I have been to more than a few locations where returning CRU drives was, to put it mildly, not high on the priority list. One location used a stack of CRU drives as an improvised stool to sit on. My opinion is that it's unprofessional to not return the CRU drives in a timely manner. They provide a label, and if the label is damaged, they will email you a new one. It's cheaper and easier to return a CRU drive than shipping 35mm prints used to be. Ignorance, apathy or laziness, it's just rude to accumulate them. It creates additional expense for Deluxe, who has to purchase new CRU drives to replace the ones that aren't returned, which then gets passed down to studios and theatres in the form of higher distribution costs.
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It's funny, I NEVER held on to any film or hard drives because of the 'threats" of being billed for them. So we have no extra stuff laying around at all, except a handful of trailers -- which they didn't really want back, once movies' shelf lives dwindled to nothing thanks to the video drain-hole that everything gets flushed into within a month or two now.
I suppose they figured it was cheaper to just buy more drives than to try to chase down unreturned ones, not to mention trying to get rogue theaters to pay for unreturned drives.it's just rude to accumulate them. It creates additional expense for Deluxe, who has to purchase new CRU drives to replace the ones that aren't returned, which then gets passed down to studios and theatres in the form of higher distribution costs.
If the whole thing was happening today, Deluxe would probably demand a credit card number or an ACH bank account so they could just collect for unreturned drives after a period of time. That would have cured the problem.Comment
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I agree completely that theaters should return drives as soon as the last show is over. Before transitioning from projectionist to service tech I was anally retentive about this, because I did not want my booth cluttered up with movies that we weren't going to play again. They took up space and created confusion and the heightened risk that a drive we actually did need could get misplaced. There were a few times that I had to tell a content supplier (usually a post house or indie of some description) that if they didn't give us a return label or instructions by a certain deadline, their drive would go to the dumpster.
But as we all know, many theaters just let them pile up. It may be that Deluxe did automatically invoice them for the drive value if it wasn't returned after a given timeout, and that within the overall costs of operating a 15-plex (for example), managers believed that these invoices were just regular operating expenses and paid them without question. Related to which, Barco have recently become a lot more proactive about invoicing for RMA-ed parts following a warranty replacement if they aren't returned promptly: I had one customer who was billed for a Series 4 light engine after the NFG one had sat in the booth for a month after I pulled it out of the projector. After they finally did return it, we had a major fight to get that invoice canceled. Of course if you receive a bill for $25K that you don't think you should be on the hook for, you're going to notice that pretty quickly and meow and hiss about it. But if it's for $250 I guess you might not, especially if you're running a business that turns over several million a year.Comment
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I could also see this habit of keeping them well past due developing out of paranoia due to previous technology failures and needing the original media to recover from that. Keeping them much past last screening is not really excusable, but it could be apathy or accounting combined with that paranoia.
If you have a practice of returning them, there may also have been mishaps where the incoming and outgoing piles got mixed, and drives were returned accidentally before ingest and screenings. This would again rachet up the paranoia. I used to not peel our labels until the screening was over. But we had at least a couple drives come right back to us because that was missed. Now I religiously peel them after ingest, but they don't leave booth until after screening.
But I feel the most likely is "someone used to be responsible for that", but that position or person went away, and owners/management was so hands off in the booth that they just started piling up without bringing someone else up to speed on the return end.Comment
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We had a similar pile-up, not that bad as in the picture, but this was due to a failed RMA procedure at NetApp, combined with some kind of possible production issue with the disks in our machine. So NetApp decided that all of our disks needed to be rotated...
We received a giant pile of new disks, which we needed to replace one after another. The problem was, the procedure for all disks took way longer than the RMA window and after five mails and three calls I'd given up on in. So we had someone from FedEx turning up at the reception for days on end to collect the RMA disks, only to send them away empty-handed. Afterwards, after a week or six, the disk rotation procedure was finally finished, but now we had a giant pile of RMA disks in shipping boxes and a broken RMA system at NetApp's side that didn't manage to get them picked up for months on end.Comment
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"My CRU Drive Dump"
Last week, we had two drives in our TMS RAID suddenly fail. (well one completely died,
and the other one had some 'issues') The system had begun acting odd about a day earlier,
and we couldn't quite figure out what was going on. We were also still running 70mm
ODYSSEY shows, and I had two other live events that required my attention, so I had limited
time to realize there was a problem and even less time to troubleshoot. To make a long story
short, it took about 48hrs to source the new drives and re-build the RAID. Much of the
previously ingested content was either 'lost' or corrupted. ( I thought a RAID was supposed
to prevent some of that. . but I digress) - - I also lost all of my carefully curated and fine-tuned
show templates, and several days-worth of playlists, although I was able to pull some of this
stuff from the auditorium servers. I even had to run two shows completely manually . No
trailers, ads, policy or 'Feature Presentation" snipes, etc. Just the movie, Even the lights and
electric door closers had to be operated manually, since there was no playlist, and thus no
cues. Because, at the outset of this we didn't know exactly what was wrong or how long it
would take to fix it, the bookers decided to have Deluxe hard-ship me the next two weeks of
content on CRU drives. And they also had to ship some drives for content that had already
been ingested and 'lost' or corrupted. Since my venue does a lot of private rental events and
repertory programing of tites that will only be shown once. . this amounted to over 2 dozen
CRU drives from Deluxe received over a 2 or 3 day period. I didn't have the time or space to
log them in properly, so they pretty much wound up in various piles assorted by playdates.
