Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Wrong movies in digital

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Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-18-2015, 03:09 PM:

So apparently GDCs have a "chip problem" in their design.

Movie mix-up shows 'Fifty Shades of Grey' to 'SpongeBob' audience

quote:

Loveland theater accidentally starts R-rated movie in place of kids' flick

By Jessica Benes
Reporter-Herald Staff Writer
Posted: 02/18/2015 10:35:32 AM MST3 Comments

"SpongeBob GreyPants."

Or maybe "Fifty Shades of SpongeBob."

Joe Jaramillo of Johnstown sat in the MetroLux 14 theater Monday morning with his granddaughter waiting for "The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water" film to start. He noticed that the previews all seemed to have a romantic flavor but didn't think much of it until the movie started and the words "Fifty Shades of Grey" appeared on screen.

"People ran out of there," Jaramillo said with a laugh. "You could hear little kids going, 'SpongeBob! SpongeBob!' as the parents were dragging them out."

He said after a few seconds, the screen abruptly went blank. Then new trailers started rolling, this time with children's themes.

While "SpongeBob SquarePants" is about an underwater sea creature and all his silly antics, "Fifty Shades of Grey" is an R-rated erotic romance movie based on a book by the same name.

Jaramillo said he was thankful that from what he has heard, the adult themes in "Fifty Shades" don't begin until later in the movie.

"What was interesting is they have the policy you can't take a kid into an R-rated movie," Jaramillo said. "Some of the trailers were coming up R-rated."

David Corwin, president of Metropolitan Theatres, said that there was a chip problem with the server and somehow the wrong movie started playing.

"It stopped pretty quickly. Someone came out to tell the staff and they stopped it," Corwin said. "Fortunately, the beginning (of 'Fifty Shades') is pretty scenic. It was obviously not intended."

He said that both movies are played in that auditorium at different times; "SpongeBob" during the day and "50 Shades" at night, which means the films are on the same computer server. Digital theaters project digital files onto a screen, unlike older film projectors.

Corwin added that the theater managers handle every situation differently. In this case, no free passes were issued because the situation was resolved quickly and without undue harm to the children.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 02-18-2015, 03:30 PM:

"Hey Chip, run up to the projection room and switch that playlist."

"Yes sir!"

Chip problem resolved...

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 02-18-2015, 05:10 PM:

Definitely feel a black eye coming for the company that owns Metrolux ...lol.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-18-2015, 05:12 PM:

I was just going to post this story. Why does stuff like this make the news these days? Is it because it doesn't happen as much as it used to? Does some parent run out of the theater and call the local news station?

They're just incompetent.

Posted by Jim Cassedy (Member # 4115) on 02-18-2015, 06:29 PM:

Hey Frank-
just wanted to let you know that your response to the "chip problem"
almost made me fall outta my chair laughing.

Thanks for "making my day"

Jim C

Once, way back in the 1970's I accidentally started a reel of
"The Godfather" right in the middle of a "Pippi Longstocking" movie.

But I readily admitted that I mucked up, and didn't try to blame it
on some sort of lame 'equipment problem'

("Oh gee whizz, boss - somebody mis-labeled the reels. . ")

gimmieabreak!

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 02-18-2015, 06:51 PM:

quote: Joe Redifer
Why does stuff like this make the news these days?

It did in the film multiplex days, too. I remember one place in London swapping Reservoir Dogs and The Lion King, because they were trying to interlock one print of each movie through multiple projectors for a set of shows starting at around the same time, and didn't get the sequence right. The Daily Mail published a shot of Mr. Whoever's ear being hacked off and a quote from a child psychologist opining that the little darlings could have been emotionally scarred for life (which, having to endure all that 1970s music, I'm sure they could have been).

Of course when you're doing that, you can't just stop and re-edit a playlist...

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-18-2015, 07:01 PM:

If some kid was scarred for life because of the ear-hacking scene, then the parents or guardians asked for it. Did they just keep watching said movie thinking "Hmmm... when do the animated lions appear?"

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-18-2015, 07:24 PM:

Apparently the lions come in sometime after reel 4, which is the reel with the ear-hacking scene.

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 02-18-2015, 08:28 PM:

I think pretty much everyone has a story of threading the wrong movie when it came to film. Whether it was two unmarked prints on the platter, a screwed up schedule in the booth, or being distracted at the wrong point. It was all too easy for a human error to cause that to happen.

