Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: DTS disc reading question.

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Posted by Rob J. Buskop (Member # 3338) on 02-17-2009, 01:10 PM:

Unit: 6D with perfect drives. (Plextor)
Monitor hooked on to the processor.
Mystery: Drop-outs occur, with green led on and time code being
nicely read (as shown on monitor).
Led voltage checked and O.K. Tracking of reader also O.K.
Drop out can be quite long in duration and drive is not reading disc. Different disc of same title: similar result. Switching discs to other drives makes no difference.
Time code runs nicely, but corresponding disc code stalls and whole system switches to analog. It's like the disc is temporarily unreadable. But with another disc of same film reel
(S.W. 3, ..Sith) same fault occurs.
Any suggestions or enlightment would be very welcome.
Thanks,
Rob.

[ 02-17-2009, 04:25 PM: Message edited by: Rob J. Buskop ]

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 02-17-2009, 01:33 PM:

Just a guess butit is possible that the print's serrial number doesn't match the disks Does this happen with other film titles as I have never had any luck with Plextor drives working usually they would either run a bit of a film then quit or not complete the boot cycle

Posted by Mike B. Smith (Member # 2829) on 02-17-2009, 02:27 PM:

As Gordon suggested check serial numbers make sure disc and print matches, also if it is only playing 2 minutes of audio at the beginning of the reel then it drops out, it could be the TC chip on the 422 board, check to make sure the version is V1.46. When did this problem first occur? Was any maintenece done on this unit prior to it not working? If you just installed these plextor drives were they assigned correctly? You metioned a monitor connected, does it show the drives? Also DTS never qualified the plextor drives, the drives DTS use have special software, so it may be hit or miss with off the shelf drives.

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 02-17-2009, 03:49 PM:

The only other drives that I have repeatedly been able to make work are the SONY 2x Caddy SCSI drive used in some apple machines

Posted by Rob J. Buskop (Member # 3338) on 02-17-2009, 04:18 PM:

The drives are the Plextor 32 Csi caddy drives that have functioned perfectly since I installed and assigned them 2 years
ago. Other than a momentarily drop-out in the odd print and a one time odd behaviour that has'nt occurred since, these have worked very nicely. The 1.46 is installed and no special maintenance was done before the earlier mentioned problem occurred. Have not checked the print against the disc nr. Will certainly do that. O yeah, the drop out does not occur at the beginning, but rather like after some 10 minutes or something like that. It does'nt occur at the start.
Again, I'll certainly go over the disc and print nrs.
The Plextor drives are nicely recognised on the monitor screen.
Gordon, I recall having to do quite a bit of trials to find the
right combination for the termination of these fine drives.
Maybe that played a role in your problem getting them to work?
Thank you all for your greatly appreciated response!
Rob.

Posted by Marco Giustini (Member # 4544) on 02-17-2009, 07:32 PM:

I've tested a lot of SCSI drives on my DTS and found that the ones that seems to work start to give problems randomly sooner or later. They work for a month, than they start giving trouble every day, even if on the monitor the drives were nicely recognized.

Marco

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 02-18-2009, 12:51 AM:

Could have a flaky power supply-getting tired and grumpy..It's an AT, 250w PS.

Posted by Jim Cassedy (Member # 4115) on 02-20-2009, 10:42 AM:

Monte's suggestion about the power supply is a good one.
One of my fellow projection guys had a 6D that was starting to act funny until he replaced the power supply, which is real easy to do.

I had a "mysterious" problem with DTS dropping out last year
that turned out to have nothing to do with my DTS unit.

A frayed high-voltage cable occasionally caused a momentary
spark inside my lamphouse as it flashed-over to the frame.
This was a very intermittant problem so it was hard to trace.
Sometimes it wouldn't happen for weeks. In retrospect,I think it was more prone to happen on days when the humidity was high, for obvious reasons.

Even though the frame carried the current to ground, it caused
a noise spike in my DTS system that was enough to screw up the system clock that caused it to mis-read the disks and switch to dolby analog.Sometimes it locked up the whole DTS system and i had to re-boot.

At first I too thought I had a drive going bad and was about
to try swapping out the unit when I discovered the real
cause of the problem. I made a temporary fix to the HV cable and later replaced it and the DTS has never dumped on me again.
(Except for not reading a disk that was obviously very scratched in shipping)

Posted by Ron Curran (Member # 3631) on 02-20-2009, 06:57 PM:

Slightly off track … I have forgotten the model numbers of dts units incorporating a hard drive that stores the information from the discs.

Are these units widely in use and if so, do cinemas send the discs back as soon as their info is on the drive? This would free up discs for other venues that run with discs only. Our cinema still runs the original (but modified) model, as well as Dolby digital.

There are also reports that many cinemas have ditched dts – though I have seen no evidence of the hard drive units coming up for sale.

It is still worthwhile to upgrade film equipment because the change to dci will be slow, particularly in Australia where the exchange rate has inflated the cost.

Unfortunately, there have not been any recent upgrades of dts, such as usb sticks instead of discs or extra tracks.

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 02-20-2009, 06:59 PM:

the model was the XD10

Posted by John Hawkinson (Member # 1135) on 02-20-2009, 10:25 PM:

Ron, at least in the United States, the problem is not that there aren't enough discs to go around. It is that sloppy theatres lose the discs, and the exchanges don't have procedures in place to put new discs back in the old cans.

You would have to figure out a way for the exchanges to move the discs around independently of prints. Though they basically already have that -- it's called theatres calling up and saying that that their discs are broken/missing/whatever.

I doubt many people have gotten rid of XD10 units. They are fairly new, and by most accounts pretty reliable. The unreliability of the 6D and related units mostly stemmed from either drives or aging timecode readers, and because they tended to crash when faults happened, rather than producing diagnostic messages, they could be annoying to diagnose. The XD10 runs a more modern operating system and doesn't have that problem.

The XD10 can read from USB sticks, actually, though movies are not distributed that way. There have been limited 8 or 10 channel DTS releases, to go with the XD10 and the XD10P. I don't know what the story is on them, and why they have not been better-promoted. At least one person here on F-T has run one (I can't remember who! Search!).

--jhawk