Category Archives: About The DCinemaCompliance Group

Centered On Quality Control

Training Sites–Exhibition

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As digital cinema exhibition makes the transition from a science project to a commercially viable network of locations and activities, there are several places to learn the basics. 

Each year, for example, the EU/Italian group Media Salles holds a D-Cinema Training. The last few were in England, and the next course will be in Finland in 2010. Details are available at their site, Media Salles Training. Media Salles is also a member of the EDCF, the European Digital Cinema Forum, which has information from their many meetings available to the public. If you become a member, you can download even more information, including pdf files of their two magazines on Mastering and Alternative Content. 

Barco has a complete schedule of classes. Harry Mathias at DCMP also holds classes on demand. 

Learning Online

Another consulting group with an enormous amount of information on DCinema, ranging from history to politics and emerging technology is Michael Karagosian’s MKPE Site. Look especially at the different topics under the menu pull down marked Digital Cinema.

The group Film Tech is a great resource for documentation, and sprinkled throughout is information on DCinema. There are also several dcinema forums where projectionists discuss the good and bad that they have found in the booth.  In the same vein, of a film-centric site making the transition to providing digital information, is the Mad Cornish Projectionist. Humour abounds. 

A phenomenal group of videos from Disney Digital Cinema give essential data to a projectionist on how to handle digital movies, especially 3D. Likewise, there is a terrific site of very instructive movies at the site of the Cine Tech Geek. 

The real essentials of Digital Cinema are conveyed in the hundreds of pages of documents at DCI Movies. That site contains the Digital Cinema Specifications and the System Specification Compliance Test Plan. Anyone who reads them all gets bonus points. NATO also has an important document, the Digital Cinema System Requirements (pdf), which goes through many technical digital cinema points from the exhibitor’s viewpoint.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Science & Technology Council has a downloadable paper named The Digital Dilemma which brings out much of the data concerning long term storage of digital productions. 

More simply and in a Socratic way, working through the Digital Cinema Naming Convention will give a lot of information, and also help organize the data with the relevance to other information. In the same way, the powerpoint at the Harkness Screens site aligns many important points.

Last but hopefully not least, The Directory of DCinema Glossaries on this site lists a number of sites which are filled with DCinema data from the acquisition/camera, post production and exhibition fields. In full disclosure, DCinemaTools is part of the DCinemaCompliance Group, with training and compliance plans as described in this document: Coordinating DCinema Training and Compliance. The link below (seen only if you are logged in) will download the same file.

Please mention other resources as you find them in the comments.

Centered On The Community

The DCinemaTools Community

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When will this be filled with something interesting.

We don’t expect a community right away. But we would appreciate any of your time in making it happen. Many disparate groups studying the same problems/solutions, but not talking, is not only inefficient, but not fun.

Do you want to join in?

Here’s the platform that we offer you:

  • Articles are nice. Cross the line between Science and PR and most people will stop reading…but go ahead.
  • White Papers are very cool. I mean, we’re all really trainspotters here, with a social disguise.
  • Contribute to the forums. Don’t start fights. Pretend that you don’t know everything and ask a question.
  • Point out a news source that you enjoy, which we should include on our pages.
  • Give us a scoop or two. We won’t tell anyone where it came from.

Any help or advice is appreciated.

Centered On Quality Control

Security – In General

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Security was one of the promises of Digital Cinema from the beginning. The concept was as fundamental as the savings angle.

Ten years later it remains a critical element;

  • From the Copyright holders viewpoint
  • From the exhibitors viewpoint
  • From a technology standpoint
  • From the cost standpoint
  • From an eas-of-use standpoint

A great overview of this can be found at Micheal Karagosian’s How Digital Cinema Works – Security section. We will make this a dynamic document, possibly a wiki as time goes on.

