DCP Quality from MPS (UK)

[Astrid Barker-Smith]

The majority of DCPs we receive are still physical drives from MPS via NFT still due to the age of our site (an old Doremi Showvault from 2012.) Then a little is screened from Blu-ray (or, more often than not, DCPs encoded from Blu-ray rips with permission from distributor).

In the last year or so, the quality of DCPs we receive from MPS has been in decline, many of them unable to be read by neither our CRU adapters nor new ones that have worked from other cinemas.

We also have had an uptick in KDMs being issued with incorrect dates and times.

Has anyone else experienced this recently? Is it just bad luck or have MPS really gotten sloppy with their DCP QC?

[Leo Enticknap]

I can't speak to the situation in the UK, but I've certainly noticed an uptick here in customers asking for help as the result of a TMS or SMS not being able to read anything from a DCP drive (usually, but not always, from Deluxe), with the end result of the troubleshooting being the diagnosis of a DOA drive and having to ask for a replacement. I suspect the reason why to be that the industry is now pushing theaters toward online delivery (I would guess that 70-80% of my service customers now download their DCPs, with the remainder being mainly mixed use venues and residence theaters), and that therefore Deluxe is not replacing their stock of hard drives in CRU cartridges, many of which are now likely 10-15 years old. Although they will have far fewer spin-up hours on them than a typical drive would do for its age, they will have been repeatedly stressed through handling and shipping, which a regular drive would not be, and so we're now seeing the failure rate increase significantly.

Five years ago, if a customer reported a drive that they couldn't ingest from, the reason was usually that it had come from a mom and pop distributor, or was a student's first festival entry etc., and that the drive was not partitioned and formatted per ISDCF specs (e.g. it had an EFI partition, was formatted exFAT or HFS+, etc. etc.). If that happens now, the cause is almost always physical drive failure.

[Astrid Barker-Smith]

Interesting theory and glad it isn't just this side of the pond being effected by it. Certainly makes sense with drive age etc. being considered.

I wonder if they'll have to come up with a solution for sites like ours who don't have the money to look into LANSAT. They certainly wouldn't be looking to invest in sending SSDs instead! We invested in UniqueX a few years ago but no one seems to use this anymore except Pearl and Dean.

[Michael Richardson]

Is there a reason you have to use physical drives? My location is only doremi showvaults and we use e-delivery exclusively. Setup was as easy as adding the ingest device

[Astrid Barker-Smith]

Primarily monetary. We already have e-delivery as I mentioned, but it seems to have lost the format war against LANSAT (MPS) as almost nothing is available on it.

We are a student cinema in a University, so, technically since we don't "own" the equipment, it takes a lot of hassle to try and get any major changes made to the projector and server. Also we don't have much money! Everything is given to us from the University budget, and anything extra has to be applied for as a charity grant.

It's something we are looking into as the last few months have been particularly ropey for DCPs, and we have had to make some fixes very last minute. Hopefully it isn't too costly. The most we have managed to squeeze out of them is £3000 (~$4000) to repair and service the dormant Cinemeccanica Victoria 5 - although that hasn't left anything for a training budget so it is still out of use!

[Leo Enticknap]

I understand your pain when it comes to universities. I have several among my service customers, and the need for their IT departments to be involved in installing basically anything that has an IP address adds an extra level of forward planning, form filling, and related hurdles to any installation or upgrade project. The campus IT people I work with are generally great, helpful people, but they have rules to follow, and following them slows everything down.

The situation in the US appears to be that e-delivery (meaning DCP transfer from distributor to theater using the theater's regular Internet service as distinct from a satellite dish) is in the process of superseding satellite based systems, and that Deluxe are giving the e-delivery servers (off-the-shelf NAS boxes with customized software in them) to pretty much any venue that wants one, including low volume film societies and mixed use venues. As far as I know, the full slate of DCPs that Deluxe has on their books can be pushed into one of these e-delivery boxes. It doesn't take many CRU drive shipping charges for the boxes to pay for themselves. I'm sorry to read that this doesn't seem to be the case in the UK.

[Marco Giustini]

It's not trivial to determine the health of a mechanical HDD. The SMART table/test will flag some super-obvious fault but you can have a drive which is clearly unhappy (making clunky noises etc) and SMART still passes. The most "community approved" way to fully test an HDD is to run several passes of SMART long + something called "badblocks" which writes the whole drive 5 times with different patterns and reads it back each time to confirm it worked. For a 1TB HDD it's about 3 days of testing.

Which is probably unfeasible for a distribution company. Particularly where the vast majority of the cinemas don't use physical media anymore. Also, those drives are ABUSED by shipping companies and cinemas. Back in the day I remember receiving a drive which had been returned plugged into the CRU the other way round. There are metal pins to prevent that from happening so whoever returned it hammered the HDD in the CRU bay. Literally. The plastic connector inside the CRU had a hole where the metal pin was touching it.

On KDMs, I'm not sure how it works but I have a feeling there is a software portal where someone types dates and times and I have a feeling it might not be the mastering facility doing that?

[Leo Enticknap]

Agreed completely: it makes more sense for Deluxe or MPS simply to ship another drive in response to one being found to be NFG on arrival at a site, than to test a drive thoroughly before shipping it, or to retire and replace drives frequently enough that the risk of bad drives circulating is insignificant. The problem is that when a bad drive does arrive at a site, significant extra shipping and admin costs are incurred, and possibly the risk of lost shows if it wasn't shipped with a contingency time margin. When you add to that the fact that DCP distribution by shipping physical media is in decline, the argument for theaters installing an online delivery system strengthens by the day.

In the US, Deluxe is encouraging this process by providing their e-delivery boxes at no up front cost to the exhibitor, presumably figuring that the fleet of them in the field will soon pay for themselves in saved shipping and handling costs. As they use the theater's existing copper or fiber Internet connection, on site installation is quick and reasonably simple, and can even be done without the need for a field call by a tech in some cases. However, from what the original poster in this thread appears to tell us, that is not the case in the UK, where MPC (which I presume is the Deluxe equivalent) is insisting on satellite receivers. Installing those is an order of magnitude more difficult and expensive than an e-delivery box, hence the reason that e-delivery boxes have superseded them here and enabled the mass switch from physical drive shipping to online delivery to really get going.

[Matt Smith]

Have you considered going the route of using the Gofilex cinema tool? MPS should be able to set you up on the Gofilex portal and send links to download feature and trailer DCPs to a PC. I’m not sure how the cost compares to a hardware server. You would of course need a fast and reliable internet connection.

Although I think you may have some underlying issue if your server is not ingesting the replacement HDDs that are being sent presumably working from another site...

[James Gardiner]

The main eDelivery providers all have "PC software" delivery agents you can also use.
They prefer to get hardware in as it build a barrier to entry. But I have always encouraged cinemas take whatever they can as to build competition.
There is a history of service providers building gatekeeper type implementations in cinema.. and milking it hard.

I also like the idea of a PC-tool download applications as you can then download them off site, if need be. It any internet connected site can be abakcup download site.