Whattamess!
Back in the good-ol film days, it wasn't unusual to sometimes get a print shipped in those
metal ICC shipping cases, some of which were 20+ years old and occasionally required
a hammer-and-chisel to pry open. As long as the latches and hinges were still intact, the
shippers were still somewhat serviceable. But jeeezus cripes! - What excuse does Deluxe
have for sending out CRU drives in shippers like this, which probably cost them less than
2¢ in the quantities they buy them in. The cable-tie was the only thing holding it together:
And, ironically, this DCP was "Casualties Of War" - - and it looks like it !
BadBox.jpg
Now that the TMS is back up & running and I've got everything
re-ingested, I need to start shipping this pile back to Burbank!
JimsShippingShock2.jpgComment
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That box is a classic!
Knowing what FedEx charges these days, it would likely be cheaper to pay you mileage and hours on the clock to take a nice scenic drive down the 101 with that lot.Comment
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yeah we get boxes in that condition quite frequently. They should send us tape too for the repair burden.
That TMS failure I suppose is a good reason to keep CRUs somewhat in play, but not really once the booths begin to lack ways to mount them. I also suspect any venue with a decent network link could probably download 12 titles overnight, but I suppose the fear was the TMS would crap out again.Comment
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1. Even if the TMS dies you can always ingest the movie directly at the screen.
2. Even if there's no place to mount a CRU ingest bay on the pedestal you can carry one of the USB boots over and plug 'er in and set it on anything until you finish the ingest.Comment
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Well, Frank - - 'yes and no' : There's a logistical problem with doing that. Only my two largest
auditoriums have actual 'booths' where I have complete access to the projectors and integrated
IMB's. The other three screens are located in what used to be the lower balcony of of a large,
old 'movie palace' type theater. The projectors in those auditoriums are Barco LS4k-12C's with
integrated ICMP-X IMB's, and they each reside in a tiny 'cubby hole' high up on the back wall
of each room. I can access that space from either a hatch in in a hallway, or by opening up the
port-glass on the auditorium side. And accessing from either front or rear requires me to set up
a ladder. Those projector perches were originally designed for different projectors a decade ago,
and the Barco projectors fit inside with only enough space to barely stick your hand inside reach
the USB ports. Not only that, but since the ingest ports are near the front end of the projector, my
arm isn't long enough to reach if I try it from the hallway side. The projectors are on rails, so in
theory I could slide them out, but these rooms have somewhat large screens and a short throw,
so even just sliding the projector in-and-out' will throw positioning off a bit. There are some other
logistical problems if I try to enter reach the projector from the auditorium side, one of which
is the difficulty of positioning a ladder in the back row due to the location of the seats and a
couple of other annoying auditorium obstacles. So, yes, I wish I could have ingested locally
to a couple of the auditorium servers, and I had indeed done that several times in the past
for various reasons when the old projectors were in place. But with way things are now, local
ingestion would be tricky and potentially create more problems than it would solve. I'd also
have to deal with setting up a ladder in a busy hallway, or in the back of an auditorium, which
would basically be in everybody's way.Comment
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Sounds like a good spot for a USB extension cable to hang out. Might be cheap insurance if needed in the future. I'm not sure about the ICMP-X but with the doremi's you can set them up as ingest sources from one another, so while it would take longer, if the ICMP is capable, you could ingest to an accessible server and then ingest to the hard to access one...Comment
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You can. You can pull by FTP from an external site into an ICMP (all variants); but you can't push into an ICMP from the external site as you can with a DolRemi or DSS server, by uploading to a specified folder on the DCP server's built in FTP server.Originally posted by Dustin Grush
Without wanting to come across as overly preachy, the moral of this story is to regularly and proactively check the condition of the RAIDs in your theater if the devices are not set up to warn you proactively (e.g. via SNMP monitoring) if one drive goes bad.
But even then, rebuild success is not guaranteed. If you have, say, a TMS with a RAID of four drives, all installed new at the same time and from the same batch, then one of them kicks the bucket 7-8 years later, the chances are that the others are in a similar condition. I've had two or three occasions when I've replaced a bad drive, started the rebuild, and then one of the others died during it, because the stress of prolonged spinning and constant head movements pushed it over the edge.
The only insurance policy against that is to do what the mega data centers do and replace RAID drives proactively on a set schedule (e.g. every five years) as a preventative maintenance action. The question is what is more expensive in the long term - doing that, or dealing with the occasional loss of a RAID's content as and when it happens. For theaters that have both TMS and SMS storage, there could be an argument in favor of the latter.Comment
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