I have a very difficult time seeing this happen with digital. The most likely scenario to me is that some kind of issue got the auditorium behind schedule. Maybe it wasn't turned on soon enough at the start of the day, or the previous show got behind. Maybe there was not enough time between play lists, so the schedule didn't load (on GCDs I've found you need to have about 2 minutes between playlists or this can happen). For whatever reason someone had to manually start the show and they selected the wrong SPL.

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 02-18-2015, 08:39 PM:

quote:
the situation was resolved quickly and without undue harm to the children.

Just the harm that was due [evil]

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 02-18-2015, 09:29 PM:

quote: Justin Hamaker
very difficult time seeing this happen with digital

It can happen since the "booth clowns" in the 35mm world graduated up to wearing penguin outfits, but still retains the same "above my pay grade" mentality.

Happened at our plex a few months ago: Trainee fellow, when building the SPL, added in the wrong feature CPL to the list and didn't catch the error. Thus, saved the SPL and put it into the scheduler.

Next day, sure enough, TMS screen showed the proper feature assigned to that one house, but on the scheduled performance, the wrong feature hit the screen.

Luckily, this didn't cause a violent issue as in the story above since it was an easy fix - to stop the SPL, go into the edit window, take out the wrong feature CPL, put in the correct one and resave the edited SPL.

The fellow was lightly warned to be more careful in the future builds to double check before saving.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 02-18-2015, 09:32 PM:

quote: Justin Hamaker
I have a very difficult time seeing this happen with digital.

I've done that a few time with digital, but I've caught it before an actual picture showed up on the screen.

I usually play just one show per week, so on the odd occasion when I have two different shows, one at 7pm and the other at 9pm, I have occasionally forgotten to switch the playlist before starting one of them. I notice about a half-second after hitting "play", though, and stop and do the switch. Nobody ever knows that it happened, though.

Posted by John Roddy (Member # 7348) on 02-19-2015, 01:25 AM:

I actually just recently dealt with a server that was running an outdated schedule, and started the wrong feature as a result. For whatever reason, the LMS refused to push the correct schedule, even though everything seemed find on that end. The only conclusion we could come up with was that someone screwed up when modifying the ticketing system. Of course, that was all due to a very last minute change (I verified the schedule the night before, and it changed the very next morning). There were no network issues or any oddities with the server at all. It was just weird.

This kind of thing happens a lot. That's why both of my theaters have dedicated projectionists to go in and double-check everything. The reliability of these systems is a joke.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-19-2015, 11:56 AM:

John - what LMS and server are you using?

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-19-2015, 12:44 PM:

I don't believe we've had this problem and we monitor Cinedigm, GDC and Dolby TMS systems. Mind you, the GDC TMS depends an awful lot on the end-user to get things right on their end...it isn't entirely automatic by any stretch. Likewise, the Dolby TMS, though drag and drop, isn't going to help you too much but it will run whatever you say you want to run.

We HAVE had bad schedules come from some POS systems to the Cinedigm system...however, the cause is easily proven by looking at the schedule that the POS sent out. Thus far, I'm unaware of a wrong movie playing in any of our theatres.

Reliability depends on equipment choice, implementation and operation. At the speed most of this stuff was installed, I'm amazed it works as well as it does.

Posted by John Roddy (Member # 7348) on 02-20-2015, 02:42 PM:

quote: Brad Miller
John - what LMS and server are you using?

Cinedigm TCC and GDC SX-2000AR. It happened in the house that just had its server swapped the day before, which is what confused everybody. Yet, despite the perfectly suspicious timing, there were no issues with it. Everything was set up correctly, the network was fine, and the LMS was communicating properly with it. It had already migrated a feature or two and set up most of the schedule when I left. The only reason it wasn't completely done was because some content was still being pushed to it.

The change was made the next morning, but it did not push the updated schedule. The LMS showed everything fine, but the server kept the old showtimes. We tried deleting the schedule directly off the server for that day, but it didn't push an updated one. Every other day was fine though. And it's been running without issue ever since. Again, very bizarre.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-20-2015, 05:22 PM:

Well the server swap was a key bit of information there. Not that it should have caused any particular issue. However, if it had built up shows for the previous server, the UUID would have been tied to that server and you would have needed to force a change to have it rebuild the shows for the new server. If you are talking about one or two shows, it is easy enough to use Schedule Viewer to "edit" the show time by moving ahead an hour and then back an hour and save...that will force a new show build...do that for each show.

Another way to force new shows more globally is to change the credit offset in Title Mapping by a second (does it really need to be that accurate?)...when you save the title map, all of the shows with that title will be rebuilt from scratch with new UUIDs.