Areas of Interest

In this section, we will try to cover some basics so that the news pages will have more relevance:

  • Copyright Owners Rights and Responsibilities
  • Motion on the Production Chain
  • In the Technology
  • At the Exhibitor
  • Pain and More Pain

We look forward to input, either via the comments or directly to the contact info on the contacts page.

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Centered On The Community

DCinemaTools Facts

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Here are some interesting facts about DCinemaTools

  • We are working on a hunch that the professional DCinema world
    • is filled with people who are interested in many topics
    • is basically able to be self-regulating
    • has reached the limit of all possible bandwidth
  • We have a very clear view of what we think is possible and expect computers to have it already developed
    • Our experience in 40 years of handling computers says that we’ll have to do it ourselves…again
  • DCinemaTools is part of the DCinemaCompliance Group…but we’re more friendly…their into security and compliance and training and structured responsibility.
  • We invite all suggestions, even snark-filled ones
  • We hope to launch by ShoWest 2009

The DCinemaCompliance Group has a wider scope and a narrower focus. The scope is providing the tools for a DCinema facility to know how to stay in compliance with the SMPTE and DCI requirements. This involves the training of staff, and providing an automated system for checking the quality control values that the cinema wants to keep in place for the facility.

What does that take? A system built around those values and a daily, weekly and monthly check of the various parts of the equipment and playout of the facility. It takes a skilled staff and a database that an informed executive can use to monitor the equipment and experience. It takes a routine and it may involve an independent asssessment at regular intervals…perhaps yearly or every two years, depending upon the desires of the executive staff.

The DCinemaCompliance Group has organized these tools around a common set of standards known as ISO-9001. Since we are only involved with the DCinema facilities, and not the complete cinema, these tools are based upon the standard without the certification requirements of the standard.

Since the industry is cuurently reaching for momentum rather than more rules, the DCinemaCompliance Group is in the education mode, rather than in the sales mode for these services. We look forward to discussing these needs with any group who feels that they want to contribute to the long-term viability of the DCinema artform at the exhibition complex. 

Centered On Quality Control

DCinemaTools Editorial

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Welcome to the Industry Online news magazine for the Professional Digital Cinema Industry.

Defining DCinema is like defining the Cote d’Azur and the Riviera. Some people say one or the other goes from St. Tropez into parts of Italy, while some people limit them from Cannes to Monaco. 

Our definition of professional DCinema (in addition to David Reisner’s definition)  is whatever is involved in capturing, manipulating and exhibiting image and sound using high end, professional digital technology. Digital has been part of the post-production world for a long time, in the acquisition world on a more limited level and the exhibition side is just leaving its science phase.

Our goal is to bring together the tangential pieces of information from throughout the internet, so that people focused on one area can find nuance and trends from other areas of the community. But because the exhibition end is expecting to have a tech revolution without a lot of tech savvy people, our focus will tend to be at that group. We hope that we are not “All 3D, All the Time”, but we will cover 3D implications.

We will gather items from blogs and newsletters, but we don’t mean to replace them, just direct you to them as appropriate.

Please contact us whenever you have ideas that might help us help the community.

Finally, the disclosure bit: DCinemaTools is part of the DCinemaComplianceGroup, an organization set up to assist exhibitors in fulfilling their requirements of staying compliant with SMPTE and DCI requirements. It is a work in progress, hopefully available Q2 2011, when the SMPTE specs take over. Our project will include projectionist training in the basics as well as maintaining databases of the daily, weekly and monthly inspection reports.

Centered On Quality Control

DCinemaTools Overview

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Rules, Policies and Other Ideas:

  • Humor is always accepted
  • Derogatory remarks will be expunged, and ‘We’ will decide how ‘derogatory’ is defined
  • Most other items will be accepted
  • You can remain anonymous
  • You can have a separate account for non-anonymous work
  • You can start a poll and request that it get front-paged
  • You can ask that an event gets put on the calender
  • You might find that some of our decisions are capricious…we’re probably not that smart
  • New features will be added…we hope you will contribute with ideas