Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Missing Files on Cinedigm LMS

This is topic Missing Files on Cinedigm LMS in forum Digital Cinema Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Jason Metcalfe (Member # 5739) on 06-26-2012, 07:10 PM:

Hey guys I wanted to see if anyone had been experiencing a strange issue that has been occurring at our theaters for a few months.

Most of the theaters in our chain use a complete Sony system, from projectors to the central server, and do not usually have problems identifying/using dcps created by our creative department.

One of our theaters however uses a mix between Dolby Media Servers on each projector and a central LMS server from Cinedigm. 90% of the time the dcps sent to this theater have no issues however every once in a while we'll get a file that won't be identified/won't show up to ingest to our central server, Ive received one such file today.

This dcp shows up fine on the sony servers and on the Dolby Media Servers but doesn't show up on the Cinedigm server, the hard drive is identified and there is even other content on the drive that shows up to ingest but this file is missing. Sometimes this is because the creative department doesnt tag the dcp correctly, as only certain classifications (eg. trailer, advertisement) are compatible with the cinedigm server, in these cases I use OpenDCP to rewrite the CPL/PKL files from the .mxf audio/video files and they usually work fine, in this case the problem persists.

I wanted to see if anyone else had experienced a similar issue/commiserate on the ridiculous problems that have cropped up due to the digital conversion, as our creative department is at a loss for what to do, the only solution at this point is to load the file to all of the projector servers and manually add it to playlists for the rest of the month, as this is part of our standard ad tape id rather not do this for the hundreds of shows that it would effect.

One possibility that I can't figure out how to do would be to send the file from the Dolby Server to the central LMS manually from one of the projectors but I can't figure out how to do this, any ideas?

Posted by Yinghong Wu (Member # 6908) on 06-27-2012, 12:32 AM:

The DCP file have two version,One is interop DCP and One is SMPTE DCP,I suggest you to make the Interop DCP,Because some SMPTE DCP will not be found by some Server.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package
Good Luck^-^

Posted by David Zylstra (Member # 4230) on 06-27-2012, 12:39 AM:

Is this the Windows based LMS from Cinedigm?

I've seen something similar before, the Cinedigm LMS will ignore content that is not whole number frame rates - i.e. 23.98, 29.97 and 59.94 will not be recognized (or it shows an error, I can't remember specifics); it needs to be 24, 30, etc.

I ran across this a few years ago when we were making our own DCPs using CineAsset - content sourced as 29.97 and encoded as 29.97 would work fine directly on the DoReMi servers but not on the LMS. We had to request that the content creators output their files in 24p so our CineAsset could encode to 24p (as a side note most of their files come through as 23.98 but CineAsset can be set to treat 23.98 as 24, but it does not do the same for 29.97 or 59.94).

If you look in the CPL file it should show an <editrate> and 24fps is shown as 24 1, 30fps is 30 1, etc . . . . . . 29.97 showed as 30000 1001 (IIRC sometimes the frame rates were shown as 24/1 - depends on some encoding options chosen).

A secondary issue we had was the time zone offset not being 2 digits - i.e. -5:00 needs to be -05:00 (subsequent versions of CineAsset fixed this).

Posted by Jason Metcalfe (Member # 5739) on 07-01-2012, 02:21 AM:

Thanks guys, I'll look into this the next time I'm at that theater.

Yinghong - Do you work at the theater that's in the central shopping district (sorry I dont remember the name) in Suzhou? I remember seeing Spiderman 2 or 3 there in a big theater next to a like 6-7 story shopping mall when I was there in 2007. Suzhou is such a beautiful city, I had a great time there.