Category Archives: Consultants

Consultants

Another Future of Film

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The panel of experts didn’t always merely show the warm and fuzzy side of the matters that Marty Shindler wondrously navigated them through. Under the ‘never-a-dull-moment’ microscope were the very real effects of consolidation, Alternative Content and Event Cinema, the impact and need for tentpole movies examined for every market, technology that ranged from plush chairs to lasers, woven with the continuing aspects of 3D, and how new entries will or won’t be making headway into established business (mostly, won’t).

During the days when the Studios got their hands slapped for too much integration, “Exhibition” entirely meant movie theaters. As a few studios then owned the lion’s share of production facilities and theaters they were also able to control the artists and financing and everything else involved. Since those court cases of the 1940s – 75 years ago, eh? – there has been a lot of care so this would never happen again. With only a few examples to the contrary, studios are quite divested from theaters.

That can’t be said, of course, for the other means of distribution. Last week’s Comcast bid to purchase DreamWorks Animation put the spotlight on their ownership of another animation studio Illumination Entertainment (known for launching the Despicable Me franchise), …and oh, by the way, Universal Studios and the two TV studios on their Universal City lot, Univision and NBC, and the theme park on top of the hill named Universal Studios Hollywood (“The Entertainment Capital of L.A.”). Comcast was prevented from a hostile takeover of Disney in 2004 and a friendly takeover of Time-Warner Cable by the FCC last year because of the amount of distribution they already had and would have. They still control 20% of the US links into homes. (For comparison, in today’s news Charter Communications was allowed by the FCC to take over Time-Warner Cable, giving them a 22% broadband marketshare.) But, to the letter of the law, no theaters.

Of course, this is not peculiar to them. Disney and Sony and Fox and Warner Bros are similarly vested in many of the same ways. Without a representative on stage, it was still their health, driven by their tentpole movies, that the symposium centered upon. On the contrary, theater owners Regal and AMC own Open Road Films, which produced last year’s Academy Award Best Picture and  Best Original Screenplay winner, Spotlight. And AMC’s owner Wanda has purchased the film finance/production group, Legendary Entertainment, which helped finance blockbuster hits such as The Dark Knight, Inception and Straight Outta Compton, among others.

Likewise on the dais, represented and pointed out by AMC’s President of Programming, Bob Lenihan, the theater chains are no slouches with joint partnerships among the other largest chains of new entertainment product (movies, essentially, though not entirely) and advertising and ticketing companies…and distribution. The largest satellite distribution company, DCDC, is owned by AMC Theatres, Cinemark Theatres, Regal Entertainment Group, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. which put movies onto 58% of US screens last year, plus several dozen “special events” including 5 live events.

The arc of Other Digital Stuff getting into cinema theaters has been a slow and haphazard one, filled with the promise of bringing the cinema’s unique social atmosphere to the entire range of high-profile events such as sports and opera, delivering both large productions world-wide and local content to distant diaspora. Several companies bet that they could break even installing equipment and use that installed base as a platform for a distribution empire of alternative content and special events. Several big companies lost big-time on that bet, starting with a spin-off of the giant broadcast manufacturing group EVS, whose large investments (among others) into dcinex was absorbed with little fanfare into Ymagis last year, and the earliest obvious success that has also morphed several times without attaining the traction that potential and bright ideas (and a lot of hard work and investment) promised, Cinedigm, né Access IT.

The dream and promise of low-cost distribution to the cinema (no need to make and fly prints all over the world) and easy programming flexibility at the cinema (Theater Management tools that decrease the team head-count at every point of the chain from the studio to the nonexistent projectionist), became a topic that flew by. “How does a small production get into the big cinema chains, in an era when new ‘studios’ such as Amazon are making their play.” With a large bit of the oxygen leaving the room, the panelist answered, “They don’t.” When another panelist tried to put a positive spin on a different small production’s attempt as having “so-so” results, he re-gained the audience’s sympathy by saying, “We would have killed for ‘so-so’.

