Pre NAB

[Joakim Ziegler]

Never mind SMPTE, just make Interop. We use DoReMi CineAsset, and we’ve distributed fairly widely and played back on a fairly wide variety of servers, supplemental packages, subtitles, etc., not had any trouble yet.

It might just be lucky, or it might be that DoReMi’s software is better at avoiding problems than others, but still, there it is.

We do rent a larger theater for review before shipping off, though, but that’s mostly to see that things look and sound good in a more subjective sense.

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Joakim Ziegler – Postproduction Supervisor

[Gustavo Bermudas]

Actually I had clients bringing me DCPs that were done with CineAsset in other facilities and didn’t play as well, had to extract it and re-encode, I guess you were lucky.
I think most of the problems are places with older servers, those sometimes are tricky, but most of the times I encounter problems were a re-wrapping was needed and the same disc was used to put the new DCP, now I just put a brand new disc and replace it, works all the time.

[Joseph Owens]

[Joakim Ziegler] “We do rent a larger theater for review before shipping off, though, but that’s mostly to see that things look and sound good in a more subjective sense.”

You might be interested to investigate Fraunhofer’s EasyDCP Player2, to be shown next week. One of the announced features is SDI playback through selected video cards, eg., BM Decklink. So if you have an SDI-equipped projector (I have a Christie), that addresses that, but it still leaves authors open to the vague differences between all the legacy servers that are out there.

I have to imagine that theatre owners are going to have to come to terms with the rapid obsolescence and turnover of technical assets. For nearly a hundred years, they have been able to more or less play a universally standard distribution format (35mm print) and now they’re going to have to cope with some bloody thing after another every 6 months. Is this really a good idea?

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joakim Ziegler]

I guess we might be lucky in some senses, our stuff is mostly played in Mexico, where the digital change is relatively recent, so there’s not too much very old equipment, in Europe, where I get some of the same impression, and at festivals, where they tend to have more modern/better equipment in general.

I do want to look at the new EasyDCP Player, although I still think it’s a good idea to review in a larger theater with a different playback system, etc.

And I think the change to digital is definitely a good thing. But then again, as a post supervisor, I’ve spent way too much time and energy carrying stacks of 35mm material around, so I might just be biased towards convenience.

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Joakim Ziegler – Postproduction Supervisor