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Topic: Servers won't recognize DCP drive

Carsten Kurz
Film God

Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 07-16-2016 08:00 AM

An increasing number of film-makers ignore the ISDCF recommendation for ext2/3 single-partition MBR drives. I have seen many GUID dual partitioned NTFS&HFS+ drives that do not work on many servers, especially when created on a Mac with the system default hidden rescue or fake MBR partitions.

Part of the problem is that now more or less all current general computer systems default to GUID partition schemes.

People seem to think that a drive working on their personal machine should work just as well on a DCI server.

- Carsten

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 07-16-2016 01:28 PM

Stephen: large capacity USB sticks aren't a more expensive option than the 2.5" SATA hard drive in a USB case/adaptor packages sold in Office Depot-type places anymore, at least not in the US. 128GB sticks go on Amazon for $30-50, depending on the speed. The only gotcha is that the cheaper ones take a very long time to write (typically 2-3 hours to write a 100GB DCP), but once done they are so much cheaper and less fragile to move around than hard drives, and you are guaranteed to have no problem with there not being enough USB bus power on a server.

If I'm making a DCP for someone else I would always advise them either to use a high capacity flash stick or a hard drive in a CRU cartridge (the latter if ingestion speed will be an issue for them and they are prepared to spend more), never a bus-powered USB drive, for all the reasons you give.

Admittedly, if you want a capacity greater than 128GB, then 2.5" consumer USB hard drives are still a cheaper option than a flash stick, but I doubt if this'll be the case for long.

The distributors who insist on using consumer USB 2.5" bus-powered drives really annoy me. Kino Lorber, Rialto and Alamo Drafthouse are the worst offenders: roughly half their drives either refuse to spin up when connected to our servers, or the server can't see the DCP on them, and I have to take them home and copy the DCP to one of my CRU drives in order to ingest. And more often than not I find, as Carsten mentions, that these distribution drives have GPT partition tables, multiple partitions, HFS+ or NTFS content partitions ... in short, all the things that are specifically not allowed under the ISDCF recommendations and thus server manufacturers aren't obligated to support. It's pretty clear that these outfits, who call themselves professional movie distributors, are buying consumer drives from Office Depot (or some such place), and aren't even bothering to re-write the partition table and content partition per ISDCF recommendations before writing the DCP on them. They're just taking them out of the box and putting the DCP onto them, leaving EFI partitions, "rescue" partitions, Windows crapware and what have you still on them as well.

Why do these idiots believe that they know better than the industry standard-setting body for DCP distribution media? Saving $150 on a CRU kit and buying a cheap consumer drive instead is well worth a few lost shows (or shows that have to use the backup BD, if one is supplied), because the drive won't work at a given venue and the projectionist there doesn't have the IT skills to copy the DCP from the non-functional (when connected to a DCP server) drive, isn't it?!

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 07-19-2016 10:13 PM

Further to the above post, I popped in to Office Depot this morning to buy a replacement for a failing network switch (panic phone call on Sunday: DSS200 can't connect to cat745), and, while browsing, saw that they were selling 256GB USB3 flash sticks for $50. That's big enough to hold a typical 4K, two-hour feature. If USB flash memory has now become this cheap, I can't understand why anyone would want to distribute their DCP on a spinning rust drive that needs USB bus power, given how problematic we all know that they are in the field.

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Randy Stankey
Film God

Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99

posted 07-19-2016 10:40 PM

quote: Ian Freer
I'm not sure what the Mac solution would have been, if anybody wants to put up a solution?
I don't think using HFS+ would be universally reliable for linux based cinema servers, and Mac cannot write to NTFS can it?

Paragon Software's ExtFS for Mac: https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/

Does, pretty much what it says on the box but performance can be slower than normal and it can also take a while for volumes to mount and dismount. However, it does what I need it to do, when I need it done so I don't complain much.

It does come with a free ten-day trial period. [Wink]

Do remember... When you format a disk for a DCP system, it has to be Ext formatted AND it has to be set as Master Boot Record or else the drive won't mount.

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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!

Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 07-20-2016 03:48 AM

Leo, did you fill out a case number on Dolby Customer for that CAT745 disconnection? More than likely, you needed to reboot the DSS200 to get it to connect again.

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Carsten Kurz
Film God

Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 07-20-2016 06:01 AM

quote: Leo Enticknap
If USB flash memory has now become this cheap, I can't understand why anyone would want to distribute their DCP on a spinning rust drive that needs USB bus power, given how problematic we all know that they are in the field.

It's not practical yet. 256 is not big enough for an inventory, because many features come in many versions and need 500-1000GB disc sizes. Plus, these sticks are incredibly slow to write, which is a nogo in mass duplication. Slow read for ingest is another issue, of course. For the indy filmmaker, it may become an option.

- Carsten

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Stephen Furley
Film God

Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002

posted 07-20-2016 07:48 AM

quote: Leo Enticknap
saw that they were selling 256GB USB3 flash sticks for $50

I wonder what sort of price you could get if you were to buy, say, a thousand of them? The CRU inside a rather flimsy plastic box inside either an even more flimsy cardboard box or a 35 mm fibre transit case is starting to look rather silly, and the courier service isn't cheap.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 07-20-2016 10:17 AM

quote: Steve Guttag
Leo, did you fill out a case number on Dolby Customer for that CAT745 disconnection? More than likely, you needed to reboot the DSS200 to get it to connect again.

