Current TMS solutions

[Mattias Mattsson]

Hi all,

I would be interested in opinions on current TMS solutions (still supported by the supplier). What do you use? Pros/Cons etc?

Rosetta Bridge from Unique X is what is most common around here (probably due to the Norwegian heritage of the company). It works nice and their RosettaNet thing is really neat.

Arts Alliance Screenwriter is also used at some sites here, but I have less experience with it.


Others I know of, but have no personal experience with:

- Comscore Cinema ACE

- GDC TMS-2000

- CinéDigital Manager

- Cinemeccanica Streamer

- Dolby TMS4

- CineXpert e-TMS

- Vista Cinema TMS

[Shibu Paul]

Halo Mattias Mattsson

Me personal experince, please gor with AA Screen writer.


Regards
ShibuPaul

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

During the course of all the digital conversions I used GDC TMS exclusively. It's easy to understand, inexpensive and very straight foreword to set up and use. They will also allow a 30 day trial. Today it accommodates pretty much all servers and the license cost is reasonable, and gets renewed every two years. You also get GDC's excellent support along with it.

[Gordon McLeod]

We tried GDC TMS at the beginning and being windows based it proved very unreliable eapwcially with CRU drives. We use the Linux Box Cinedigital with hardly any issues and excellent support. It was very economical and no renewing fees

[Steve Guttag]

At this point, we support three TMS systems. Which one is really based on how much hands-on the client really wants, particularly at the theatre level.

• Cine Digital Manager is more for the hands-on TMS. If you like the classic Doremi UI (right down to the Fisher-Price colors) then this is the TMS for you. You build up shows in the CDM TMS the same way you would on a classic Doremi and send them to the various servers. It does provide for mapping cues that may not match between the various server brands (including what a Black Pattern is versus a BLAC-MOS CPL).
  
  I give it a negative strike for not, natively, knowing the Eprad eCNA automation but the Integ JNIOR. Both are popular and both should be supported equally...like they are on the various SMS servers. It's not too big a deal and I'm sure most wouldn't use the direct to automation function but think about POS interaction and controlling lamps based on if someone is in the audience or not.
  
  CDM has done away with the free versions now (it used to be free for 1-2 screens) but the license is perpetual still though there is a very nominal fee after the first year (or maybe two) when you change your configuration (server brands/serial numbers) such that they have to issue a new license. The software is licensed to the mediablock serial numbers...so a server-swap can result in needing a new license...which is a nuisance. I think, if you are licensed for 3-screens, you are licensed for 3-screens and changing out servers due to any one of a number of reasons shouldn't necessitate a new license.
• GDC TMS2000. This is sort of a middle-ground TMS that isn't fully automated but isn't fully manual either. That said, it has evolved and now has the templating that the higher-end TMSes offer to make things more automatic. I like that they adopted the Dolby Show Manager style of building the shows horizontally (classic GDC SMS servers did have a horizontal version of the show in the edit page at the top...it is MUCH easier to move clips around by dragging than doing it vertically, in my opinion). GDC has kept the color coding to make it all more visually easy to work with.
  
  I find ingesting on the GDC to be a bit clunky and knowing which tab/portion each piece gets ingested. Content transfers having "exceptions" is a common occurrence so one does have to check to make sure everything got there and resend as many times as necessary to complete the task.
  
  It has an email client but I've found it to be flaky and the paper trail of what went wrong is non-existent. It's a good feature but I wouldn't depend on it working.
  
  GDC is licensed but at a relatively reasonable amount for what it does and tech support is good.
• Comscore (Hollywood Software) ACE (the current version of what was the TCC). This is for fully automated theatres. About all the manager has to interact with are the "packs." That is, the trailer and ad packs. There are numerous segments in the show to get the more valuable parts closer to the feature (or even post-feature). It is template based so there is a very high uniformity to the shows.
  
