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Author Topic: Tarantino Gets 50 70mm Projectors For The Hateful Eight Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 08-16-2015 01:25 PM                     Well sure there aren't enough people out there currently running theaters with the appropriate training, and of those who do have suitable training, they are probably in other jobs now or retired. I don't think the issue is that there aren't enough people around who can't be trained to do the job properly though. What I'm predicting is that there won't be sufficient training. I've said many times over the years many of my best projectionists were kids that had never touched film before. In fact if I had 2 applications on my desk and one had worked at a huge AMC 30-plex projectionist and the other at McDonald's, I would favor the McDonald's kid almost every time (an exception here or there though). This is because the McDonald's kid had no idea what he was doing, which means no bad habits. I could train him properly and he would simply know no other way to do the job. Training almost always went faster and the kid who only knew how to flip burgers would run show after show after show flawlessly without even a hint of damage to the prints. So in looking at the current timeline, by the time these systems are ready to start installing and all of the obstacles that will occur during the installs, when they are ready to run the issue then faced is one of training. Can it be done? Absolutely. What are the odds of it being done properly in the given timeline and the obstacles in the way? Pretty darn slim. I doubt there will be a training reel produced for each site. Paramount made a 1 minute reel to train with. Really??? That was totally useless. And no they can't send out old reels from other movies. They must send out new clean prints of something. It can be reel 1 from Hateful Eight or they can just print up a bunch of 20 minute reels from some other movie with the 2.76 anamorphic squeeze in it (just shave off the top and bottom of the image when printing as it's just a test reel to ensure the new projectionists can run the reel a couple dozen times without putting any marks on it). I also doubt the training will be close enough to the opening date so the managers don't forget what they learned from their training. After all, assuming only 2 people per site know how to run the thing, if there are only 50 sites that's 100 people to train in the last week'ish before the movie plays. That can't be done by one guy, so you're left with having multiple trainers...or worse...training them when the equipment is installed and then leaving them for a month to forget everything. Training will also be rushed. But the point is when multiple trainers are dispatched, the success of the presentation will depend largely on the trainer's ability and qualifications. I can think of one major chain that hired a trainer who had his heart in the right place, but just had no grasp on how and why the way he was training was wrong. Those sites of his clearly suffered. Then there is the equipment itself. This is all old used stuff. I know the term "rebuilt" is being used, but when I think "rebuilt" I think Louis Bornwasser and Hadden. That was a rebuild. I don't mean "take the parts out, clean and re-paint the case and then change out any obviously bad parts and call it rebuilt". Sure it only has to run for 2 weeks, but from my understanding these intermittents aren't being rebuilt or sent out with new sprockets. Sure some may have never had the back side of the sprockets used and they could be flipped and be just fine, but let's not kid ourselves, most of this gear is not in the greatest of condition and BL&S has a major amount of work to deal with and the odds are against them. Overall though I think there has to be some sort of definition to "quality presentation". I'm well aware that I'm far stricter than most people when it comes to film damage (and yes dust on the print is damage in my definition). As a result I might go into one venue after it's played the print for a week and say "that presentation was pretty sloppy", but some other guy may walk in and say "the presentation was flawless". That's not to say either of us was wrong, but there is certainly a matter of defining what constitutes a quality film presentation and there are many levels of acceptance. Typically though what I've found is that the biggest difference between opinions is based upon those who have used FilmGuard in a theater they have personally spent time being a projectionist at, vs a projectionist who hasn't used it, or didn't use it per the intended instructions, or a technician who has been a service tech for the last 25 years. The standards of quality are simply different for those who haven't seen the difference. So who is right? I don't know if anyone here is truly qualified to answer that definitively, I just know what I consider a quality show and anything else isn't. But if Quentin wants to have a chance at saving film, it damn well better be at least as good as digital in these primary regards: *Steady (BL&S rebuild) *Bright (BL&S spec/install) *Sharp (Cinematographer/Fotokem/BL&S install) *Spotless/no light dirt or scratches (Projectionist)  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 08-16-2015 01:47 PM                        quote: Brad Miller when they are ready to run the issue then faced is one of training. Can it be done? Absolutely. What are the odds of it being done properly in the given timeline and the obstacles in the way? Pretty darn slim. This isn't the fault of BL&S, it's just the facts. I think it's very significant that BLSI are only supplying and installing the equipment. My understanding is that their contractual obligations stop at the point that they leave a working projector, platter and DTS player set up in each venue. They are not getting involved in operating or supporting the systems during the actual run, and were not willing to take that aspect of the project on. From this I infer that they are well aware of the pitfalls Brad describes, and which have been mentioned many times on this thread, on others and on the post mortem threads from the Interstellar run. All that remains to be seen is how much of a trainwreck the run is in the theaters that receive the new installs. Hopefully it won't be enough of one to kibosh future 5/70 releases.  