all clips that are 3D are so notified.


Screen Shot 2022-11-12 at 9.46.37 AM.png

When a show is loaded, it too is obvious.

GDC is more stealthy about it on the SMS page. It updates its status in the lower right for each clip individually. This is a 3D show but you'd never know it. The 3D notice at the bottom is due to how the show was named by its TMS (ACE):

Screen Shot 2022-11-12 at 9.51.18 AM.png

In the GDC Build screen, it doesn't flag a show as 3D but it will show the clips as 3D:

Screen Shot 2022-11-12 at 9.51.33 AM.png

So, unless you are looking at the part of the show that has the 3D clip, you could miss it.

The SR1000's UI is a bit of a ripoff of the Doremi IMS UI, with a bit of a GDC's legacy mashed in. On the build (Edit) screen, it is pretty traditional GDC (minus the Automation section...what's up with that?). All you have is that orange 3D box to indicate that a particular clip is 3D:

Screen Shot 2022-11-12 at 10.01.49 AM.png

On Playback...nope, no indication of 2D or 3D (just the current version of what each clip is while that clip is playing):

Screen Shot 2022-11-12 at 10.04.19 AM.png

I will say, overall, I like the SR1000's UI changes (except the omission of the automation cues omitted from the Edit screen)

The current Dolby/Doremi UI on the IMS3000 is also not very verbose about the 2D/3D status though it can be confusing. If one is manually building a show, one set's the show's properties to be 2D, 3D (or 4K). However, there are cues that one can use that will allow a more traditional, if there are any 3D clips, the show is 3D. This is such a show:

Screen Shot 2022-11-12 at 10.09.09 AM.png
Note the name at the top. The TMS (ACE) put the "3D (en)" part in...but the properties of the show are 2D so the server considers it a 2D show. Part of what is in that "3D_SCOPE_2048" cue is the cue to tell the server to treat the entire show as 3D. There is a "Match 3D Output" command in there:

Screen Shot 2022-11-12 at 10.15.54 AM.png

Now, if Mike was building his show manually, by not setting the show properties to 3D and leaving it at 2D...and not having this cue in there, then his show would run 2D and just the one 3D clip would be wonky.

[Frank Cox]

you are running an SX 3000

No, it's a SR1000.

When I "upgraded" from the GDC big black box I thought I'd be seeing stuff that's improved but other than having less wires going from here to there, I don't think anything actually got better than it was before.

Ingesting stuff from a hard drive on the SR1000 is dead dog slow whereas with the old server it marched right along doing that. I guess that's not particularly relevant any more since pretty much nothing comes on a hard drive any more but still, it's definitely a downgrade from the old machine in that way.

The user interface is too long for the screen on a standard laptop so you have to keep scrolling up and down for no good reason, and the play/pause/stop/etc buttons on the playback screen are too damn small.

[Mike Blakesley]

Well let's see, here's my wish list about the interface.

1. I'd like to be able to see the cues on the playback screen while playing. You have to go to Edit and then click on the "lightning bolt" to see the cues. How about a "Next cue: (cue name) at 0:00" display.

2. When loading trailers from the Qnap server, you constantly have to scroll the content list back and forth (left/right) to see what you're looking at, because there's no way to make the list window wider. I'd like to see it be able to filter out stuff -- like, show only 5.1 content, or only non-3D content, etc. Or how about having everything grouped? Like, 5.1 content, 3-D content, Atmos content, etc. We know they have the ability to separate things into categories already, so why not take it to the next level?

2a. Speaking of the Qnap server, it takes 3 minutes and 45 seconds to "open" that thing to load content from it. That's ... nuts. Not a GDC problem, I guess, but it came to mind while typing this list.

3. I'd like to see a "Are you sure you want to STOP the playback?" confirmation when hitting the stop button. After all, you probably hardly ever need to hit that button and it's so close to the Play/Pause that it's easy to hit it by accident.

4. I wish there was an easy, seamless way to skip forward in the playback (from one item to another. Like, maybe we have a teensy crowd and I'd like to skip over a trailer or three. On the old server I could hit pause, then skip-skip-skip until I got to where I wanted and hit play again. New improved system: hit pause, then >>| (wait), >>| (wait), etc. then hit play, whereupon it plays a couple seconds of where you paused it before skipping to the new selection. Should just be able to hit pause, then click where I want to be on the playlist, then hit play again.

5. It takes too long to do almost anything, considering it's a "computer" based system with a solid state drive. I thought it would be much faster than the SX3000 but it's oh-so-much slower.

In short, I wish they would have someone who actually designs user interfaces weigh in on designing these things. But I do get that they are really designed as a set-and-forget system, where some person at a desk sets everything up long in advance and nobody ever looks at it while it's playing.