I didn't open a support case, because it was very obvious what the problem was: other devices that communicated through the same switch started to play up, too. With the switch replaced, the problem disappeared. No server reboot was needed, but a projector reboot was.

quote: Carsten Kurz
256 is not big enough for an inventory, because many features come in many versions and need 500-1000GB disc sizes. Plus, these sticks are incredibly slow to write, which is a nogo in mass duplication. Slow read for ingest is another issue, of course. For the indy filmmaker, it may become an option.

I have a SATA CRU bay in my main home PC: writing to that and to a USB3 flash stick happens at about the same speed. Older USB2 sticks are significantly slower to write than a CRU drive (in particular, the cheap Sandisk 128GB sticks only write at around 5mbps, and therefore take 4-5 hours to write the entire volume), but the newer ones are just as fast.

In any case, I wasn't proposing them as a replacement for CRU drives for Deluxe/Technicolor-scale distribution, but as a replacement for the consumer, USB-powered hard drives that a lot of smaller distributors use (and which suffer from slow read for ingest anyways). At least 90% of these that I receive contain a DCP that is smaller than 256GB, and probably around 70% are smaller than 128.

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Scott Norwood
Film God

Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99

posted 07-20-2016 10:34 AM

Agreed with Leo--those tiny USB-only hard disks and their easy-to-lose standard/mini/micro USB cables need to go.

That said, I don't really like the USB flash drives much more. Odd as it sounds, they tend to be too small and too easy to lose, and also offer little or no space on the device itself to identify its contents (most have a hook or loop which can be used to attach a cardboard "price tag" with a piece of string, but few people/companies do that).

I really don't see what is so wrong with CRU drives that causes independent producers and distributors to feel the need to constantly re-invent the wheel with respect to DCP distribution. No one has any right to complain about cost for feature-length material, since the alternative would be to spend $1k+ on a 35mm print.

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Stephen Furley
Film God

Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002

posted 07-20-2016 12:01 PM

A few months ago I received a CRU which was very much lighter than usual. On examination it contained a 2.5" drive, but I don't know if it was a laptop or server type.

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Carsten Kurz
Film God

Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 07-20-2016 04:23 PM

Yes, these appear more often now. They actually need to custom drill special mounting holes into the CRU carrier to fit the smaller drive's mounting holes. Looks a bit D.I.Y.

Two years ago I thought that we would see SSDs for mass distribution sooner or later for their speed and robustness. Now I think we're stuck with CRUs and spinning discs until most cinemas will receive their content diskless. The prices for SSDs won't come down quickly enough.
Duplicators would love them for their write-speed.

We never had problems with those cheap external 2.5" drives (our Sony has USB 3.0 and this offers 1A USB current). However, we had lot's of problems with the CRU DCmini gear. Wether these were related to the drives or the enclosure/electronics, I don't know - I'm glad they are only used by a single distribution company here in germany. Unfortunately, not the smallest, though. Just received two of them, and one caused trouble again, the other I haven't tested yet.

- Carsten

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 07-20-2016 04:51 PM

quote: Carsten Kurz
Two years ago I thought that we would see SSDs for mass distribution sooner or later for their speed and robustness. Now I think we're stuck with CRUs and spinning discs until most cinemas will receive their content diskless. The prices for SSDs won't come down quickly enough.

Interesting that the price of USB flash sticks seems to be in freefall (or, more accurately, the capacity that a given price will buy you is increasing rapidly), but not SATA SSDs. Maybe there are some serious patent royalties on the SATA interfaces and/or firmwares that won't go away anytime soon.

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John Wilson
Film God

Posts: 5438
From: Sydney, Australia.
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 07-25-2016 11:41 PM

Just updating...

Managed to import the content over to DCP-O-Matic and remade the files in there. All good and thanks all for your suggestions / help.

JW

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Jim Cassedy
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1661
From: San Francisco, CA
Registered: Dec 2006

posted 08-04-2016 07:36 PM

quote: Ian Freer
Mac cannot write to NTFS can it?

No, natively MAC's cannot write to NTFS.

However, I've run into 'issues' mostly with festival stuff where I really needed
the capability to format, write or modify an NTFS drive or usb stick on a MAC
that I found a solution called "Tuxera NTFS for MAC"

It doesn't take up a lot of disk space, and works well. I did a lot of testing
with the "free" version and had no interoperability or compatability issues
on any of the server systems that I've tried using the 'MAC fomatted"
NTFS drives on.

There's a fully functional "free trial' version that you can download and
try/test for 15 days. I liked it so much I bought the licensed version.
It wasn't expensive- around $30US if I recall, and worth every penny.

Best place to checkitout is on the manufacturer's website linked below:
TUXERA NTFS FOR MAC

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Carsten Kurz
Film God

Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 08-05-2016 05:48 AM

There are a few options to support NTFS writing in OS X, but the commercial/pro version of Tuxera is the most solid and also fastest in my opinion. It actually comes for free when you buy certain Toshiba external 2.5" USB drives. After installation, it works for other manufacturers drives/USB sticks as well.

- Carsten

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