DOLBY IMS 2000 Stuck ingest progress that can not be deleted or canceled

[Steve Guttag]

Carsten...I'm not angry in the slightest...ASCII isn't good at conveying emotion too well. With respect to Mark (and I do like the "reMark")...while I do realize that I did add to the static on this thread (including this post), I don't think Mark quite gets that his comments are, at best, not helpful/non sequitur. And, if his only goal is to get a rise out of someone...then yes, he is being a dick. There is a time and place for most everything. When someone is in distress, that goal of any contribution should be to help that person not act like a child and spout how nice their life is. Compare that to one seeing opinions on what to buy...then all bets are off as anyone is free to like whatever they like for whatever reason.

Mind you, I have sold, installed and serviced MOST of the projectors and servers based on the DLP platform so you won't find me often overtly condemning one of them. And, let's face it, MOST of this stuff is pretty good and will yield a reasonably long service life. There are some definite exceptions, particularly surrounding the initial introduction/release.

So I come back to...Mark has been in the industry a long time...he has experience to offer that can really help people. There is zero reason to make a post, while someone is in distress, that effectively says "you bought the wrong stuff."

[Marcel Birgelen]

ASCII isn't good at conveying emotion too well.

We're doing Unicode with smileys nowadays, although the last time I used extended Unicode characters as a subject title, the local Unicode-police must have changed that back to more ASCII-compliant characters...

With respect to Mark (and I do like the "reMark")...while I do realize that I did add to the static on this thread (including this post), I don't think Mark quite gets that his comments are, at best, not helpful/non sequitur. And, if his only goal is to get a rise out of someone...then yes, he is being a dick.

Well, we probably all know Mark's routine of chiming in and claiming that his NEC or GDC stuff NEVER experienced anything like this Dolby or Barco stuff. It's almost more reliable as an atomic clock or the "Save the Cat" moment in your latest superhero blockbuster. I consider it as a kind of keep-alive, at least we still know everything is still good and well with Mark. But it's a bit like a spider watching for his/her pray, just waiting for you to react to it. :P

Still, you two should consider that evening comedy program for cinema-tech geeks, once the zombies have cleared the streets.

[Mike Qu]

To all friends,
As we ship back the IMS2000 board to the dealer,they solved this issue by "reset" the board,I think it is like clear the system and rebluid it.I ask them how to do this,but they didn't tell me
The dealer tell me the issue is cause by the self-made DCP.But the DCPs are all made by DCPomatic，the tool is very good and I have made many dcps by it.So I don't agree the dealer's words.
The same DCPs/KDMS that cause the issue and originally store in the IMS2000 had been successfully uploadedd and played very well now.

So submarize the progress of this issue:
Reboot the IMS2000: not work
Reboot the projector and IMS2000: not work
rePlugin the usb driver contain the DCP that the issue progress deal with: not work
rebuild the storage raid: not work
update the software version through GUI: not work. upload work,but after reboot,software version do not change.
replace the small borad on IMS2000(size is like a rubber,I think it contain the software): not work. the software version goes to higher version,but the issue still there.
ship back and do something like "factory reset": work.

[Leo Enticknap]

If the same DCP that gave the trouble ingested and played OK after the IMS2000 came back from Dolby, then the problem clearly wasn't a bad DCP (either the files themselves, or the drive on which they arrived). My guess is that something got scrambled on the /opt partition, and this is what they nuked to defaults.

Well, we probably all know Mark's routine of chiming in and claiming that his NEC or GDC stuff NEVER experienced anything like this Dolby or Barco stuff. It's almost more reliable as an atomic clock or the "Save the Cat" moment in your latest superhero blockbuster.

Reminds me of a chief projectionist I worked under early in my career, in a three-screen arthouse in London. He had a pathological hatred of Philips/Kinoton equipment, and loved anything Cinemeccanica. Two of the screens had Vic 8s, and the third DP70s (Norelco AAIIs). At that time, I wasn't really knowledgeable or experienced enough to evaluate their relative pros and cons: all I knew is that I loved working the DP70s, and found the Vic 8s fiddly and frustrating to clean and thread up, and to convert between 35mm and 70mm. This suited the chief fine, who would rant loudly and often about "fucking chickenshit mickey mouse Philips equipment." For his 60th birthday, he was given a framed photo of what remained of the Philips factory in Eindhoven after the RAF had bombed it the previous night during WWII, which occupied pride of place on the wall above his workbench in Screen 1's booth (personally I felt queasy about that, because lots of innocent people died in that raid; but was too young and too junior to say anything). Anyways, on most shifts (Screen 2 ran from a tower, but 1 and 3 were both 20-minute changeovers, so two projectionists were always working), he was happy to leave the DP70s to me, and I was equally happy with that arrangement.

