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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Multi Region Bluray player
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 07-08-2015 12:01 AM
quote: Stephen Furley
Oppo 103 - about £600. Oppo 105 - just over £1,000 That's about $1,500; it ought to be good at that price.
Most of the differential between the US prices being quoted by Steve being VAT (sales tax). In Britain it's 20%. Lifelong Californians complain about the sales tax here (between 7-9%, depending on the county and city sales taxes) being high relative to the rest of the US, but compared to Europe it's a positive bargain!
quote: Jim Cassedy
Oh, geeze, Leo- - after the last 'amateur' festival I got stuck doing, I was ready to write an entire book of how NOT do do a 'film' festival, and most of my griping had to do with home-made blu-rays & dvds.
We have a mix of high end, professional fests (e.g. AFI and TCM), for which nothing enters our booth until it's been thoroughly tested and inspected by a dedicated team hired by the fest itself, and which is almost all 35mm and studio-made DCPs, to fests which have a lot of amateur and, shall we say, "early career professional" shows, which embody all the nightmares you describe, to which I could add a few more.
One of my favorites this year was the gay and lesbian fest back in the spring. One of their shows came on a Swank BD. It was factory pressed, but I suspect for the rental market, because it had 14 minutes of trailers that played immediately on insertion, followed by several copyright violation death penalty threat slides, and finally the menu (with loud music blaring over the menu, of course). The disc was authored such that the pre-menu crap could not be skipped. And this movie had to be played after only a 7-minute turnaround from the previous show! In the end I ripped it using DVDFab and created a copy that just had the feature program on it. Given the equipment we had in the booth, it was the only solution available that worked.
I'd love a Mac with Playback Pro on it, because high bitrate ProRes files are rapidly becoming the delivery format of choice for these "semi-professional" shows, alongside BDs.
Interestingly, my experience has been different from Stephen's. At the fests and shorts shows I do, the BD has now pretty much totally taken over from the DVD for optical discs. I'd say that probably only one disc in 7 or 8 I get now is a DVD.
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 07-08-2015 02:46 PM
My recent experience is similar to Leo's--I haven't seen a DVD for public screening in a while, except as a backup for a Blu-Ray. I don't generally deal with high-profile festivals, but the better-run ones that I do work with all want 35mm, DCP, or HDCAM, all of which are reliable, professional formats.
DCP can be weird because people do not understand it, although that is improving slowly. I have more than once been given a flash drive containing an MP4 or Quicktime file and told that it was a DCP. Another common one is valid DCPs delivered on disks or flash drives formatted as HFS (for the Mac), which some, but not all, cinema servers will read, which leads to people complaining that "it worked at the last theatre." The good news is that unkeyed DCPs seem to be increasing in popularity for festivals, eliminating at least one major potential source of unreliabilty.
What seems to be on the rise is people who want to screen various non-DCP file formats. In principle, this could be a good thing if everyone standardized on one format that played reliably (preferably in a hardware playback device). The practical problem is that there is no standard and the festivals that accept these formats all have different requirements. Apple Pro Res 422 played on an Aja Ki-Pro is my preference here, but the file format for this device is very specific. Unless the content is actually recorded using a Ki-Pro, it often takes several attempts to get a playable copy of the movie. (The most common error here is soundtracks formatted as AAC and not PCM; the picture will play fine, but the sound will be static.) Even this setup does not handle a mix of frame rates particularly well, and the Ki-Pro does not do 3:2 pulldown for 23.98 material (a nonissue for D-cinema projectors, but a potential problem for some monitors and nonprofessional video projectors).
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 07-08-2015 04:07 PM
There's a major difference between DCP and just about any previous professional format. Very few people would have the means to create their own 35 mm, or even 16 mm film print, the same goes for 2 inch Quad or IVC 9000, 1 inch 'B' or 'C' format, Beta SP, D1, D2, DCT, D3, D5, Digi Beta, HD Cam, or whatever the upgraded version of it is called, etc. Anybody can make a DCP, using nothing more than a laptop. It may not be fast, but it's easy to do, and if you do it properly it's pretty much universal. I really can't understand why anybody making a film today, including students etc., doesn't make their work available as a DCP. Nor can I understand, as in another thread, why producers and distributors of 'proper' films, intended to be seen in cinemas, produce trailers for them, but don't make a DCP available, and point exhibitors to a YouTube or Vimeo download.
The only real disadvantage that I can see to a DCP is the time which it takes to ingest.
quote:
Most of the differential between the US prices being quoted by Steve being VAT (sales tax). In Britain it's 20%. Lifelong Californians complain about the sales tax here (between 7-9%, depending on the county and city sales taxes) being high relative to the rest of the US, but compared to Europe it's a positive bargain!
I'm not sure if the UK prices I quoted include VAT or not, but even if they do, the 103 at £600 is about $900. Adding 20% to Steve's US price of $499 only brings it up to $600, so even allowing for VAT, the UK price seems to be about 50% higher than the U.S. One would be if the tax rate was the same there.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 07-08-2015 05:45 PM
quote: Scott Norwood
I have more than once been given a flash drive containing an MP4 or Quicktime file and told that it was a DCP. Another common one is valid DCPs delivered on disks or flash drives formatted as HFS (for the Mac), which some, but not all, cinema servers will read, which leads to people complaining that "it worked at the last theatre." The good news is that unkeyed DCPs seem to be increasing in popularity for festivals, eliminating at least one major potential source of unreliabilty.
This mirrors my recent experience precisely. Our DSS200s will read DCPs on HFS and HFS+ volume, but only if it has a MBR partition table, not a GPT one, and only if the DCP files are in the top folder or one level down. So most of these DCP drives won't work, and I have either to ingest the DCPs through the network (takes a long time), or copy them to an NTFS or ext3 volume first (saves time compared to FTP/LAN ingestion for DCPs bigger than around 20-25GB).
On the ingestion time issue, I so wish that Dolby would make a replacement for the cat915z (front panel USB board for the DSS200) that enables USB3. Most of the flash sticks being sold now are USB3 ones, and increasingly I'm getting kids with Macs providing their DCPs on the bigger (64 and 128GB) ones. I supsect that when 256GB flash sticks enter widespread circulation (they're already available, though pigfuckingly expensive as yet), we'll start to see Technicolor and Deluxe use them - they'll be small enough to send through the regular mail and therefore they'll save a huge amount of shipping costs. Ingestion at USB3 speeds would be a huge help, especially for an arthouse/rep venue such as ours, which have a large number of DCPs flowing through the booth.
quote: Michael Sharples
Is DVDfab worth the money?
It doesn't do anything that absolutely cannot be done with free software (that I'm aware of), but it makes the job much easier and quicker.
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