How to keep on IMBs without using a cinema projector.?

[Miguel Moreno]

Hi every body.

I hope that both you and your families are well in these difficult times


As we all know, many cinemas have closed permanently, I have an 8-screen complex that had to close, and we had to take all the equipment out.
Currently the equipment is stored in a warehouse and I am mounting the IMBs in the projectors of another complex which I do not recommend due to the sensitivity of the equipment.


I wonder if there is a special charger with which the cards can be kept on without having to connect them to a projector

thanks

Mike Moreno

[Jesse Dovi]

I’m not aware of any way to keep them powered without a projector. Our projectors were shut down from March - June. Come to find out the batteries had not been replaced for years in the media blocks and I had 4 fail. GDC is currently offering to repair them, which is welcome news since a new one is $5000. Even so, at $600 per unit and a bunch of down time it was a pain. Anyhow, I think that they need to be in the projector and the projector should be turned on at least once per week for a few hours. If you have GDC stuff they are currently offering an 18 month warranty on older servers and media blocks for $600 per screen. I guess you could buy that and then just take your chances on the media blocks dying. Not a lot of good options.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Hi every body.

I hope that both you and your families are well in these difficult times


As we all know, many cinemas have closed permanently, I have an 8-screen complex that had to close, and we had to take all the equipment out.
Currently the equipment is stored in a warehouse and I am mounting the IMBs in the projectors of another complex which I do not recommend due to the sensitivity of the equipment.


I wonder if there is a special charger with which the cards can be kept on without having to connect them to a projector

thanks

Mike Moreno

Nope, nothing available yet to power them up that I know of. You just have to go in and power up the projectors a couple times a month for an hour or so. GDC SX-3000 IMB Certificate Batteries should be replaced before the three year mark, and the full size servers can go for five years before needing battery replacement. I went 6 years on some of the full size servers, Then all of a sudden I lost the cert in an SX-3000 that was exactly three years old. Back then, even GDC in this country did not know about the time limits on those batteries, Then they all of a sudden put out bulletins about changing the cert batteries...

[Ioannis Syrogiannis]

Please keep in mind that it's not only the IMB that has certificates and batteries to keep alive. It's the ICP also.
So, try to use the projectors once in a while.
There was a thread here about six months ago where Steve Guttag mentioned EP-100 from USL, that would power a Dolby Cat.745.
The thread was named something else, so, here it is: http://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/m...=2396#post2396
But that is now unavailable.
In the same thread, for Dolby IMS1000/2000/3000, there is an external charger. I wonder how would that work with other IMBs/IMSs...
So, here is a niche for the rest of companies to jump in.
Especially now, that the need is wider.

Edit: Is that Dolby solution now out? Does it have a price tag? I haven't checked yet.

[Jim Cassedy]

I wonder if there is a special charger with which the cards can be kept on without having to connect them to a projector

During a webinar sometime this past spring, I seem to recall Dolby showing special jig you could plug one of their IMB's into which would power it up and allow you to program or troubleshoot it without it being installed in a projector, and of course that could also be used to keep the batteries topped off. If my memory is correct (and there's a 50% chance of that) they hadn't come up with a price yet, but were planning on doing so & marketing it at CINEMACON 2020, which of course was canceled. I just checked their latest "new products" and price lists, and I don't see such a product listed, but I do recall that many watching that presentation commented that it would be a useful device. I thought I had video from that event archived on my computer & was going to grab a screenshot, but I can't seem to find the file. Perhaps some of you watched the same presentation and have a better memory than I do.

[Leo Enticknap]

I was at that Dolby webinar, too, but haven't actually seen the Dolby powered IMB/IMS cage, or a price for it. If you had one, you could cycle units in and out to charge.

Ioannis Syrogiannis[/URL]]Please keep in mind that it's not only the IMB that has certificates and batteries to keep alive. It's the ICP also.

Yes, but there isn't much you can do about the ICP. The certificate battery is a one-time battery, soldered onto the board and not user replaceable. Unless you are prepared to keep the projector powered up for as long as it would be under regular operating circumstances, there isn't much you can do to extend its life. I wouldn't be surprised if, when the C19 crisis is over, we'll be facing a deluge of dead ICPs, especially in early Series 2 projectors. Their batteries are coming up to the 10-year design life.

