Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Transferring USB drives to CRU

This is topic Transferring USB drives to CRU in forum Digital Cinema Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Phil Ranucci (Member # 3820) on 02-01-2016, 10:49 AM:

Cinedigm LMS and GDC servers.
Local film fest gets lots of submissions on small USB drives that they have tried to copy onto a CRU setup they bought. Formatted EXT2&3 and still will not load into Cinedigm library but some will load in GDC server. Any ideas? Library and server are both USB 2 which is too slow for the number of films that have to be loaded.

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 02-01-2016, 11:27 AM:

Bootlinux on a system with USB3.0 sockets. Get a USB3.0 MoveDock + CRU carrier, copy submissions from USB sticks to a 2TB MBR partitioned EXT2 drive using that MoveDock.
If the system has SATA/ESATA ports, you could also use the older USB2.0+SATA Movedock with a SATA connection.
The old USB2.0 MoveDock will not support drives larger than 2TB over the USB2.0 bridge. I'd say play safe and never use drives larger than 2TB in a cinema environment, since these also will make trouble when partitioned with GUID/GPT schemes.

Note sure if I understand all the server/LMS related issues you bring up, though.

- Carsten

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-01-2016, 12:14 PM:

Pay close attention to the formatting on those drives...you have to have the right inode size (128 Bytes) and the default on is wrong.

From the ISDCF document:

quote:
The partition on the storage device shall be formatted as EXT3 or EXT2,
with the inode size set to 128 bytes.
Note 1: These are not standard settings for the default Linux formatting command,
as the defaults have evolved since this configuration was agreed upon.
Following is a suggested command to format a distribution device from a Linux
prompt. Various GUI-based formatting programs may require you to explicitly
specify these settings.
Note 2: The suggested Linux formatting command is:
'mkfs -t ext3 -I 128 -m 0 /dev/xddN'
where “-t ext3” specifies the filesystem type, “-I 128” specifies the inode size, “-m
0” specified that no blocks need be reserved for the operating system, and
“/dev/xddN” is the name of the device/partition that you intend to format. N will almost
always be 1.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 02-01-2016, 01:12 PM:

Agreed with the above comments.

I will add that there may be a permissions issue (all files should be permission mode 644). Also, I have had the most luck with putting only one movie on each drive and by putting the files in the root directory. Copying multiple movies onto the same drive will cause issues if they are copied into the same directory (since all DCPs will have identically named ASSETMAP and VOLINDEX files), and not all servers seem to be adapt at looking for DCP files outside of the root directory.

Given the types of screwed-up DCPs that now arrive at "film" festivals, it is also possible that there are issues with the original material that is on the USB flash drives as delivered. The only way to rule that out is to try to load the DCP directly from the flash drive.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-01-2016, 01:18 PM:

Or if you just want to be simple about it, format the new CRU drive NTFS and make a folder for each DCP. (Yes you can name each folder what the movie really is, such as "Paint Drying" or "Steve's Love Affair with Platters".) Then just copy all of the assets for each DCP into it's corresponding folder.

I believe all servers out there will read NTFS drives just fine (Dolby/Doremi for certain, but I'm pretty sure GDC does as well) and I believe most if not all of the TMS systems out there can read it too. (Again, I'm pretty certain TCC can.)

You may have to have a Linux machine to READ the original drives though, or you could ingest it into a server, then FTP it out of there. Regardless, NTFS seems to be universally accepted and easy.

Posted by Jim Cassedy (Member # 4115) on 02-01-2016, 01:45 PM:

quote: Brad Miller
I believe all servers out there will read NTFS drives just fine (Dolby/Doremi for certain, but I'm pretty sure GDC does as well)

I can confirm that GDC servers and TMS handle NTFS formatted drives OK.

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 02-01-2016, 02:10 PM:

I actually did this with a wide release feature last summer. Had a problem where the drive could not be read by the GDC servers, but not the Cinedigm LMS. Copied everything to a directory on a Windows 7 computer, then onto an empty CRU the theatre owns. This worked just fine and I was able to ingest the content successfully on the LMS.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-01-2016, 04:18 PM:

If you have the amazing Dolby DSS200 servers, you can have them format a CRU for you correctly (they will also format thumb drives too).

quote:
Via the Administrator login on the CLI: formatStore.sh will format a CRU or USB drive to be used for content transfer. CRU drives will be formatted EXT2 and USB will be formatted FAT32. Caution: All existing files on the attached drive will be lost.

This feature was added in system 4.5

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 02-02-2016, 09:44 AM:

This can also be done from within Terminal on the Doremi, using the CLI. Run Terminal, su to root, and proceed with caution.

The command that Steve gives is correct:

'mkfs -t ext3 -I 128 -m 0 /dev/xddN'

Just be sure that the disk is unmounted (it may auto-mount under /media if there is a filesystem on it already) and that the correct /dev/sdXX is used. The easiest way to get the device file is to run "dmesg" after inserting the CRU (or USB) disk and look at the bottom of that output to see what device was just inserted.

The Dolby method is way easier, though.

Is there an officially supported way to get access to the shell on the GDC server?

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 02-02-2016, 05:15 PM:

Done that trick with GDC, making folders on a drive and copying DCP assets from USB and even the repository source to these created drives for the CRU to read.

Did this all in Windows Explorer. Had to do a USB ingest to a server and wanted all of the needed content on that one drive since I have a booth free location, I wasn't too thrilled to go up a ladder too many times with different pieces of content to do the USB ingest.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-02-2016, 05:26 PM:

If you have the Windows computer there...why not just FTP the contents over to the GDC?

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 02-02-2016, 05:36 PM:

Had a network issue where I couldn't push contents to that one server - couldn't complete a handshake between the two.
Had to get our NA people to fix this one.
For the time being, this was the easiest way to get the task completed. I know it was a "bubblegum and duct tape" fix job, but it did work.
I had time to complete this task, but didn't want to get behind with all of the transfer jobs that had to be done that day.