Three decades later, I am still puzzled as to why he felt so strongly about it. Both models of projector have their good points and their gotchas, and both will put out a good picture if properly operated and maintained.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I also suspect some local file system damage on the system. What I don't understand that replacing the OS drive didn't solve the problem though.

I guess next time you may want to replace the Big Borad for Great Success.

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Three decades later, I am still puzzled as to why he felt so strongly about it. Both models of projector have their good points and their gotchas, and both will put out a good picture if properly operated and maintained.

I guess we all are, to some extend, biased towards the stuff we know that works. Experience has thought us that X and Y fit together well and seldomly cause problems, so we tend to implement it this way. If someone comes along claiming that he/she has a bad experience with X and/or Y, we'll tend to defend our position, I guess that's a pretty natural reaction. What I've learned over the years though is that others may come up with different solutions to a problem than you and while some of them may really be crappy, not all of them are. Those solutions may have a set of problems, but so do have our own solutions, since nothing in this world is perfect.

Going back to projectors, I guess that almost everybody who has worked with either a DP70 or Vic8 will find the former to be the superior projector in general, there probably was some kind of personal grudge against Philips or maybe some bad personal experience with some other Philips-built projector in the past.. But that in itself doesn't imply that everything produced by Cinemeccanica was shitty, nor does it imply that everything produced by Philips was golden. Over the years I've come to accept that brands are just a sticker on a product. Although some brands maintain a higher level of consistency than others, there is nothing magical about them, as most manufacturers have had their "bad apples" over the years and many companies shift shape over the years. Dolby, for example, may have been a high-quality engineering company that designed and built killer hardware that would last forever and was highly maintainable, nowadays, most of their stuff is just off-the-shelf components, just like everybody else. Not that their products are bad, but they don't really stand out that much anymore, among the different options that are available.

[Sam Chavez]

I could go and do, but to the homegrown US tech, and I am one, it's less intuitive and somewhat intimidating. The exciter lamp door was weird and not so reliable and the adjustments on the sound head were obscure enough that no one ever actually did a proper A chain. There was one wacky version of an FP20 where the light from the exciter was relayed via a plastic light guide ala DP70 but badly executed. I changed it out to a directly lighted solar cell and the level came up an astonishing 14 dB. However, Kinoton/Norelco aimed way higher on the engineering front and a properly maintained projector just purrs. Even the film is seemingly happy. The V8 looked like some monstrosity to a union operator used to Xl's, Century's and Ashcrafts, Futura lamps. And those manual rewinds that would get all the way back to head in 13 minutes, plus or minus several feet of leader. Speaking of manuals, Kinoton's were precise and yet puzzling. They were impressive manuals so one thought immediately, we were unqualified. The V8/V18 manuals if you could find one, were pretty damn crude.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I don't think Mark quite gets that his comments are, at best, not helpful/non sequitur.

Apparently not as they sure stir up some very good, constructive conversation once in a while!

[Kenneth Wuepper]

Rather fun and interesting. Like watching the two guys in the box seat from the Muppets.

[Dave Macaulay]

I don't think you can see the boot/OS drive from the GUI. Log in as root in a terminal window and you can access the entire file structure. The boot files and OS are not on the RAID to the best of my knowledge.Try removing all three drives and starting the server, I expect it will boot with some severe error warnings about the missing RAID proving there is a boot flash drive in it somewhere.
The 1000 and 2000 GUIs are pretty much identical, the IMS3000 uses a Dolby GUI that's very different from the Doremi one on the 1000 and 2000 - it's similar to the CP850/950 GUI.

[Steve Guttag]

Over the years I've come to accept that brands are just a sticker on a product.

While that is becoming more true by the moment as companies hire individuals and firms for the purpose of producing products, back in the film projector days, particularly of Philips/Kinoton and Cinemeccanica...they were more than mere badges. They were design philosophies. One could absolutely follow the progression/evolution of those brands through their projector models. There weren't too many "jump-cuts" in them. The DP75 was THE oddball of the Kinoton group as it shared very little with other Kinoton and legacy projectors. There are a handful of Kinotony things in it (intermittent shaft coupler for framing is one example) but most things about it are just different and didn't seem to fit with the rest of the product line/legacy. Oddly, THAT is the projector Ballantyne based the "Pro" 35 and "Pro 70" on, as far as gear train.