If you have media blocks with one-time batteries (e.g. most if not all GDCs, Dolby cat745, Barco ICMP, or Doremi IMB), then if you replace them before mothballing the equipment and then again when recommissioning, you should be OK. But for media blocks with rechargeable batteries (e.g. Dolby cat862, DSP100, IMS1000/2000/3000), the only way you can preserve the certificate is to power them up once for a day or two every now and again. In the case of IMBs or IMSes, that means powering up the projector in which they are installed.

[Pete Naples]

I put a customer's equipment into storage whilst they did some majot refurbishment. We just set it up on benches with timers to power it on every wother week.

2 years later it's re installed and workign without a hitch.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I would think one could build such a cage to power IMB's pretty easily.... The voltage pin outs have to be the same on all brands since they are interchangeable....

[Dave Macaulay]

Barco and Christie have been less than helpful on this, they don't know (or won't tell) if the battery life is different with a shelved ICP vs one in a projector with typical use ... or what happens with one in a small town cinema with only a few hours a week powered up.
Or if the TI "10 year" life specification is assuming the system is powered several hours a day.
I assume the RTC and cert store memory are powered from the system power when on, and the battery should therefore last considerably longer in use. But that's just a guess.
At least Barco offers refurb ICPs at a good discount off the new price. Haven't asked Christie or NEC.

[Leo Enticknap]

Given that there are a lot of early Series 2 projectors still installed (I would guess an order of magnitude more than Series 1 survivors) and that it looks like a significant number may be powered off for the best part of a year, either the projector manufacturers or TI themselves may well come under a lot of pressure to fix ICPs with dead batteries for a figure that represents little more than their cost in doing it. If all the ICPs in a 10-plex are found to be dead when the time comes to open it back up again, that's a $50k bill right there if they have to buy new ones.

[Carsten Kurz]

I brought the upcoming mass dying of ICPs up on one of the recent ISDC meetings. Seems that TI wants to keep this low profile - they were contacted about it, and more or less admitted it, but didn't saw a problem with it. They seem to think that the natural spread of dying ICPs over a few years will cover it.

What I learned is that ICPs can only be serialized by the manufacturing company (which is NOT TI, and not the cinema OEMs, Barco, Christie, NEC). So there is another party involved.
Currently, it looks as if they simply wait for it to happen. They seem to think that 10 years is enough life for an ICP.

[Steve Guttag]

There needs to be a "program" for changing out ICPs, really. And it should be a proactive one.

Of note, all of the Series 3 and beyond, the OEMs make their own "ICP" like module. Barco's is the ICP-D and the ICMP (Alchemy) The ICP-D is lower cost than an ICP so I would presume that is what Barco/Cinionic is going to tell people with dead ICPs. Because a $3 battery should be changed with a $5K board.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

I would think one could build such a cage to power IMB's pretty easily.... The voltage pin outs have to be the same on all brands since they are interchangeable....

Wouldn't that be as simple as getting the cage from an older (but compatible) projector of any brand and feeding the correct voltages from pretty much any power supply? All it would take is one donor projector to build one...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Wouldn't that be as simple as getting the cage from an older (but compatible) projector of any brand and feeding the correct voltages from pretty much any power supply? All it would take is one donor projector to build one...

Tony, I would think it would be unless other aux signals from a projector also need to be present.

[Leo Enticknap]

As Mark notes, a wrinkle might be that the IMB or IMS plugs into PCI connectors (usually just one for an IMB or SDI/Enigma board, two for an IMS, or three for a Barco ICMP, if I remember correctly) on the backplane (Barco) or motherboard (NEC). If that board needs to receive commands from another board to tell it to provide power to the IMB/IMS/SDI Enigma card option slot, then that's not going to happen if you remove the card cage, with that board on the back of it, from the projector, and then try to power it standalone.

I know that on the NEC NC1100 that is not the case and that simple power to the motherboard will power the option slot, thanks to a mistake I made recently. I had to replace the DCI tamper switch buried in the bottom left hand corner of the card cage. It was an absolute pigf****r of a job, that involved a lot of disassembly to get the card cage out of the projector. When I reinstalled the DIV card that sits horizontally on top of the card cage, I accidentally pushed the male PCI connector on the card over the top of the female one on the motherboard, rather than into it. When everything was reassembled and powered up, I got two red lights on the ICP, and the GDC SX-3000 in the option slot booted up. But otherwise, the projector was completely dead. So that model of motherboard at least will pass power through passively to the slots, in the absence of any control logic telling it not to. But that doesn't necessarily mean that others will.