  One can run ACE on Windows Server (so far, we've used 2019) or Linux and there are on-prem and cloud based. There are also "Enterprise" variants so if corporate wants to set the ads and trailers, so be it (not to mention monitoring their "empire." The on-prem versions do NOT have an email client for KDMs...which I think is unthinkable in a package of this type but I believe their cloud version does have an email version. Then again, their cloud version is maintained by them. All that is on-site is a NAS to load content and to move it about. Interaction is via web browser so it matters not where one bookmarks that. Since ACE, by default keeps 48-hours ahead with respect to having content and SPLs where they below (this is configurable), a loss of cloud service for a short period will not affect booth operations (but would affect any changes that may be needed before the cloud comes back). Then again, if the cloud disappears, I would think that the various POS systems and credit cards would have issues too.
  
  ACE is the costliest of the three listed by me but not prohibitively so. Its normal competitor is Arts Alliance "Screenwriter."

Of those listed, I would discount the Dolby TMS. While it is still licensable, there is no software development any further so it will no longer be current, or updated and is not as equipment agnostic (it has a heavy Dolby/Doremi slant...I wonder why). So, if you have it, sure, continue to use it but I would question starting out with something that has reached the end of its road unless you really just want to get your DSS servers and IMS servers with a unified system. One can also load the Dolby TMS onto a DSL100 or DSL200...so, no new hardware, if you have one. However, those are getting long-in-the-tooth so you could be one breakdown away from scrapping your TMS.

[Leo Enticknap]

The Dolby/Doremi TMS is no longer offered for sale or supported. My understanding is that Dolby will renew existing licenses, but are no longer selling new ones.

I've done the training for RosettaBridge and played with the free version of CinéDigital (when there was one), but not the others that Mattias lists. They are both hugely impressive in terms of features (though arguably less so for ease of use when doing the operator basics - substantial end user training would definitely be needed for someone coming to them cold), but the list price per screen year is simply too high for most small chains, indies, and screening rooms, which is the main market I service.

That basically leaves GDC and Cinedigm/Theater Command Center with that sector of the market to themselves, at least here in the USA. Of those, I have by far the most experience with GDC. That experience is that once it is set up right it is reasonably reliable, and doing the basics (ingestion, KDM wrangling, SPL building, and shunting stuff back and forth over the media LAN) is intuitive and not a horrible learning curve for your average duty manager.

Setting it up right, though, is not easy and takes significant thought. Not only is it Windows based, but you have to install several third party components (e.g. Postgres and Filezilla Server) and configure them correctly, as well as the GDC installer itself. We have a standard image that goes with our own hardware configuration for a TMS in which the GDC software is pretty solid, but getting to that took a lot of experimentation and tweaking.

As Gordon notes, being Windows-based means that there is no native support for Linux-formatted, ISDCF-compliant DCP distribution drives. All the freebie Linux readers for Windows out there we've tried have caused stability problems. WSL will not mount drives automatically, and theater managers cannot be expected to enter commands into a terminal window. The good news is that we've found the Paragon reader to be rock solid, and combined with enabling hot plug in the BIOS for the SATA jack to which the CRU reader is connected, the system behaves pretty much as if it can read these drives natively, at least as far as the end user is concerned. At $20 a license, the cost of Paragon is insignificant in the context of the overall cost of a TMS system.

[Steve Guttag]

Leo, Dolby will still issue new licenses (I've priced them out in recent history) but yes, it is a dead product, in terms of development.

On the CRU front, I'd go with USB3 instead of eSATA (unless it is an internal drive)...hot plugging is native to it. I would caution against having just 1 CRU bay for an LMS. The pins on them can (and do) become damaged...you don't want the LMS to have a bottleneck because the one bay is down.

TCC is done (still runs but it has hit the end of the road on development and Comscore will transfer a TCC license to ACE). The trick is if the hardware that is running TCC is up to running ACE. I've heard of some loading in Linux to allow ACE to run on the same hardware. Most TCC system were running Windows Server 2003 and later ones 2008.

Thus far, for our smallest clients, Cine Digital Manager has seen the most appeal. Yeah, it can be a higher entry cost but it will run on Windows XP and they have a Linux version. The new version (3) will be Windows 7 and later (and Linux). So, the cost of the hardware that runs it is pretty minimal. If you are just a 1-3 screen theatre, having an LMS (storage on the TMS) may not be a big deal as one can ingest on the SMS servers and let the TMS move things about, as needed.

