Peripheral I/O solutions

[Greg Routenburg]

So, I've been in this very position and must say that I have the utmost sympathy for you. Playing content directly from the editors/sound mixers/film makers in these post production formats is nothing short of a nightmare. Having said that, my setup, when I was doing this 5 or 6 years ago, was a Mac with a booth monitor running off the Thunderbolt port and the HDMI output handling the audio and video. We stripped out the audio en route to the DVI input on the projector and brought in into the analog domain using a commercial 6ch D2A. We manually patched the audio into either a matrixed input for Lt/Rt or a 6Ch input for everything else on the sound processor. Newer sound processors have native HDMI pass through with software configurable format options though so that would skip a step. As Carsten suggests, for playback software, we used VLC for the lions share of it and Quicktime for the odd file that wouldn't play in VLC. VLC was nice because it played nicely with two monitors allowing the playlist and control panels to be displayed on a screen other than the theatre screen. It also has a setting that will auto fullscreen the playback to a specified monitor with the OSD muted. It actually made a pretty respectful presentation. You'll just want to make sure that the content is copied to internal storage rather than streaming from external portable storage. Also, give the computer as much RAM as it will hold. I also found it helpful to strongly encourage the content provider to export the content to some variety of MP4 from their editing software before delivering it. That achieved two things. It gave us a file that VLC was sure to play and required them to make sure the audio channels were setup properly. Other than that, it was cross your fingers and toes that there were no obscene scaling artifacts, framerate conversion artifacts or sound anomolies. If your projector is new enough though, it should be relatively smooth sailing.

[Carsten Kurz]

ProRes is also a production format - many pro and semipro cameras record ProRes. While for a screening, you may want to show some editing, color grading, etc, you rarely want to transcode before screening. Many software and hardware video players support ProRes playback, free/open source software as VLC, also Apples Quicktime Player. Most consumer grade media players can not show ProRes.

ProRes is also used a lot as an intermediate format, for mastering the final edit. It can have an unlimited number of audio channels, as it is typically wrapped in a Quicktime container (MXF is also possible). Typically, it is also the highest quality codec option for exporting offered on most video editors, at least on Macs. Unlike many other video formats, ProRes is quite solid, as it is controlled by a single company, Apple. As such, it is proprietary, but Apple does license it. E.g. ARRI cameras are able to record ProRes.

The 'native' format for Avids is not ProRes, but DNxHD.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I'm a bit out of touch with this. I've done screenings for film crews on film, DVD, and videotape, but it has been half a decade or more since I have done any of this stuff. Pro Res is a thing now for dailies screenings? How does that work? You get a bunch of files and someone says "play this"? Do the files have sound? Do you need a full Avid system to properly play them? I've fumbled around a bit with Avid's software, but never in the context of file playback. I can imagine that DCPs wouldn't be used for this purpose, but hadn't really thought about what would be,

Those days, dailies can be almost anything. For dailies, it doesn't really matter there is "garbage on screen", lights don't need to dim at exactly the right moment, you're not playing anybody's fixed playlist, so anything that can render a calibrated, as close to the original intended picture on-screen and working audio to the speakers goes. The format is highly dependent on who's providing the content. ProRes is pretty common, as most editing software allows you to export stuff directly into ProRes. It's accepted as a final delivery format by broadcasting companies. Also, like Carsten mentioned, many cameras can shoot and record directly into ProRes.

But it can also be a bunch of RAW files directly from a camera, which usually use their own software for playback, like RedCode Raw (REDCINE-X), ARRIRAW (ARRI Converter), Blackmagic RAW (Davinci Resolve).

Sometimes, you get post-production intermediates like OpenEXR (often used in Nuke workflows), DNxHD/HR (Avid) and yeah... ProRes. For ProRes, we simply use QuickTime as playback option, this has proven to be the most reliable and with the least overhead.

Quite often, you simply get someones unexported Avid, FinalCut, Davinci Resolve or Premiere project...

In some rare cases, you actually get DCPs, but all too often, they're broken "default exports" from some video editing software. Nowadays, most servers allow you to playback DCPs on-the-fly, but before Barco added it to their Alchemy software, we used a software player for DCPs that were delivered last-minute, because importing them can take a considerable amount of time.

As for audio-routing: It depends on the playback device. For the PC and Mac, we use a bunch of HDFury Vertex2 devices to split video and audio, which we then feed into separate matrix switchers, feeding the video to the active projector and the audio into the CP850 (in some cases, we feed the audio into a mixing panel first). In the future, I want to replace a bunch of the audio routing with Q-Sys... but that has been work-in-progress for a while now.

So yes, it generally is a mess, but figuring it out is what people end up paying you for.