[cjflynn]

- Tue Jul 19, 2016 6:57 pm #2022 Film Festivals are ubiquitous in some parts of the world, and becoming more ubiquitous everywhere else.
They range from small and tightly focused on a particular topic to International in scope with dozens or hundreds of full length movies in competition and on view for distribution. The needs therefore range from the need for DCPs with the tightest security to viewing product direct from portable computer video ports.

Why is this of import to the ISDCF group?

Many reasons. First, even though some of the festival support teams which have run into every nuance of DCP conversion issues that rippled through the general exhibition field for the last 10 years – compressed into their 3 day or two week setups – have learned through diligence, better processes and more stable equipment – the continued growth of the festival industry, the SMPTE Compliant DCP transition and other "digital" factors has kept the industry in turmoil.

Second is the inexplicable belief that free internet tools will be so easy and flawless that people with no professional skills can bypass logic and learning curves during the last phase of their artistic process and come up with a deliverable that is difficult for even professional companies to achieve – a DCP that will play on different generations and makes and models of media servers and projectors with different software and firmware – against the advice of the festival organizers who often work out special deals with DCP creation teams to reduce problems...but which predominantly refuse to invoke a "Must Use" clause.

A third reason is that the internet is strewn with 10 years of "solutions", some small part of which still have enough truth to be useful and some large part which adds to the confusion. It is hoped that an ISDCF Forum discussion can lay out problems and solutions.

Since it has been the remit of the ISDCF to help deal with Pain Points in the d-cinema transition, and since this topic comes up regularly, this post is submitted to discuss still existing problems and tested solutions that can assist tech support teams, and therefore festival organizers and artists.

[cjflynn]

- Tue Jul 19, 2016 6:59 pm #2023 To kick off the discussion, this is a helicopter view of some issues that I've collected from conversations with festival techs.

There are many kinds of film festivals held around the world, but they all have similar traits.

1) Rarely are they held in a facility that is exclusive for the festival.
2) Rarely are they held in one facility.
3) Rarely is there one set of equipment of same manufacture and similar vintage.
4) Rarely does all equipment have the latest software (or does all software work everywhere.)
5) Rarely are there more technical people on-site than needed for the situations-at-hand.
6) Rarely will all the DCPs load and/or play through without some technical intervention.
7) Rarely does the technical team get to play all the productions with the creatives.
8) Rarely do the QC previews get done in the room they’ll finally be played in.
9) Rarely will all other rooms load/play even when the preview room loaded/played.
10) Rarely does the Festival’s Material Requirements Form include a line that shows which DCP-Validation tool was used.

Here is a look at some of the ‘whys’ for these situations.

1. Even the most spectacular of Film Festival spectacles, for example the Festival de Cannes held at the Palais des Congress in Cannes France – where there are no other movies played the rest of the year – is not a perfect situation. There are no other movies played because there is no equipment for the rest of the year. All the equipment is brought in for the Festival from one featured manufacturer and one installation crew adjuncts the staff organized and brought in from all over the country by the CST. QC runs are held 10 days in advance and woe to the group who miss their QC spot.

2. In many festivals around the world, the movies and documentaries have to be played at several cinema facilities in the host city. The contracts with these facilities will typically specify that the equipment is brought up to the latest specification, that the software and firmware are the latest versions and that the technical staff of the festival have the right to put new software and firmware as required. [Is this HTML comedy tag working?]

3. In reality, the equipment vintage will vary from cinema to cinema, even projection room to projection room, as will the software and firmware. But the equipment works, as witnessed by the fact that the facility is playing commercial movies several times a day to a paying audience. Typically the facility will play their normal schedule for part of the day and turn over the auditoriums to the festival. The facility owner doesn’t really care if they have the latest, they just want a working system when regular movie patrons appear.

4. It is an anachronism to think that every software changes will cause at least one problem with one set of equipment that will need to be debugged. But it isn’t untrue to believe that changing the firmware/software in a projector/server system might allow a new DCP to work but cause a previously working movie to not play. It is not anecdotal that many systems of similar type and vintage will work with a particular set of firmware and software, but one or two systems will need to be beat into submission…or emails sent to manufacturers begging them to get together and figure out the problem(s).

5. Given that these things are true, and that bigger events will have dozens of cinema facilities with dozens of equipment combinations in play, the best solution would be the laughable notion that the festival will hire extra technical support staff beyond the needs of whatever emergencies might present themselves. Fate, of course, subscribes an inverse proportion rule that puts less resources (money to hire techs) at festivals with the most likelihood of odd variations of client submissions (submit your ‘tape’ in any of these several formats or make a DCP yourself perhaps!) Actually, every festival, large or small, gets last minute submissions in odd formats. There is never enough tech support and there is never enough time. Most emphatic tech complaint: even after heroic efforts to make a movie or documentary avoid a black screen, coordinating the creative for final QC sign-off is a time consuming battle.

6. Of course, the great majority of DCPs will show up working, and the creative will be on-time for the QC run. There are also DCPs that show up working on most equipment, but through no fault of the creative there is some inexplicable reason that the DCP works on one set of equipment but not another. This happens – very rarely – even with regular cinema movies. On the other hand, through no fault of the tech team, perhaps through some fault of festival communication or more often, the artist thinks they can magically defy laws of physics and equipment standards. It is not odd for creatives to show up with odd variations of tape format and/or disk formats that are clearly in violation of the rules, yet they are willing to risk their investment at the final link in the chain of their production.