Dolby, for example, may have been a high-quality engineering company that designed and built killer hardware that would last forever and was highly maintainable, nowadays, most of their stuff is just off-the-shelf components, just like everybody else.

Um...no. That is, yes Dolby has been a high-quality engineering company. Their hallmark has been in their intellectual property, not in their hardware manufacture. Little to nothing in Dolby's list of hardware was more than off-the-shelf parts (speaking to their analog audio based stuff). Certainly, the cinema processors through the CP65 used off-the shelf parts. Part of their reliability is by using off-the-shelf parts that are robust in quality/reliability. Heck, the CP200's audio switches were car parts! That said, something designed to survive the rigors of being used in automobiles is going to stand up pretty well in a projection booth. Unfortunately, their success with the CP100 power supply gave them confidence in power supply design/manufacture/selection as Dolby has had a special talent in making/selecting power supplies that fail ever since. And even if they picked a good power supply, they picked a connector that would burn up.

As to documentation. Sam has summed up Philips/Kinoton pretty well. There were more drawings that could be had from Kinoton than they put in their Service manuals (pretty detailed drawings about assemblies) but for whatever reason (that secretiveness that someone might try to steal their ideas...yeah in this industry where cheap is king...yeah right). I'd give Simplex the trophy for best drawings on their machines and probably the best mechanical designs. Very little on Simplex happened by accident or happenstance. There is a lot of clever in them. Century drawings, while sufficient, are artist conceptions. Ballantyne are the stuff of comic books. Sam also hit the nail on the head of our Italian friends, at least as far as we could obtain documentation in the US with respect to them.

I think Leo is absolutely right on his assessment of why some have a preference/hatred to brands. There is also likely "imprinting" by those that work with a particular brand/model early in their career. There is also something to liking/disliking a brand not just for what it does/doesn't do but the support the manufacturer provides for it after the sale. Some just make you regret the purchase because what should be the simplest thing becomes an ordeal. How many have been greeted with (after running into a problem) "That is not possible" or, the never ending favorite, "You're the first to ever have complained about that." If only we had cell phones with cameras back in the day to shoot a picture of the problem.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Oh Steve, that's a load of crap. Dolby's hallmark until Ray passed away was the actual equipment they invented and marketed that encompassed just about every audio and video industry known to man.. Licensing was just a part of it. Today of course that's all been reversed since there is no Ray and it is run by the B.O.D. by the bottom line. Today they are primarily a licensing firm.

[Leo Enticknap]

How many have been greeted with (after running into a problem) "That is not possible" or, the never ending favorite, "You're the first to ever have complained about that."

There is a big difference, IMHO, between "You're the first to ever have complained about that, so you can bugger off and fix it yourself," and "You're the first to ever have complained about that, so please forgive the delay while we try to figure out a solution."

I've had two instances of the latter with Barco/Cinionic, and in both cases I was impressed with how seriously they took the issue, and the staff resources they threw into coming up with a solution or workaround. The first involved a DP4K-32B that would suddenly throw a red tail light and freeze the image for no apparent reason. A lot of poring over logs and back-and-forth with Belgium later, the reason turned out to be that the end user was communicating with the ICMP through the projector's cinemacontroller (i.e. there was no separate LAN connection to the ICMP). She'd configured the address of a NAS server in the booth into the ICMP's web UI, and started to download DCPs from it, through the cinemacontroller and the backplane, and into the ICMP. The backplane was overwhelmed with bandwidth, and froze up.

It took them a while to figure this out, because the fault didn't happen instantly. Sometimes the red tail light wouldn't appear until several minutes after she started a download. But eventually they did, we corrected the original installer's mistake (no dedicated LAN connection to the ICMP), and all was good.

The other involved an SP4K/ICMP-X that simply would not exchange EDIDs reliably with a Lumagen scaler, and gave us all sorts of resolution and color space glitches. Again, Rancho Cordova escalated it to Belgium, and likely invested tens of staff hours, on both sides of the Atlantic, into producing software updates that fixed it.

In contrast, there is another major manufacturer in our industry (I'm not going to say who - no point in causing unnecessary friction), that often responds to queries with "that's impossible," and/or a veiled insinuation that I caused the fault by doing something stupid. I don't like having to deal with them.

