Ingesting on a CineDigital set-up

[Dennis Benjamin]

I am now in charge of a few locations and I am working with the Cinedigital TMS program. I have run into an issue that I having trouble resolving. I occasionally make custom DCPs. Some of them won't fit on a flash drive and I have to put them on a portable SSD. Working with the GDC program in the past, I could ingest the DCP into the "theatre store" and then transfer them out to the auditorium servers. The file system on the portable storage device cannot be recognized by the individual servers as they are not formatted in a Linux friendly file format. Since GDC runs on a Windows computer, it recognizes the files easily. With Cinedigital, there is no "theatre store" to ingest the DCP to. None of the servers recognize the portable drive and won't mount it.

So the question is: What's the best way to resolve this? I tried formatting my portable storage drive to an EXT file format, but it still doesn't recognize the drive. I went through the Cinedigital manual and it looks like I can only ingest after creating a library using FTP. Is that the only way to ingest content that isn't recognized by the individual servers? There is no way to create a library from a drive?

Does anyone have experience with this? Any advice would be appreciated.

[Steve Guttag]

Dennis, why not create a "Theatre Store" on your Cine-Digital TMS computer? Or set up your computer that is creating the content as a FTP source and then have Cine-Digital treat that as a "Library?" Cine-Digital seems to allow one to have as many Libraries as desired. Thus far, the one client I have that is using CDM has used the screen servers to ingest content and then merely transfer them about as needed rather than having local storage on their Win11 computer. They have a mix of Dolby DSS200s and IMS3000 servers. Their IMS3000 has the 10.5TB NAS storage so they do have the ability to store a bit of content.

Also, it might be worth asking the CDM people about strategies that are consistent with your goals.

[Jesse Crooks]

Our CineDigital TMS is sitting inside a rack without any peripherals, and we use VNC to control it. As a result, we never use it for direct ingest. Instead, for content we receive via a cloud platform or a DCP transfer service, we use the manager workstations to transfer content directly to a screen server via FTP and then use the TMS to transfer it to other servers. This is our primary method for ingesting in-house content, since most of the files are small enough to share via Google Drive. For features we convert to DCP in house, we tend to use external hard drives and, as Steve said, ingest locally at a screen server and then use the TMS to transfer it. We almost never have compatibility issues.

For the second site where we plan to use CineDigital, you have to walk through the auditoriums to enter the booth. As a result, we’re considering locating the TMS in the first floor office so it can be the primary ingest point.

In terms of file systems, we’ve only ever had issues with Mac formatted hard drives that cannot be read by either the servers running Linux or the manager workstations running Windows. We recently starting telling filmmakers and other folks who provide their own DCP that we require it to be NTSF (preferred) or exFAT (for Mac users). We’ve never had to use EXT for in-house content.

[Gordon McLeod]

GDC will read normally a NFTS file system it has issues with fat16 though
The cinedigital should be able to read a portable USB drive plugged into it if one selects the option of USB/DVD in the content menu
we use all our cinedigitals with a synology nas as a content library

[Leslie Hartmier]

I am the person who installed and maintains all the CDM TMSes in the company that Gordon is talking about. CDM will accept EXT2, EXT3, and EXT4, as well as exFAT, FAT32, and NTFS.

Here are some suggestions that might help you:

1) Format the drive (thumb drive or portable SSD) to NTFS, copy the content to the thumb drive/external SSD, then plug the content into a USB port on the CDM TMS.
On CDM, under 'Transfer', then 'Source,' select *either* 'All' or whatever the selection is for DVD/USB/CRU (that is what we set the name of our 'at the TMS' ingest source to). Then, (obviously) set your Destination to the server you want to transfer to.
Click 'Refresh'. This will completely update all the content on ALL devices (and servers, if you selected 'All)
Then it's as simple as ingesting, just as you have been up to now.

2) If your manager's computer that you access the TMS is on the same network as the content server, you can easily just install FileZilla (or a similar FTP client software), then log into the content server you want to transfer the content to using FileZilla, transfer that, then if you want to transfer between servers, either send it via FileZilla or through the TMS. This will involve knowing the FTP information for the content server, but I imagine you have access to that.

3) If you only want to transfer using CDM, and the manager's computer is on the same network as the content servers, you can also install FileZilla SERVER (Caps to show the difference), set up a content account (example, content for a username, and content for a password), set up a location on the manager's computer for FileZilla to allow username 'content' to transfer from, THEN set up another source for the TMS to grab content from that points to the content on the manager's computer. This way is more involved, BUT it will simply act like a permanent source for content that you can always just transfer from, no USB drives involved (you can also modify the path to get content from, and the TMS and content servers will not notice a thing.)

I will say, I agree with Gordon that you really should consider a NAS to have some storage, and this is for a number of reasons. Our company will not allow ANY content to be transferred while a show is running, but the external storage allows for content to be ingested without complications. Additionally, it allows us to store 'permanent' content in one place, in case we ever need it again. There are other reasons, but in the end, that is your decision.

Considering that every content server we have ever used reads NTFS, FAT32, (not exFAT) in addition to their native formats (which I have tested, and includes not only EXT2/3/4, but also BtrFS, ReiserFS, XFS, and ZFS. I have not tested Apple's HFS, but I am aware that native support exists in Linux, although APFS and HFS+ (two other Mac formats) are awful, when they work at all), I confess that I am uncertain what format you are using. Only because I am 100% certain of NTFS being supported (exFAT isn't universally supported, although is technically supported in Linux via FUSE since 2009 Interestingly, Microsoft released the NTFS driver themselves, so now Linux can also write to NTFS drives),, I do recommend formatting your transfer drive with NTFS, since I can guarantee that it WILL work. Side note: EJECT the drive before disconnecting from the computer to copied the content from. GDC, at least, will sometimes refuse to recognise a USB drive if it is not properly ejected, and I wouldn't be surprised if that is an issue with Linux, and therefore CDM.

If none of this works, come back here and say as much, and I'll try to come up with additional suggestions. (I will be confused that they did not work though.)

[Dennis Benjamin]

Back to this Cinedigital subject:

I was successfully able to take care of the ingest problem. Now onto a new topic/issue:

It took me several days and actually working with the guys from Cinedigital to get our POS to send the schedule file to the TMS (it has to be sent through HTTP). I was successful in doing that part (as complicated as it was). Now a new issue has cropped up: We need a ten minute offset, I do NOT see a way to do that. Has anyone on here had to deal with this issue? I did send an email to the development team at their company and have not received a response back.

Four of the theatres I'm in charge of have Cinedigital and they run Screenvision ads. They typically do a ten minute offset.