However, having not seen what happened...I can say for sure what did happen. I'll say that I have done server swaps...even changing brands and the TCC didn't have issues kicking out the shows properly.

Note, your version of TCC could also be a factor there too. I'm having real good success with the new one 3.4.7.0 since Patch 3 came out...fixed a memory leak. Before patch 3 you'd have memory problems.

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 02-20-2015, 05:35 PM:

Although I think a hardware or software issue is highly unlikely, I would be interested to hear more. It's easy to laugh this off and say someone is just covering their ass and shifting blame. But it wouldn't be the first time something like this actually did turn out to be a hardware or software issue.

I still think the issue comes down to someone either manually starting the wrong play list, or mapping the wrong title (unlikely since it was the second week of SpongeBob).

Posted by Andrew Thomas (Member # 7000) on 02-24-2015, 06:22 PM:

The biggest question mark I have is over their claim that they are splitting a screen between SpongeBob and Fifty Shades. I'm pretty sure that Paramount is still requiring you to play SpongeBob clean. I suppose they could be playing less than 14 movies, so they are splitting an extra screen in addition to the screens that are dedicated to SpongeBob and 50.

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 02-24-2015, 06:32 PM:

Andrew, I'm sure both movies were still getting a full slate of show times. But they were probably splitting in this particular auditorium to accommodate demand at a particular time of day. Most likely there is another auditorium which has the other part of the schedule for both movies. It is also possible this auditorium was used to offer additional show times above what would normally be possible with a single auditorium.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 02-24-2015, 06:33 PM:

The problem happened at a morning showing on a Monday, so they probably are playing Spongebob as a matinee and 50 Shades in the evening and/or afternoon.

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 02-24-2015, 06:44 PM:

Actually the GDC TMS doesn't do a dang thing to run a show. All it does is send the SPL you made up to the servers and the servers get the content first from other servers, then from the TMS if it is not present on other servers. The play schedules are all stored on the individual servers and is done separately from sending the SPL's. So if you send it the wrong SPL for that play time it's going to automatically play what ever wrong content you programed it to play irregardless of what content is already selected for playback. I have second run sites that load ten shows on each GDC server so all they have to move around (mabie) are the previews, and that part happens very fast.

Mark

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 02-24-2015, 07:09 PM:

That's what I tell people here when I'm training them on this GDC-TMS unit..is that:

All the TMS is like a big monitoring system that displays what is in the LMS, what content is in each PSD-3000 storage unit, and what the SX3000 IMB is doing to process the information to the projector.

I tell them that I could build all content via the GUI in VNC instead of the TMS, then just refresh content lists so the SPL's can be built in the scheduler using the TMS.

I also tell them that I can even local ingest into the SX3000 and build right there at each individual projector using the laptop with VNC running.

Definitely sounds like a poor manager who is not on top of his operation, not getting involved with his operation (we got one of them here also), and isn't willing to accept the blame for his shortcomings as a manager should be. Manager believes in playing the "blame game."

Posted by Scott Christopher (Member # 834) on 02-24-2015, 10:26 PM:

I had a similar incident here late 2014. The Doremi in cinema 1 refused to play the scheduled playlist and play whatever it wanted. I manually loaded the playlist and got the correct show running.
I then checked the schedule thinking I had made a mistake(I schedule using the Doremi)... It was all correct.

The following session, the same outcome. It did start automatically at the scheduled time but it was the wrong film! Manual override again!!!
Once the 2nd session was complete I rebooted the machine. There hasn't been a problem since!

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 02-25-2015, 03:32 PM:

For all we know, this might have happened due to a freak incident caused by a software bug... or somebody just screwed up... Calling it a "chip problem" might sound stupid for the informed crowds around here, but the general public who's barely sufficiently competent to turn on their TV and post their latest ramblings on Twitter and Facebook on their smartphone wouldn't care anyway.

But at least those little buggers didn't have to live with a trauma the rest of their lives... As you might know, a few minutes of 50 Shades of Grey will melt the mind of anybody below 18 years of age...

Posted by Jim Cassedy (Member # 4115) on 02-25-2015, 03:49 PM:

quote: Justin Hamaker
I'm sure both movies were still getting a full slate of show times. But they were probably splitting in this particular auditorium to accommodate demand at a particular time of day.

I've got a situation at one of the theaters I look after where not all of
the auditoriums are handicapped accessible. Movies are constantly shifted
around to avoid any ADA compliance complaints.