Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: QuVis Wraptor DCP drive creation

This is topic QuVis Wraptor DCP drive creation in forum Digital Cinema Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 12-11-2009, 03:02 PM:

A friend of mine has created an independant film, and at my recommendation purchased the QuVis Wraptor plug in for Final Cut / Apple Compressor.

He says that everything is going well on the compression end, but when he brings over the hard drives, the Dolby Show Store does not see any content on them, in fact I'm not even sure it sees the drive.

I asked him if he followed the formatting instructions for the disk (Ext2/3) and he said he had. If I plug them into my mac, the drive comes up unreadable, so I believe that he did format it correctly. (Macs cannot read Ext2/3 drives without special software).

One thing I'm wondering is weather the files need to be dumped at the root level of the disk, or if they should be contained in their DCP folder.

Another thing might be the drive itself. Will any external USB 2.0 hard drive do? The drive he bought is powered by it's own adapter, just like the normal drives from Technicolor are.

Posted by Kevin Fairchild (Member # 4985) on 12-11-2009, 03:43 PM:

I had a problem with that too. I figured out that I couldn't use the mini or micro usb ports. Only the regular type A or B usb ports will work. I ordered a DX-10 carrier and dock from CRU. I put the hard drive in there any everyting worked good. I recommend doing this because you can play the content directly off the drive without having to ingest first (plus it is the same style that Technicolor uses, so anyone who uses digital equipment will know how to use it)

If the Mac/PC is at the cinema, you can also load the content onto the dolby via FTP.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 12-11-2009, 03:54 PM:

You can have all of the files within the one folder in the root directory of the drive OR you can just have the raw files in the root directory. It will find them.

FTP is another alternative, but specific instructions should not be posted here.

You can also load onto the Dolbys using NTFC if I am not mistaken. You can DEFINITELY load using FAT.

If you need to read the DCI drives, nothing beats this.

Posted by David Zylstra (Member # 4230) on 12-11-2009, 06:04 PM:

When I suspect a drive is not being recognized I'll copy some standard content that I know is valid onto it to see if it gets recognized. I do know that our Cinedigm LMS and DoReMis can read off NTFS and FAT32 (but FAT32 does something odd when ingesting into the Linux based Cinedigm LMS).

If you rule out the HD not being recognized:

We use the DoReMi CineAsset software and we found some quirks, maybe Quvis has similar issues:

the DoReMi server could ingest any content created just fine (any frame rate etc)
The Cinedigm LMS was more rigid in what content it would recognize - in working with Cinedigm we found several "issues" with some of the files, things like the software did not put the time zone offset in 2 digits, the LMS would not accept non integer frame rates, and a few others I can't remember. Our workaround is that we put the PC in the Hawaii time zone in order to get the offset as 2 digits and use the JPG Interop encoding and it works fine with both the DoReMi and LMS. (note that our install is using DoReMi with the native GUI with the Cinedigm Windows based LMS)

It is possible that the Dolby is as rigid as the Cinedigm LMS and simply won't recognize content encoded by the Quvis software because of some minor issue in the assetmap, cpl or pkl files (or even if the frame rate is outside of what the Dolby will recognize).

If you have a contact at Dolby they may be able to look at the content and tell you where the issue is (I spent a week going back and forth between DoReMi and Cinedigm to figure out our issue).

I hope you figure it out!

I have software similar to what Brad linked to - it works great to create backup copies of some of our owned content that were sent on EXT2 drives.

Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 12-12-2009, 09:49 AM:

OK - We're trying FAT32 now. What other servers besides the Dolby and the DoReMi can read FAT32?

Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 12-12-2009, 02:15 PM:

I can not in good conscience recommend this product.

We've followed instructions to a T and have so far been unsuccessful. QuVis, apparently bankrupt, does not provide support for this product.

The filmmaker, now approaching his deadline, has decided to go with a professional mastering company instead.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 12-12-2009, 04:44 PM:

Mike, have him contact me before he goes to an overpriced conversion house. We can convert it.

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 12-15-2009, 11:17 AM:

FAT32 has a 2/4 Gigabyte filesize limit. With anything else than a short trailer, you will run into troubles with it.

I heard that the Dolby servers are extremely picky with some file specs, i.e. audio bit depths. Anyway - it's never a good idea to try these things the first time when you have a deadline coming up.

Quvis offers a trial version of Wraptor, so usually one can and should do some testing with specific files and servers well ahead.

I know of issues with other more expensive software packages as well. This is more a general compatibility thing than a flaw of a specific software. You just have to learn these things.

- Carsten

Posted by Mattias Mattsson (Member # 4308) on 01-15-2010, 09:10 PM:

If you have a Dolby DSS100, maybe it's this problem with the format of the XML-files: Cannot load open cinema DCP onto dolby server

Posted by Olivier Lemaire (Member # 5579) on 01-16-2010, 06:40 PM:

Greetings,

Regarding formating the disk itself, most of the laboratories are using EXT2 (or EXT3, but "who cares" [Smile]

) filesystem: any player on the planet can mount this filesystem.

Regarding EXT3, you should consider the "-I 128" option not to scare the XDC players, if used in the USA. For example :
mkfs.ext3 -I 128 -b 4096 -L DCP-DRIVE \
-m 0 -O sparse_super \
-T largefile4 /dev/you_disk_device
(XDC player are Microsoft Windows (TM) based appliance, and use a freeware - not Open Source - driver that still have some limitations nobody fixed yet - see FAQ on http://www.fs-driver.org/ ).

Most of the players can mount FAT32 and NTFS too. But both have probably patent issues, and FAT32 have the 4GB restriction. So, safer to use EXT3.

For the QVis Wraptor Final Cut plugin, I heard that the JP2K conversion algorithms were not that... perfect, so quality issues can occurs. Go to a laboritory for more, or have some nights spent on http://code.google.com/p/opencinematools/ [Smile]

Have a nice burn [Smile]

--
lem