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Author Topic: the film-less "film" festival Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 03-02-2012 11:29 AM                        Jonathan--I don't know that particular festival, but my guess would be that 35mm films would show only in the 35mm houses, and that temporary video equipment will be installed in those venues for video material. Most of the video will probably be on HDCAM tape, which does not require D-cinema equipment for playback. DCPs have not really caught on for festivals yet (this was the first year that I have even heard of people asking about it as an exhibition format), so there will probably be 35mm or HDCAM copies of any material that is being shown as a DCP in the D-cinema houses. The type of film festival also dictates formats, at least to some extent. I worked at one last fall that was almost entirely 35mm, as the programming largely consisted of upcoming major releases. Festivals which focus on documentaries and low-budget productions are more likely to have lots of video. Sadly, 16mm only really shows up for student and experimental-film programs now. (If anyone is doing a 16mm festival, call me. I happen to like the format.)  |  IP: Logged Jonathan Goeldner Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1360 From: Washington, District of Columbia Registered: Jun 2008 posted 03-02-2012 09:39 PM                     ^ or Lord forbid - a film projected from a blu-ray disc, although I must say the two times that happened at the Avalon - the image was surprising, in a good way. in regards to DC's Environment Film Festival - the folks who are in charge of the screening of Cane Toads is doing a deluxe setup over at E Street (on screen 4 I assume) - prior festival screenings were in 3D, but with some problems here and there, DC premier screening wont be in 3D but should look and sound top notch.  |  IP: Logged Tony Bandiera Jr Film God Posts: 3067 From: Moreland Idaho Registered: Apr 2004 posted 03-02-2012 11:02 PM                     This thread brings up a good point..if there is no actual film being run, should it be called a Film Festival? And if not, what would be a good alternate name for it?  |  IP: Logged Victor Liorentas Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 800 From: london ontario canada Registered: May 2009 posted 03-02-2012 11:26 PM                     Movie festival.  |  IP: Logged Edward Havens Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 614 From: Los Angeles, CA Registered: Mar 2008 posted 03-03-2012 01:59 AM                     Cinema Celebration!!!  |  IP: Logged Louis Bornwasser Film God Posts: 4441 From: prospect ky usa Registered: Mar 2005 posted 03-03-2012 06:39 AM                        Video-fest (cause that is what it is)  |  IP: Logged Brian Guckian Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 594 From: Dublin, Ireland Registered: Apr 2003 posted 03-03-2012 06:45 PM                     Also, "Content Festival"  |  IP: Logged Mattias Mattsson Film Handler Posts: 90 From: Göteborg, Sweden Registered: May 2007 posted 03-04-2012 09:47 AM                     Thanks Scott for sharing your experiences! I was responsible for the technical side of a 10-day film festival taking place this January/February. We had about 750 screenings of something like 470 films (a mix of features and shorts, mostly the former). Of these about 100 were DCP and the rest 35 mm, HDCAM, Digibeta and a few BD/DVD. The venues were both art house theaters and multiplexes. Servers were exlusively Dolby (one DSS/DSP100, the rest DSS200). Projectors were mostly Barco (one series 1, rest series 2), and some Christies (all series 2). Some locations hade scalers, Barco ACS-2048 and Kramer VP-729. On the sound processor/media adapter side the theaters were equipped with several different makes and models: CP750, CP650, CP65, ECI-60 and DMA8Plus. We prepared a bunch of CRU-carriers fitted with large disks (2 TB) onto which we loaded all the festival’s DCP:s in advance. We had five of these pre-loaded CRU-carriers in total. These disks were then carried around to the different locations and the material loaded onto servers in advance. These preparations took a lot of time but I think it also saved us a lot of trouble. We could sort out obscure distribution media/formats in advance, such as: fragile USB/Fw/eSATA disks, HDD:s formatted with wrong file systems (eg. HFS+), wrong partition tables (GPT) etc. Of course all the original distribution disks were transported around festival cinemas as well. Just in case a backup copy should be needed. Overall we had very few issues, but this is what I learned: - Be very careful to check that all projectors and servers have the latest firmware. We missed this at one location and had to cancel a screening (the only one for the entire festival!). This was due to old software in the Dolby server which fail to recover the journal of an ext3 fs and cosequently failed to recognize some language versions of a particular DCP. When we tried to save this screening by showing off BD - the ACS-2048 scaler had the old firmware with HDCP issues... Unfortunately I found out about the reasons for these problems when it was already too late. - Most problems we had was with CineCanvas (Interop) subtitles. The ICP is VERY picky with parsing the subtitle XML. Eg. if it does encounter an empty <Subtitle>-element it cancels subtitle display altogheter! I strongly reccomend filmmakers to burn in their subtitles for festival screenings to eliminate these kind of problems. In my opinion this problem is all TI:s fault in writing a very unprecise and ambigious specification for the CineCanvas XML format. - Additionally there are some problems when the projector is unable to retrieve the subtitles from the server (this is done over HTTP). Barco has an ICP patch (“Limit port range patch”) that is supposed to remedy this. - We also had a issue on one DCP which had its subtitles slightly out of sync. Strangely this happened only on some screenings. I think this was due to too small “leader” (offset) before the FOA at the picture/sound start of the DCP. - The Dolby DSP100 does not support DCP:s at 25 fps. Even with latest firmware. We had one such DCP which was impossible to reschedule to another theater. Fortunately the DCP was unencrypted and I was able to time-stretch the audio and remux this one to a 24 fps DCP. - Managing the KDM:s was a nightmare. We had approx. 110 keys manually distributed to 11 servers.. (Just below 40% of the DCP:s were encrypted). - To use some software to check DCP:s in advance (before ingesting) is very useful. I like Wolfgang Woel's dcp_inspect: https://github.com/wolfgangw/backports - Lots of DCP:s in 1.78 (1920x1080). It is possible to run these with the ordinary FLAT macro, but it looks nicer if you do a proper one with the right masking. - Lots of DCP:s with 2-channel audio (L+R only). If you have a DMA8Plus, you could set it to decode the first AES/EBU as ProLogic to somewhat remedy this. The real solution though, is to educate filmmakers to do a proper sound mix for cinema. - The Barco and Christie projectors we used can not handle SD-SDI, only HD-SDI. Thus, the Digibeta players (Sony J-3) we used had to use a scaler between it and the projector. - Be sure to set the right output frequency (50/59.94 Hz) on the scaler when playing PAL/NTSC tapes from HDCAM/Digibeta. Otherwise you get jerky motion! - Educate the projectionists to test a DCP with unknown aspect ratio with SCOPE macro _first_, otherwise you risk cropping off too much of the frame. About “grey” being projected. Barco has an “Info-T” describing this (or a very similar issue). “Info-T 917: Reflections outside active area of projected image (...) Cause: Reflection of the internal aperture in the DMD is causing this phenomenon.”  |  IP: Logged Martin McCaffery Film God Posts: 2481 From: Montgomery, AL Registered: Jun 99 posted 03-04-2012 11:12 AM                        quote: Tony Bandiera Jr This thread brings up a good point..if there is no actual film being run, should it be called a Film Festival? And if not, what would be a good alternate name for it? Ingest Fest!  |  IP: Logged

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