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Author Topic: Arclight LA Star Wars Disaster Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 12-19-2015 06:52 PM                     Not a big deal compared to a show stopper, but just a few days ago I watched Spectre on a Barco/Dolby System, and at one point in the movie for the first time ever saw a codec break, maybe one or two frames of a broken-up image. I watch a lot of DCI stuff, but never had something like this under normal playout conditions. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Terry Monohan Master Film Handler Posts: 379 From: San Francisco CA USA Registered: May 2014 posted 12-19-2015 07:00 PM                     Did QT put a voodoo curse on the place???  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 12-19-2015 10:05 PM                        I'm kind of sad that cell phone cameras and internet video weren't as ubiquitous back when film was in its heyday. So many more bad theaters would have been called out in the national eye. It would have been... glorious.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 12-19-2015 10:53 PM                        quote: Randy Stankey In a traditional movie theater, you can swap out a platter motor, replace parts or run a show manually, even if that means spinning a reel by hand. In a digital cinema, if a hard drive fails or if a computer crashes, it is likely that there will be no way to save a show. That's why servers use a RAID (usually RAID5) for storage, have two power supply units, more fans than the unit needs to maintain its required operating temperature, etc. Someone who has only been trained in the basic operation of the software front end would not be able to repair the sort of faults that a DCP server occasionally throws at you, but there again, a film projectionist who was only able to thread and play wouldn't have been able to fix minor faults on one of those installations, either. The DCI requirements for digital cinema systems specified that they had to match their 35mm predecessors for overall reliability. I'm guessing that the big theater chains don't publish statistics as to how many booth equipment failures causing the loss of a show they've had (with all other relevant factors, e.g. the maintenance regime in use, being equal), but I suspect that if DCI/DCP projection systems weren't achieving that reliability level, lawsuits would be flying and 35mm would be making a mainstream comeback. We've already seen a demonstration of market forces at work over reliability with the Attack on Titan subtitle disaster. Many distributors abandoned VFs as a result, and are only producing DCPs with burnt-in subtitles. Even though it means more data to wrangle and consequently higher distribution costs, the VF aspect of the DCP is now considered an unreliable software infrastructure, and given the availability of a less sophisticated workaround that improves reliability for only slightly greater cost, the industry is voting with its feet. IMHO the real vulnerability of digital cinema is encryption and KDMs. That has nothing to do with the technology per se, and everything to do with the humans using it. I've never lost a show completely due to server or projector failure, but I have because a distributor failed to supply a correct KDM.  |  IP: Logged Jack Ondracek Film God Posts: 2348 From: Port Orchard, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2002 posted 12-19-2015 11:53 PM                        I find it sad that when this kind of thing happens, the pro-film side jumps down the throat of all-things-digital... gleefully reporting on a singular failure. OK. A show had a problem. Surely, back when everything was all film, somewhere a gear failed, a diode popped, a switching power supply decided to die, a starter switch in a projector motor started its last. Those failure points would all be unusual, and not something most experienced projectionists could, or maybe even would attempt to fix quickly enough to save a show. Yet life would go on, most of us would never know of the failure in a film-based playout system and the legend of the medium's invincibility would remain intact. It's just not reasonable to believe that an installed base of 30,000+ mechanical systems could get through the day without a hiccup. I'd bet it would be generous to suggest only a small handful of projectionists never had a serious problem in their day... and I'd also bet even Brad himself had an oh-shit or two in his time.  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 12-20-2015 01:17 AM                     Film or digital doesn't matter. Sometimes shit happens. That being said the real discussion is on frequency of failures. As an example what has the better chance of failure? A Christie SLC console or a Cinema Film Systems console? The point is that old saying you get what you pay for really is true. Often times it's better to pay a little more for higher quality and ultimately...reliability. But yup, everything will experience a failure at some point.  |  IP: Logged Marco Giustini Film God Posts: 2713 From: Reading, UK Registered: Nov 2007 posted 12-20-2015 05:40 AM                     Whatever happened, maybe closing the dowser and muting the sound would have helped. I've seen many times 'managers' restarting a late show by jumping randomly into the playlist, playing a few seconds every time to check the position - with the audience in the auditorium! I appreciate a fault can happen. But then, as it has been said, it's customer care. You need someone upstairs to fix the problem and someone in the auditorium to tell people what happened/what's happening. You don't skip randomly to see if the show restarts - unless the server was doing that by itself, but I've never seen that myself. I used to tell my projectionists not to rush and damage the film if anything happened and to send someone in the auditorium no matter how quickly they could restart the show: the show had stopped, the experience was already ruined. Let's do the right thing and make the customers feel that we know what we are doing.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 12-20-2015 06:38 AM                     Something to remember...some servers are better than others at coming back to the same point of failure...Dolby's DSS line if you yank the power cord mid show will come back up up stopped right at the failure point...other servers are not necessary like that. You also don't have a booth monitor to cue up the movie to so you are guessing at the point in the movie to bring it back to. A 7:00pm show might have 30 plus minutes of preshow and a hour of previews...etc to make simple calculations hard. The TMS is likely in another room and may not be visible for one to figure out that at the point of failure they should start up at a specific time in the movie so they likely had to put a picture up just to verify that they are at the point in the movie where they should be.  |  IP: Logged Marco Giustini Film God Posts: 2713 From: Reading, UK Registered: Nov 2007 posted 12-20-2015 07:12 AM                     That's true. Then you take 2 minutes to do an accurate calculation looking at the start time and the playlist and you then subtract 5 minutes. It's not hard to do. If that involves walking to the TMS (I cannot think of a server which does not show you locally the current playlist) then do so. In the meantime ushers are walking in the auditorium apologising to the customers, explaining what happened and what was being done to restore the show. You just don't skip randomly on screen with a sold out auditorium! The last manager I saw doing that trick didn't bother checking the playlist or the TMS at all.  |  IP: Logged Mike Schulz Expert Film Handler Posts: 122 From: Los Angeles, CA Registered: May 2007 posted 12-20-2015 10:34 AM                     I agree. There are ways to check the image without shooting onto the screen. One quick and dirty method I use (and it works!) is throwing a piece of cardboard into the port window to block the throw but you can see just enough of the picture on the cardboard to figure out what scene you are on. Muting the audio should be automatic no matter what in this type of situation, too, and if you are really clever and need to listen to the audio, you can just kill the amps for a few minutes and listen to the booth monitor (assuming amps are in the processor rack).  |  IP: Logged Randy Stankey Film God Posts: 6539 From: Erie, Pennsylvania Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-20-2015 12:26 PM                     My point isn't simply a film vs. DCP issue. It's about the broader issue of physical systems versus virtual systems. Assuming competent maintenance by concerned operators being equal between the two, I prefer to have a higher chance of error or malfunction from a physical system if I can have a better chance of recovering from a problem than to have a lower chance of malfunction from a virtual system but have slim chance of recovery. Case-in-point: The problem that I have been having with my DCP system for the last few weeks. I'm still not sure if it's the AMX automation system or the TCP on the Christie projector. When problems occur, the nearest technician is 100 miles away. The only thing I can do is to reboot the system and hope it works. If it doesn't, I lose the show. Yes, I have had a showstopper because of this problem. If I had still been using the old projector, I could have run the show manually. I would almost prefer a crappy CFS console to some digital systems.  |  IP: Logged Tyler Purcell Expert Film Handler Posts: 180 From: Van Nuys, CA Registered: Dec 2015 posted 12-20-2015 12:47 PM                        I'll just mention something that may or may not stir the pot. I've been forced to watch digital projection here in Los Angeles, the hub of the film industry for what, the last 5 years? Anyway, I use to go to the theaters all the time when it was film, but with digital I don't because the consistency of the projectors is all over the place. I've seen 3 movies in the last 2 weeks, all of them had projector issues. One had a lamp going out, so the image wavered the whole time. One had white diagonal lines on the left part of the image. The other was the red channel bleeding onto the blue and green. So three movies and three bad projectors. This isn't an "extreme" case either. I'd say 90% of the time I view a movie in digital, there is a problem of some sort unrelated to the image coming off the server. Heck, last time I went to the AMC in Burbank, the upper right portion of the screen was out of focus and had lost all contrast. Must have been a bad lens or something. Still, nobody bothered to change the projector, nobody complained or cared. I sure as heck complained because if I'm going to waste $16 bux at seeing television at a movie theater, it should look A LOT BETTER then my personal home theater. I refuse to go to AMC anymore, I just won't waste my money. It's funny that every time I see film (35/70) projected here in LA, it's stellar. Mind you, I don't go to shit theaters, I really only go to Arclight because their film projectors are in good shape and their projectionists care. I use to go 30 times a year prior to the shift to digital and never once... not a single bloody time, did I have a problem with the film projection. Now, I really can't stand going to the cinema, I just wait for video. Which is really sad because I'm a true cinephile, but I can't stand incompetent projection.  |  IP: Logged Manny Montes Master Film Handler Posts: 270 From: United States Registered: Feb 2010 posted 12-20-2015 01:07 PM                     I've had the exact opposite experience and I'm pretty sure for the industry as a whole, it has seen the same as I have. With 35mm I had plenty of screenings ruined, brainwraps, gate weave, scratches, starting out of frame (yes that is a real complaint), etc. with digital I have found that the playing field has "leveled" so to speak, now the real differentiation is sound. It has turned the discount house into a decent place to watch movies since I won't have all the dirt and scratches that it used to have with an old 35mm print, it will play perfectly each time. For that I appreciate it, and to be honest as a projectionist seeing cue marks really took me out of the film and put me into "work mode" it was cool when I first started but got old quickly. I don't think digital is even close to perfect yet, but it is definitely a step up in reliability day to day.  |  IP: Logged Paul H. Rayton Expert Film Handler Posts: 210 From: Los Angeles, CA , USA Registered: Aug 2003 posted 12-20-2015 02:41 PM                    I heard that there are, nationwide, a total of 4134 "screens" showing SW:TFA. I presume that is a count of all types of screens, including the Imaxes. Just for fun, let's do a bit of speculation -- let's conjecture that each of those locations are running the show 4X per day (and I'm sure some are higher). But at 4X per day, that is 16,536 presentations of the movie every day. And we've only heard about one or two "problems" so far (strangely, both reported at local Arclights!)? That gives us -- if those are the only two -- a resultant "bad" rate of 0.0001209. I'm sure the actuaries and accountants can live with that. I'm supposing that there may have been glitches elsewhere, but here in L.A. people are hypercritical (and hyper ready-to-post-images!). But a few glitches here and there are not going to stop this Juggernaut!  |  IP: Logged Justin Hamaker Film God Posts: 2253 From: Lakeport, CA USA Registered: Jan 2004 posted 12-20-2015 03:46 PM                        quote: Paul H. Rayton I heard that there are, nationwide, a total of 4134 "screens" showing SW:TFA. Actually that's the number of theatres. The number of screens might be closer to 10,000.  |  IP: Logged

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