[Steve Guttag]

Gee reMark(tm) what "equipment" did they invent? They invented the noise reduction (the intellectual property). The Dolby-A circuit wasn't any great masterpiece on its own, in terms of componentry. It used off-the-shelf components and it had four modest compressor circuits (two of which were on overlapping bands). That said, what made Dolby-A special was HOW those compressors were applied and that, given the technology of the day, that they made a compader by using the same compressors but adding in negatively to make them expanders. Ray made something that addressed a problem in a manner that had not been done before and used principles of minimally invasive (side-chains so you only alter the signal where you have to) and principles of self-masking (only alter low level signals near the noise). Heck they GAVE out the circuit schematic/description. The CAT22 board had all hand-drawn traces using off-the-shelf components. Their cinema processors also used off-the-shelf components, be they discrete transistors, TL and NE series Op amps. Their VCAs were always rough (but they used VCAs instead of multi-gang pots)...the CP55 and CP65 used off-the-shelf CD4000 series CMOS components for signal routing...again, nothing earth shattering there, for its time...much more tried-and true. Even their surround card(s)...off-the-shelf, not invented by Dolby Sansui QS..which did migrate over time as Dolby did make improvements in the steering but, in the end those were off the shelf Sanyo (CAT150E) and Analog Devices (CAT150F). I don't even recall Dolby SR using anything but off-the shelf components. However, again, what Ray invented was a methodology of applying noise reduction in a manner superior to anyone else. And while I marvel at the CAT280/300/350 construction (look at those and see if you can figure out in 3-D space how to make everything fit together in the space allotted), the gold was in the intellectual property.

I'd argue that as they moved into digital audio, their reliability went down with the CP500 where slot J14 was notorious for being on-edge. Aside from Ray, they had/have geniuses working for them like Craig Todd so things like AC series including AC3 allow pretty impressive sound in a pretty confined space. I'd continue to argue that one of the things that has lost Dolby its market share is that, aside from ATMOS, there is very little proprietary Dolby owned technology in their products. The CP750, CP950 have to compete right along side of the offerings from QSC, Trinnov and most anyone else that can handle AES3 audio. In the server world, the DSS line had to compete right along side of Doremi, GDC and a few others. And while one can, like with projectors speak of features they like/don't like, Dolby doesn't have a technology tied to the industry that others can't have. They are competing on feature set and customer service...just like everybody else. The only place they have a lot of control is on ATMOS...not that it doesn't have competition (DTS-X, Auro) but they are different formats (though the metadata within SMPTE is such that now others COULD play back the ATMOS track).

Leo...I agree completely. How a company responds to the "never hear that before" makes all of the difference in the world. At least now, we have logs and such where equipment can try and explain to the engineers why it doesn't feel so good.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

what "equipment" did they invent?

Actually Dolby A was an absolute masterpiece in it's time... 1965! It was adopted by almost the entire audio world in many different aspects of audio and video with in less then five years of it's release. Then Dolby SR which is still a masterpiece of engineering to this day. Not to mention all the cinema processors and re-recording electronics they produced, all of which they designed. I honestly never had a lot of trouble with CP-500's myself after Ver. 1.28 firmware was released, a bit quirky before that including resetting and losing all the internal settings. A few Cat 673 failures was about all. Not even one failed power supply! The displays faded as they aged, but that's typical of all back lit fluorescent displays. Those 673 cards by the way did have some custom Dolby Chips on them. Overall, it's best to stick with off the shelf parts so a given card, and unit remains serviceable as long as possible so equipment can continue into archival use when needed, and Dolby and studios know that. Not being an Atmos fan, I won't ramble on about how Dolby completely transformed the film audio world starting in 1975, but they were just named one of the World's most innovative companies involved in music for 2020... and that's no surprise to me.

[Steve Guttag]

Thanks Mark..you essentially reiterated what I said. Dolby's chief value has always been in intellectual property (Dolby-A and Dolby-SR as examples). And, while Dolby certainly did make professional noise reduction cards/frames, it was the noise reduction methods (A and SR) that were the chief value. Now, I can state, as for customer service, yeah, Dolby was second to none there too...while you paid a pretty penny for a Dolby product (CP50s in the $5K range in late 1970s Dollars), they backed it up with the second to none RX program that cost nothing to the exhibitor. That did change over time to a nominal fee and has somewhat slid down into more expensive and various policy changes as to how their RXO policy works on different products. I also agree that using off-the-shelf parts does increase the robustness of a product and its longevity...something key to film based theatres where technology is very slow-moving.