7. If the tech team sets up some triage mechanism for problems – which lack of time and resources inevitably leads to – the most likely way to make certain that a production is placed on the bottom of the list (Black Screen Trending) is to not show up for QC, to ignore messages about problems, to not send security keys in advance (or power lunch with them in your pocket), and to not fill out the forms that may indicate the technical origin of the material. With enough time and clues – and the security keys if used – a black screen might be avoided, even if the creative is disrespecting their fellow festival teammates.

8. One constant in the 15 year transition from film to digital exhibition has been constant transition. Professionals at the DCP-Creation houses have had to keep dozens of variations of equipment on hand to test the possible combinations of hardware/software/firmware in the field and now, the variations of InterOp and SMPTE-compliant DCPs. One constant in festivals is that the hardware/software/firmware in the auditorium chosen to run QC checks will be in some way different than the hardware/software/firmware in the auditorium chosen for your production. The QC auditorium will sometimes be found lacking, so festival specific hardware will be directly attached (networked management systems and libraries on RAID systems) and updates will be applied that don’t get directly attached or completed in other auditoriums. And after all that, the properly QC'd material will be sent to another auditorium and it won't work.

9. Getting your home-made DCP validated in one facility (Hey, the guy who made my DCP tested it at his local theater…) and expecting it to work in all projection rooms of all the film festival multiplexes is not as logical as getting the DCP made and validated at a more vastly qualified and experienced DCP-Creation facility recommended by the festival since all the Technology corollaries of Murphy’s Law apply. In a perfect world: Daring is less respected than professionalism.

10. A checklist that the Creative fills out to validate that their material complies with the Festival’s Material Requirements should have a line that shows which DCP-Verification Program the Creative used.

[cjflynn]

- Wed Jul 20, 2016 11:01 pm #2024 Angelo D’Alessio has been running the Cinema Technical Department for the Venice Film Festival for the entire transition from film to digital ...among many other positions of responsibility. He has submitted these three documents to contribute to the effort of educating the needs and wants of Film Festival tech groups.

The first is this years (2016) Technical Specifications and Requirements for the submission of DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) for theatrical exhibition at the 73rd Venice Film Festival.

The second is the DCP -TECHNICAL FORM that the Creative is supposed to have filled out and submitted with their DCP.

The third PDF is a work in progress slide set that details several layers of problems and must-do solutions for festival technical groups.

Forum Note: Since it seems that pdf files are not allowed to be attachments, I have zip'd the three files together.

Forum Note 2: It seems that there is a 256k limit on uploads to the Forum, so the 2meg file will download from this link:
<Angelo's Film Festival Info>
cjf

[cjflynn]

- Wed Jul 20, 2016 11:46 pm #2025 Brian Quandt from AutoDCP has been involved in deliverables since back in the Film days when he was a specialist in the art of Dailies, and developing systems that automated that process. His web-based DCP Creation service supports festivals, as he has himself for the last decade. Brian wrote the following and asked me to post it.

List of problems:

1) Many do not even test their content prior to shipping it, whether DCP or not. They do listen to the audio, nor check the color in a balanced theater. While I'd love to say the reason is they ran out of money or the like, but the real reason is they don't know they need to, they just think it's supposed to be perfect process… after all shouldn't it be?

2) The only issues I've seen in the field regarding DCP errors themselves are:
– Failure on dual projection arrangements to handle KDM properly (SMPTE)
– Oddities on servers when they play an interop DCP followed by a SMPTE DCP
(again often not handling KDM's, i.e., loosing track of them requiring a reboot
on the system to get it happy)

3) Often I see confused audio assignments for multichannel content. This is a problem with the lack of a standard for channel naming in the industry so that tools know what is what. Only current recourse is an engineer to look at the levels and glean that the channels are probably in the right order (without asking the filmmaker). Our only rule is to follow the ordering L,R,C, LFE, Ls, Rs. Yes I know fancier ways exists, but these are not well known nor available to the outside world.

4) I often see aspect confusion, namely I see 2.35's inside of 16x9 quite a bit. This is a common error due to the way things are edited, an editor often has 16x9 monitors and therefore does this to play things back on their monitor, but forgets to set to full resolution on final renders.

5) I often see bars+tone at the beginning of the content, because again, the filmmaker/editor forgets this for a show, and not another editor, or someone else in the chain who's going to edit it.

6) I've seen audio as 5.1 channel + 2 channel, again this is a common editorial issue, they were taught to do as convenience but forgot that the content was for final delivery (and forgot to trim off that upper stereo pair). This gets encoded as 7.1 again without anyone knowing.

7) Noone knows what a interop or smpte DCP really is, nor when it might be needed and when it might not. Folks are not confirming with the theater what it can do, and often just say to use either.

8) I've seen terrible confusion in the specs themselves from the festival management. I've seen ... please supply DCP spec'd as either "DCP 1" or "DCP NTSC" – this was from a spec I saw for the AFI, for example. Not a clue what they were trying to say.