[Leo Enticknap]

Interesting. A few months ago I was told by one of my bosses that new DolRemi TMS licenses were no longer available, after asking for a quote on behalf of a customer who was looking to upgrade from a Dolby Show Manager system.

If they are, there will be a hardware problem. The DolReMi TMS only runs under a specific version of CentOS (can't remember exactly which), and Supermicro no longer makes motherboards on which it will install. We had this problem earlier this year when a customer's motherboard failed, found that the model in question was no longer available, and when we tried to install that CentOS version on the motherboard model that we now use as standard for our TMS systems, found that it wouldn't. Much scouring of the Internet followed, the upshot of which is that if new server motherboards on which that version of CentOS can be installed are still available, they are not easy to find.

On the CRU front, I'd go with USB3 instead of eSATA (unless it is an internal drive)...hot plugging is native to it. I would caution against having just 1 CRU bay for an LMS. The pins on them can (and do) become damaged...you don't want the LMS to have a bottleneck because the one bay is down.

We put two internal CRU readers in our regular TMS offering. On pretty much all server and many consumer motherboards now, hot plugability can be enabled or not in BIOS, but is usually disabled by factory default. The problem with USB CRU readers is the connection itself - the jacks on the motherboard or case tend to get damaged with repeated insertion and pulling (remember all those cat91Z boards we used to have to change out on DSS200s?), strain on the cables eventually causes them to fail, etc. etc.

[Dave Macaulay]

Well, the GDC TMS is the one I would avoid.
OK if you just use it as a TMS for playlist generation and scheduling but with the "enterprise storage" to do content storage and ingesting on the TMS we have only had problems.
The RAID unit would often get lost, with ingests going to the system drive. That, of course, fills up before a feature ingest completes.
The system with storage and the ingest unit just seems an unreliable kludge. The 3 we installed were returned to us. Might have one available if anyone wants it.
We do have the base TMS working ok without the local RAID, doing scheduling from Vista. Ingests are done at the servers, some Dolbyremi and some GDC internal.
We have been installing Rosetta Bridge on new builds and replacing Dolby TMS. As said, that's no longer updated plus ours are all 10+ years old and having hardware problems.
Personally i don't like the ones that generate a new playlist for every show.

[Harold Hallikainen]

The DolReMi TMS only runs under a specific version of CentOS (can't remember exactly which), and Supermicro no longer makes motherboards on which it will install. We had this problem earlier this year when a customer's motherboard failed, found that the model in question was no longer available, and when we tried to install that CentOS version on the motherboard model that we now use as standard for our TMS systems, found that it wouldn't. Much scouring of the Internet followed, the upshot of which is that if new server motherboards on which that version of CentOS can be installed are still available, they are not easy to find.

Interesting! Why would that version of CentOS not install? Secure boot, maybe? In the past couple years, I moved from CentOS to AlmaLinux on the virtual private server I rent. I was able to move everything over and get it to work (though I had to mess with some 32 bit to 64 bit migration). On OS version changes, I've mostly had to make changes to PHP code since some old features are replaced by new ones.

Anyway, it would be interesting to know why the old CentOS version would not install and why DolReMi TMS will not run under a more current version.

Harold
https://w6iwi.org

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

We tried GDC TMS at the beginning and being windows based it proved very unreliable especially with CRU drives. We use the Linux Box Cinedigital with hardly any issues and excellent support. It was very economical and no renewing fees

I never had any issues at all with GDC and I generally only updated them once a year. The first ones went in around 2011l, and all, of the TMS systems we built are still running today... minus two sites that closed permanently. All were built on Dell 2950's and even most of those are still running. I am up to having replaced 5 servers out of the 43 original TMS systems. OS and programs run on RAID 1 and the media is on a RAID 5. Three were replaced with R-810's and two with Computer store built on site PC's.... All is well...

[Steve Guttag]

Personally i don't like the ones that generate a new playlist for every show.

