Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Cinedigm LMS doesn't recognize external USB HDD

This is topic Cinedigm LMS doesn't recognize external USB HDD in forum Digital Cinema Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 03-07-2012, 10:13 PM:

I am attempting to ingest a CPL I created on my laptop and then transferred to a Seagate USB 500GB external HDD. The drive is NTSF formatted. When I plug it in to the LMS, it starts to mount and then says "Invalid". However, I can browse the disk under "Import Data".

Any ideas?

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 03-08-2012, 03:31 AM:

Also, I am able to ingest from the same HDD directly onto my GDC servers.

Posted by David Zylstra (Member # 4230) on 03-08-2012, 01:36 PM:

All my NTFS formatted thumb drives work on our Cinedigm LMS (I usually use a 32GB to ingest content I create with CineAsset).

I do not know specifics but maybe the invalid message based on content rather than drive format?

I recall when I first started creating DCPs we found that the Cinedigm LMS is very strict in what content it will ingest. I.e. content must be in a whole number for the frame rate (look in the cpl file for the <editrate> tag and it should be "24 1" or "30 1", anything fractional gets rejected - i.e. 23.98, 29.97, etc will not be accepted by the LMS). Our fix was to ensure that the content we received was 24, 30 or 60fps (23.98 was not too bad because the DoReMi CineAsset software can be set to treat 23.98 as 24).

The second hurdle we had was to ensure that the time zone offset from the <issuedate> tag is 2 digits for the hours, i.e. "-05:00" and not "-5:00" for EST (a workaround for the version we used was to put the PC in the Hawaii time zone of "-10:00").

Our case was similar to yours where the DoReMis would accept anything created by CineAsset but the Cinedigm LMS was not . . . . the explanation was that only certain frame rates were in DCI so only those were accepted by the LMS.

Edit: I looked back at my notes from 2009 and 29.97 was coming through as "30000 1001" in the CPL.

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 03-08-2012, 02:15 PM:

I know it's not the CPL, because the drive shows up as Invalid, even when there is nothing on the drive. Plus, a drive with a bad CPL should still show up as long as the server can read the drive; the CPL just would not show up as ingestable content.

Posted by David Zylstra (Member # 4230) on 03-08-2012, 07:19 PM:

I don't deal with the LMS that often so I wasn't sure how it reacts to various potentially odd content on a mounted drive.

Maybe there is something odd with the drive? (are there other partitions? - just a thought). If the content is small maybe try a USB thumbdrive formatted with NTFS.

If you have a NOC monitoring agreement they might be able to help diagnose the issue.

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 03-08-2012, 11:48 PM:

So it turns out that the problem was not having an audio file as part of the Asset Map. since this was for my advertising program and would be using the auditorium intermission music, I didn't think there was a need to include an audio file. I attached an audio file which was several minutes of silence and then I was able to ingest without a problem.

Live and learn.

Posted by David Zylstra (Member # 4230) on 03-09-2012, 09:36 AM:

Wow, I never would have thought that . . . . . another case of the Cinedigm LMS sticking to a tighter requirement than the servers themselves.

FYI - on the DoReMi CineAsset software I have the option of doing an audio dub and "create silence" to fill channels.

All of our clips have an audio track so I never ran across this - good to know for the future.