[Steve Guttag]

For sure, the GDC SR1000 UI is a poky thing. I find it odd that some give the SX3000 praise because it is notably slower on the UI than either SX2000AR or its predecessors. The SR1000 has a 2TB Cache drive now so an external drive could be optional for the likes of a single-screen theatre. If one is running on the cache drive, you can ingest at full speed, even if a show is running.

I think part of the SR1000's UI speed problem is that it uses a Raspberry Pie kludged in for that portion. I'm not a fan of its home screen/dashboard as it does not help the user very much and it takes a day and a half for it to boot up.

I have not found the SR1000 to be that slow to ingest as compared to its predecessors. Be sure to use the USB 3 ports. Only the Dolby DSS servers could really ingest at full speed while showing a movie. Neither the current IMS or SR1000 are particularly fast at ingest while a movie is going (except if the SR1000 is on its cache drive) though the IMS is getting faster, I've noted.

As for "Seeking" or "jumping"...the DSS series was best there too as one could jump to any part in the show though the Doremi/IMS series is a close second, though one has to stop the show first. With the Doremi, one can merely move their cursor to the clip in the show they want to move to and with one click, that is where you'll start when you hit play. On the DSS servers, you stay in whatever transport state you were in when you enter your time. So, if you were playing, you stay playing, if you were paused, you stay paused, if you were stopped, you stay stopped.

[Frank Cox]

I have not found the SR1000 to be that slow to ingest as compared to its predecessors.

It's very slow to start ingesting compared to my previous server. Before I could select a dozen trailers, hit "ingest" and off she goes.

Now I select a trailer (or feature) and hit ingest and then it sits and it sits and it sits a while and it sits and then the ingest starts and runs at a reasonable speed until it gets to my next selection and then it sits and sits and sits and sits and then the ingest starts and round and round we go.

When it finally starts doing the actual copying of the files it's not bad but it takes forever-and-a-day to get to that point at the start and between each selected item.

In contrast to Mike's Qanp server, my Cinesend server opens right away when you select it on the list of available ingest sources. No waiting at all. Click Open. Blammo. Here you go. But you still wait (maybe not quite as long as off of a hard drive but still a fair while) for each selected ingest thing to start actually getting copied.

[Steve Guttag]

Hmmm...I'll check that nex ttime I'm in front of one. I'll admit, I don't, normally ingest via CRU into an SR1000...all of the ones I've installed are with TMS systems.

[Carsten Kurz]

As the SR1000 seems to use an off-the-shelf Raspberry PI, wondering wether they used different revisions of it in different SR1000 batches. I believe that Franks SR1000 was a rather early production unit, so, it could be that his SR1000 uses e.g. a Raspberry PI2, while more recent SR1000 may go as far as running a Raspberry PI4. Or a similar constellation causing these huge differences in GUI responsiveness.

[Marcel Birgelen]

There is an enormous I/O bump between the RasPi 2/3 and 4. Whereas the 2 and 3 still drive all I/O over an USB 2.0 bus, which essentially limits all I/O to about 300 MBit/s, the RasPi 4 implements USB 3.2 Gen 1 with a maximum sustainable thoughput of about 5 GBit/s.

[Carsten Kurz]

When the SR1000 was released, the PI 3 existed only for a few months. They probably have used a PI2 during SR1000 development, and maybe also for initial deliveries. They may put the PI4 on current SR1000.

http://www.film-tech.com/ubb/f16/t003086.html

The PI on the SR1000 does not necessarily need to be involved in high-speed transfers, as such, it's IO capability may not be relevant for ingest throughput. It may just direct ingest data to a dedicated high speed Gigabit connection on a different on-board controller.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I doubt they used any Pi-2's as the Pi-3 was around in many versions for aheck of a long time. Pi-4 with 8GB of ram is actually a pretty darn fast computer. The Raspberry people have not been able to release their latest single board computer because of supply chain issues. But it promises to be a major contender.

[Mike Blakesley]

The SR1000's promotional blurb sheet touted that ingest was blazingly fast, and you could even ingest blazingly fast while a movie was playing. Both of those things are false. I started a movie ingest while a show was playing, and by the end of the show it had only gotten to 13% or so.

My experience loading trailers seems to be different from Frank's -- here, you can't select a bunch of things from the list to ingest. You have to select, hit Ingest, wait for it to load. Then select, hit Ingest, wait, etc., rinse and repeat. If you try to select more than one item from the list it will unselect the first item when you click on the second one.

[Steve Guttag]

The only time I heard that the SR1000 ingest would be brisk was to the Cache drive...not to one of the conventional storage units.