I'm curious as to why. It may seem like clutter but it does (TCC/ACE) remove them after a preset time. A big advantage to them is that you know what actually ran on that show, particularly when ads or trailers are being serviced. Furthermore, the updated show can be made/pushed while a show is running since one is not modifying a show in progress.

the jacks on the motherboard or case tend to get damaged with repeated insertion and pulling

Never had one of the ones on the rear of the server get damaged...nobody goes behind there. That is where our CRU bays plug in. It would probably be wise to always have a USB hub for the front port to act as a sacrificial set of ports.

[Ioannis Syrogiannis]

[...][*]Cine Digital Manager is more for the hands-on TMS. If you like the classic Doremi UI (right down to the Fisher-Price colors) then this is the TMS for you.
[...]

Wait and have a look on the version 3 color overhaul. The look seems a bit like accessibility features were turned on.
I hadn't the time to look for differences of substance, it was yesterday, Friday (updates just before the weekend should be banned under inter-galactic law) that I got a pop-up if I want to update (without a mention that it would be a major version update).
I would like to make clear that "packages" are available on CDM as well. One that haven't used it might not deduct the fact from the discussion.

Rosetta Bridge being the first TMS I became familiar with a few years ago (unless you count film schedule programs as theater management systems), I liked the individual playlists for each screening, only when I hadn't had to use the cine-servers' user interface.

I had an issue with Cine Digital Manager since I used with an Alchemy. I had to include an intermission on a 25fps DCP. Because of difference on durations vs. frames, the intermission and the end of playing of the CPL took place earlier. The actual film stopped playing before credits and going back in the playlist didn't let it resume either. A native classic was playing (25fps?) and a full audience was really unhappy.
I did contact the CDM team and shared as much info I could, but I didn't hear from them with a "eureka"/"solved it" response.
Since then, the intermission playlists on Alchemy are edited manually. I wonder if the issue is native on Alchemy(-X) servers, since they use a cue for intermission, and not the SPL that a TMS makes. Hence, I wonder if that problem with 25fps (or other than 24) is common on all TMSs.
That's one thing to be checked on CDM v.3, even though it is to be decommissioned.

[Steve Guttag]

My suspicion is that the ICMP and its quirks are to blame. It treats its own black patterns as special in that one can start a show while still on an HDMI input...only if the show starts with a black pattern...if you should cross over into DCP content before switching the projector to a DCP input...the player stops. To me, that is a glaring defect in its design. It should not care WHAT input the projector is looking at while it runs a DCP. In fact, I have one client that makes up dummy shows for Blu-ray performances. They put all of the cues in on the dummy show and hit play on the Blu-ray and DCP simultaneously, so the DCP times out the various cues...including doing preshow via DCP and transition over to Blu-ray. This is beyond the ICMP.

That said, anytime I've found that there are FPS changes in shows, different servers behave differently. TMSes can behave differently too. This can really show up when Cine Canvas is responsible for captions/subtitles. Some servers set up the ENTIRE SPL as one big show for the captions (timed-text) and if there are different frame rates, it can cause captions to be misplaced. There is also the reality that the server and ICP (or the equivalent) will lose sync at the frame rate transition...so that has to be allowed for (hide it in a blank and possibly douser-down to avoid any flash).

I have a client using CineDigital and definitely has multiple frame rates (30fps more than 25fps interspersed with 24fps). The servers are Dolby DSS and IMS3000. I have not heard of issues.

CineDigital DID send out an announcement about the version 3 update to its dealers, for sure. I also informed my customers about it coming out. The first question I got was "are they going to do something about the color scheme?" While I'm no huge fan, I have not found it to be a detriment. I want things that work much more than the cosmetics.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I found that many digital cinema servers originally used one RPL per show and later changed to one RPL per composition to deal with frame rate change issues. The timed text file includes an edit rate and time code rate. In the system I designed, these are used in the conversion of HH:MM:SS:E_ to edit units which are then used to determine when captions are displayed. So, these systems SHOULD properly display captions as frame rate changes through a show. Note also that the SMPTE standard for sync of external renderers recommends a single RPL per show to avoid gaps in playback.

I also recall ISDCF tests of frame rate changes. Pretty much every system flashed on a frame rate change. I suspect most people close the dowser on a frame rate change.

Harold