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 08-16-2015 02:03 PM                     Oh nobody ever said BL&S wasn't smart! They were exceedingly smart to get things to a certain point and then just run. I didn't realize however that once the gear was installed that they had no responsibility for keeping it running. That's a bit of a surprise, as the quality of their rebuild could have a major influence on the uptime of the gear. I guess this also means these theaters probably won't have a dual failover DTS setup. I wonder if the XD20s they are using will be outfitted with a raid? The XD10s certainly can't be setup that way. Whenever that hard drive farts, game over, auditorium down. Personally I've not bothered with the 70mm failover setup at my personal screening room as I'm never running public or ticketed shows. If the player should die, it's not the end of the world. (Then again mine is setup with a raid.) For a theatrical setup though, ALL of my setups always have and always will have a failover system installed so if the primary player dumps, the show continues. Yes dts is an amazingly robust system, but anyone who has been around for a good while knows they can and DO fail. In the digital world most people also now realize that hard drives, even the enterprise ones, can and DO fail without warning as well. The concern here is that 70mm dts has no fallback track. The auditorium is simply dead and it's like jumping back in time to the days of CDS. Again in my screening room if that should ever happen it's no big deal, but not at a public cinema. Then again the chances of the prints being trashed beyond playability is probably significantly higher than a dts system failing. Sad, but true.  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-16-2015 03:01 PM                        Is this really only playing in 70mm for two weeks? What happens then? Do the 70mm theatres switch to 35mm or ?  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 08-16-2015 06:15 PM                        quote: Brad Miller I wonder if the XD20s they are using will be outfitted with a raid? The XD10s certainly can't be setup that way. Whenever that hard drive farts, game over, auditorium down. If I were installing an XD10 now I would not contemplate doing so without first having the PSU and all the capacitors on the motherboard replaced, and then replacing the hard drive with an SSD before doing a clean install of the final software image that DTS issued. Granted, it's not a cast iron guarantee of reliability, but taking the risk of dodgy caps from the early '00s and hard drive failure out of the equation must surely be a big help. Furthermore, the cost is negligible: the XD-10 originally shipped with a 40GB drive, and even SSDs of three times that capacity go for only $50. For an XD-20 I'd use an SSD RAID. Again, cost is barely an issue, because you only need enough space to store the audio for one feature. In any case, 120GB is easily enough to store the audio for all the DTS 5/70 titles ever released. I'd be astonished if BLSI aren't doing this as part of their refurb process, assuming that they're using XD-10s at all. As you say, they're no idiots, and they must realize that (a) the XD-10 has a history of capacitor plague failure, and (b) the hard drive an XD-10 shipped from the factory with is now between 5-10 years old, and thus on borrowed time.  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-16-2015 06:20 PM                        For whatever it's worth, real-world reliability numbers suggest that SSDs are actually _less_ reliable than mechanical drives. Strange, but true. Also, reliability of SSDs varies widely with brand and model. Also, isn't the XD-10 IDE-based? Does anyone make IDE SSDs? (I have never actually seen an XD-10 in person...I have only ever used the 6D and XD-20).  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 08-16-2015 06:25 PM                     Click here Scott  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-16-2015 06:45 PM                     Screw that mechanical hard drive crap! You plug in an 160 gb SSD and you're done for ever, that's about as small as they come any more. They even make SSD's in IDE format for that matter so no SATA to IDE adapter is needed. These audio files aren't huge after all. Some of the early XD-10's only had 80 gb hard drives in them to begin with. And later ones had larger like 200 gb drives, but If memory serves me they can't utilize anything over 2 gb anyway, something Mike Smith once told me. It's also possible software upgrades could have increased that... Mark  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 08-16-2015 06:57 PM                     I have four with 1TB drives that can store over 800 GB of movie soundtracks. Anything that ever hits that theatre becomes a permanent collection and all four XD10s backup each other's content.  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 08-16-2015 08:56 PM                     SSDs are not forever. Mechanical drives DO have a lower failure rate. Scott knows what he is talking about.