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Author Topic: UK student cinema - help! Ken McFall Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 615 From: Haringey, London. Registered: Apr 2001 posted 07-01-2003 04:37 PM                     Michale, when I first installed DTS I had nightmares getting the disc's... however with a lot of phone calls and pestering we were able to get on some sort of 'list' and after that there was no problem. And before someone says the disc's are sent out with all new prints.... that was not my experience. The problem is if the disc's don't arrive and you are showing the film the next day you stand no chance of getting them. And if you are only showing the film for one or two shows it may not be worth getting them anyway. I agree with the other post's that a good SR system that is upgradeable to SRD is a better way to go in this case. If it were a full time first or second run show then the DTS6AD would be a reasonable choice. As it's a very tight budget they need to get the most of out what they are spending and the DTS6AD 'may' not give them that. SRD would get more use and be better value for money.... when they can afford it. Until then I'd go for a good SR system and upgrade when, if, the funds become available. As the decisons have already been made all of this is accademic.... unless they get a better quote from another supplier.  |  IP: Logged Pete Naples Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1565 From: Dunfermline, Scotland Registered: Feb 2001 posted 07-01-2003 05:20 PM                     Hmmm, the North/South divide is evident here, from what I see on my travels around the cinemas of Scotland and the North of England, unless your name is UCI, you don't as a rule get DTS discs. Two RFT's that spring to mind, both have DTS. The most work the DTS player ever does is when I run my test discs on them at service time! I've an 8 screen multiplex, 4 of which are DTS. If funds would permit they would be 8 screens of SR.D, for no other reason than getting hold of discs.  |  IP: Logged Ken McFall Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 615 From: Haringey, London. Registered: Apr 2001 posted 07-02-2003 02:13 AM                     Any cinema that's having problems should phone DTS direct and they will sort out the disc's for them. If they keep at it, it get's sorted out eventually....  |  IP: Logged Pete Naples Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1565 From: Dunfermline, Scotland Registered: Feb 2001 posted 07-02-2003 03:18 AM                     But why should they have to?!  |  IP: Logged Mike Rendall Film Handler Posts: 78 From: Southampton, Hampshire, UK Registered: Nov 2002 posted 07-02-2003 05:13 AM                     Hi, Have been away for a while. The Projector from Union Films is my old machine that I used to be the technician for. We now have a new 70mm Vic 8. I thought that it went to Guildford! If you need any assistance r.e. installation, history, services, parts etc on our old projector then let me know - I still have the original receipts - and a lot of the technical bits in my head! Nigel shore installed it originally for us in 1985 (His address I have already posted) and knows the system intimately, as he has performed all services and upgrades on it since new!. If you want any more information then please feel free to drop me a mail with your queries. (We also have a Cat700 SRD reader that used to be on that machine) if you want to buy it. Mike  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 07-02-2003 06:46 AM                        The flaw with DTS has become pretty obvious: no discs=no sound. One way to solve this would be to have a hard disc instead of the CD drive in the player, which plugs directly into a broadband Internet connection and automatically downloads the sound from a DTS server for whatever film you're showing. That would have the advantage of separately stored sound data avoiding the need for compression without the disadvantage of needing to physically ship an offline carrier. As there would be no means of getting the data out of the player, I'd have thought that such a system would be safer from piracy, too. The disadvantage would be that only cinemas with a broadband connection could use such a system, but it's only a matter of time before they're as easily accessible as 'phone lines.  |  IP: Logged Ken McFall Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 615 From: Haringey, London. Registered: Apr 2001 posted 07-03-2003 08:52 AM                     There would be no benefit from sending out un compressed audio to cinemas as the only real difference would be much bigger files. As the DTS system is not a lossy system, it either plays or it don't, unlike DTS which has to cope with errors... No matter how bad the print is, if the timecode can be read then the sound will always be exactly as originally recorded. Due to the plocation of the timecode it seldom get any serious damage so is very reliable. SRD by its very nature deteriorates with the state of the print to the point where it cannot play back. I see no reason why DTS can't setup a small server and make the disc's available via a password protected site. CD writers are very cheap now so each cinema could easily burn their own in under an hour. Disc's could be downloaded in advance of the playdate. The only problem would be copyright issues. When I ran LOTR in interlock I burnt a second copy of the disc's. There is nothing special about them at all. As this cinema will be running films quite late in their life there is no reason why they can't phone in advance and ask for the disc's to be posted out to them.... DTS have always been very helpful for me in the past.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 07-03-2003 09:40 AM                        quote: I see no reason why DTS can't setup a small server and make the disc's available via a password protected site. [...] The only problem would be copyright issues. Which I seem to remember (from another topic) is why DTS either can't or won't do this. A hard disc based system would solve that, because there would be no offline media facility within the unit itself, and therefore no way of getting the data out of it. All you would need to do is put a small amount of data at the start of film identifiying the title. The first time the processor saw a new title, it would automatically download the sound data from DTS onto its local hard disc as the film played its first run. If a number of units were networked (e.g. in a multiplex) the soundtracks could then be copied between units automatically as a print was moved or interlocked. Result: no more hassle chasing missing discs and a system which is just as secure as the current arrangement, if not more so.  |  IP: Logged Michael Harlow Expert Film Handler Posts: 170 From: Faversham, Kent, UK Registered: Jul 2002 posted 07-03-2003 11:04 AM                     DTS = No Disc = No sound. We've been in this situation a couple of times only, but of course we can run analogue from the CP55 we have. I would agree that Dolby Digital seems to be the way to go thou... Anyone got a DA20 and a CAT701 they wanna sell me?  |  IP: Logged Ken McFall Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 615 From: Haringey, London. Registered: Apr 2001 posted 07-03-2003 04:04 PM                     I should make it clear that given a choice it would be DTS everytime... It's superior, in my opinion, to SRD because of the fact that the reproduced sound is 'ALWAYS' as new. However like the Beta and VHS battle of years ago, the lesser of the two won beacuse of support rather than technical superiority. DTS may well fail because of the poor disc distribution it is clearly suffering from. SRD is there even if you don't need it. You don't need to check it or make allowance for it..... So for that reason only it's the better choice to allow for in this situation. As for the DTS 6AD, Does it it fact keep all of it's data in the digital domain. I would have thought it worked in a similar fashion to the other DTS units.... ie Digital to analogue and into the processor. Anyone got any information on this?  |  IP: Logged Daryl C. W. O'Shea Film God Posts: 3977 From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from) Registered: Jun 2002 posted 07-04-2003 12:53 AM                        The DTS-6AD is digital until just before the cross over/delay/screen loss eq and then out. Analog inputs immediately go through an A/D and enter the signal path just before the DSP controller on the D741 board where the DSP does the matrix decoding, eq, digital volume control, channel delay and noise reduction.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 07-04-2003 04:45 AM                        quote: However like the Beta and VHS battle of years ago, the lesser of the two won beacuse of support rather than technical superiority. DTS may well fail because of the poor disc distribution it is clearly suffering from. Which would be a pity, because technology has now evolved to the point that there is an easy way to get round the disc supply problem. When DTS started in 1992 compact discs were the only way possible of distributing hundreds of megabytes of data. The hard disc on a PC sold then ranged from 20-100 megabytes. Now it's in the range of 20-100 gigabytes! What's even more astonishing is that when CDs were first sold in 1983 most home computers didn't even have hard discs. The biggest non-linear offline carrier commonly available was a 360kb 5 1/4" floppy... and along came a disc of the same size that could hold 650mb! At that time they were only used for audio because no other consumer application needed anything like the volume of data a CD could hold, just as today DVDs are used primarily for video. But the second law of computing (data expands to fill the space available) has long since taken effect and 20 years later, CDs are now too small for many applications. But now there is an alternative. DTS was successful because by not storing the sound data on the film itself, it could use less compression than Dolby or Sony. The difference is that CDs are now no longer the only carriers available. Even a small PC hard disc has the capacity to store the DTS sound for several features, and broadband Internet would enable each feature soundtrack to be downloaded online in 10 minutes or so. So it seems to me that if DTS is going to survive it needs to take advantage of 21st century technology to get over the problem of disc supply.  |  IP: Logged Ken McFall Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 615 From: Haringey, London. Registered: Apr 2001 posted 07-04-2003 08:01 AM                     All of that is fine and true....but to do so would introduce a whole new set of equipment and the nightmare of dual invertory for distribution. The problems with disc's not arriving would still be there and the whole new support problems of online distribution would be a big problem at the start. The scsi interface used in the DTS players is capable of supporting hard drives but as there is no user interface as standard how would you get the data onto it? The DTS player would need to be on a network or have it's own broadband connection which would be easy on a new model but impractical for existing users. So you would still have to burn a disc anyway. The current system is quite simple and reliable.... stick in a disk and run the film. Its just getting the f__king disc's that's the problem. Downloading the data and burning your own disc's is possibly the easiest way to go as it uses the existing hardware with no need to upgrade or introduce new models. For a cinema like the one in this thread I'm sure access to a computer with a CD writer and a broadband internet link is not a problem. DTS should give serious consideration to makeing the data available from a secure site. That way everyone who has DTS equipment could be sure of running films in the format no matter how old the film was. As you say computers with huge capacity hard drives are now common place so storage would not be a problem at the cinema. I'm sure it's not beyond them to try it out as an exercise. Just think, no matter how old or scratched the print was the sound would always be crystal clear without the constant reversions of SRD on old prints. Providing the timecode had not been damaged beyond use, which if the print was that bad it should have been junked anyway, DTS is the more robust and capable system. It won't revert even if the timecode is damaged for short lengths, about 5 seconds if I remember correctly. Think I'll shut up on this now....  |  IP: Logged Peter Hall Master Film Handler Posts: 314 From: London, UK Registered: Dec 2000 posted 07-06-2003 08:26 AM                        Sounds like you guys are working with DTS selling the virtues of the XD10 - twin DVD drives, soundtracks get stored on local hard drive, and theres an ethernet port for (I guess) future downloads of soundtracks (?). Also plays slides, CSS (optional) etc..  |  IP: Logged

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