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 08-16-2015 11:18 PM                        Do the figures Scott cites assume that all relevant factors are equal? For example, I gather that one of the major causes of premature SSD failures in PCs is because their owners do not disable the automatic defrag function of their operating systems, thereby wearing the drives out through unnecessary write cycles. Admittedly you have no control over whether an XD-10 does that or not (unless you do some hard core reverse engineering of the system image to disable the relevant process, assuming it's enabled by default). But I'd be interested to know if SSDs used properly are still statistically less reliable than HDDs.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-17-2015 10:17 AM                     The key here is to use only SLC drives. MLC drives do have a shorter life span. SLC drives are more expensive but they are designed to last a lifetime. And exactly what Leo said! All SSD's also have the ability to automatically log bad sectors as those sectors fail and not write to them. The best part about putting an SSD in something like an XD-10 or cinema server is that it's reading back data for 80% of its life time and writing the other 20% when you are ingesting data in to it. I've been using SSD's in all my laptops since 2005 and they still run perfectly. The XD-10 is Linux and it's not going to be defraging anything. It's just going to do a simple file system check about every 30 boots. I also have my Win 2008 server OS running on a pair of Intel SSD in RAID 1 for over five years now. The days of randomly failing SSD's are long gone and they are uber reliable today. The number of write cycles is so high that failure won't be happening in your life time. There are now 8 TB SSD's available on the market. It won't be long until mechanical hard drives completely disappear just like propellor passenger planes have.... An interesting article that talks about SSD life span is at this link... http://betanews.com/2014/12/05/modern-ssds-can-last-a-lifetime/ Mark  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-17-2015 11:47 AM                        The issue of write cycles has (largely) been solved, but the failure of the SSD components themselves (unrelated to write cycles) has not been. Failure modes are different (mechanical disks tend to give warnings before failing and some or all data are often recoverable; SSDs tend to fail immediately and unrecoverably), so exact comparisons are difficult. I can't seem to find the best article that I have seen on the subject, but it pretty much boils down to the fact that SSDs tend to require replacement sooner than mechanical disks and that Intel and Samsung SSDs are significantly more reliable than other brands. Leo--you make a good point and I am not sure if this study took that into account. Another issue with SSDs tends to be buggy firmware, although this seems to be less of an issue lately. There are plenty of good reasons to use SSDs (I have no interest in ever again using a mechanical hard disk in a laptop, for example, since SSDs offer such an incredible performance gain), but reliability is not one of them. If I owned a theatre and wanted to provide the highest possible reliability for 70mm DTS shows and could only have a single XD10, I would have a second hard disk on the shelf with the soundtrack already loaded on it. At least that way, a failure could be addressed relatively quickly. Obviously, Brad's redundant configuration is the best option.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 08-17-2015 11:49 AM                        An interesting read - thanks Mark. One sidenote - the XD-20 holds its system image on a little flash drive that is plugged directly into the motherboard anyways, not on the hard drive(s). So if flash memory (that is not used for multiple, intense write cycles, but primarily as a read only medium) still had serious reliability issues, I doubt if this machine would have been designed that way. And nowadays, cellphones and other mobile devices use flash memory as their exclusive method of storage - nothing mechanical in them at all - and you very rarely hear about them suddenly failing. That having been said, their life cycle is so short, relatively speaking (how many smartphones more than 3-4 years old are still in regular use?) that most of them don't exactly get tested for longevity anyways. I've been wondering how long it'll be before flash memory renders the HDD totally obsolete, for consumer and small volume professional applications, at any rate. I was contemplating replacing my hard drive's 1TB HDD with a SSD earlier this year, but drives that size of a reputable brand are still around $400, and at the moment, that's more than I'm willing to pay. I suspect that this will be the last laptop I own with spinning metal in it, though, and it could well have a SSD in it before its lifetime is over.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 08-17-2015 12:19 PM                     Leo, Also All Doremi Servers and the GDC SX-3000 use the flash memory for the OS as well. Since it's reading back 98% of the time and getting upgrades written to it perhaps about 2% of it's life span they are extremely reliable. I know that Doremi did have a bad batch of those some years back but those have all been weeded back out since then. Also, unless your laptop is your ONLY computer what on earth would you need such a large HD for? I have a 250GB SSD in mine and I've yet to fill it up. I don't store a lot in the way of pictures or music on it either. Pictures stay on the phone or camera memory and eventually end up on my HP Server at home. Ditto for music that gets streamed to my system via JRivers. Mark  |  IP: Logged

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