That’s when it becomes obvious that each sector that looks like a giant monolith worthy of the Justice Departments scrutiny and other segments enmity, each are still an agglomeration of small entities trying to make their mark. Dolby, represented by the same Doug Darrow who steered the choppy waters of Texas Iinstrument’s digital cinema efforts when the path was obvious but no roads or bridges built, let us know that their successful Atmos system, by far the leader in immersive sound from artist viewpoint to installed base and customer respect, has 1,400 installations.

Given that it is still early days since the system’s release at CinemaCon four years ago, it is still a small number compared to the total number of screens that is approaching one hundred times that many. SMPTE arranged with AMC and Dolby a special set of High Dynamic Range (HDR) presentations after CinemaCon and before NAB that showed off the latest iteration of Dolby Vision at AMC Prime. That still boutique set of technologies known as DolbyVision (Dolby Million-to-One Contrast, High Brightness Laser Technology with comfortable chairs among other highlights) is still only two orders of magnitude smaller after a year of installations worldwide. …hardly a monolith compared to the 800 screen boutique of IMAX.

Dolby sits at the table with a market cap of USD$4.5 billion, IMAX, represented by the recently feted Phil Groves (SVP and EVP of International Distribution) sits at USD$2.25 billion. AMC at USD$2.8 billion, though purchased last year by the Wanda Group, a former property management group with a market cap of USD$30 billion, USD$18 billion of that now generally accepted to be the value of the Wanda Cinema Line…though only a billion of which comes from the 2,000 screens it has throughout China.

Duncan Stewart, Director of Research; Technology, Media and Telecommunications for Deloitte flew in from Toronto. Deloitte is a private firm, with a market cap valued at far over USD$100 billion, and famous for their CEO’s prediction of adding nearly 20,000 net jobs this year. Chris started out the quip-fest, with remarks that showed that a company in its position doesn’t have to cater to anyone – unlike your author who has to make nice with everyone since they all might be a customer or boss someday.

Rounding off the table, Chris Edwards who represents two private companies, The Third Floor (specializing in big-budget movie previz) and The Virtual Reality Company (specializing in the burgeoning VR creation world), who probably measures well financially though would rather talk in the value of helping develop the artists intent, some type of a pixels per idea quotient.

So, when exhibition is discussed, it means Virtual Reality and its twin AR, as well as all the streams of better pixels; high definition, wider gamut, high frame rate and lasers and immersive sound and plenty more.

Our future tech discussions will focus upon the different strategies that are developing, from the expansion of the boutique model that Dolby is implementing with their new product lines, through to Barco’s re-applying their magic to take the majority of the projector market, this time with LasersInside.

Consultants

Another Future of Film

Leave a comment

The panel of experts didn’t always merely show the warm and fuzzy side of the matters that Marty Shindler wondrously navigated them through. Under the ‘never-a-dull-moment’ microscope were the very real effects of consolidation, Alternative Content and Event Cinema, the impact and need for tentpole movies examined for every market, technology that ranged from plush chairs to lasers, woven with the continuing aspects of 3D, and how new entries will or won’t be making headway into established business (mostly, won’t).

During the days when the Studios got their hands slapped for too much integration, “Exhibition” entirely meant movie theaters. As a few studios then owned the lion’s share of production facilities and theaters they were also able to control the artists and financing and everything else involved. Since those court cases of the 1940s – 75 years ago, eh? – there has been a lot of care so this would never happen again. With only a few examples to the contrary, studios are quite divested from theaters.

That can’t be said, of course, for the other means of distribution. Last week’s Comcast bid to purchase DreamWorks Animation put the spotlight on their ownership of another animation studio Illumination Entertainment (known for launching the Despicable Me franchise), …and oh, by the way, Universal Studios and the two TV studios on their Universal City lot, Univision and NBC, and the theme park on top of the hill named Universal Studios Hollywood (“The Entertainment Capital of L.A.”). Comcast was prevented from a hostile takeover of Disney in 2004 and a friendly takeover of Time-Warner Cable by the FCC last year because of the amount of distribution they already had and would have. They still control 20% of the US links into homes. (For comparison, in today’s news Charter Communications was allowed by the FCC to take over Time-Warner Cable, giving them a 22% broadband marketshare.) But, to the letter of the law, no theaters.

Of course, this is not peculiar to them. Disney and Sony and Fox and Warner Bros are similarly vested in many of the same ways. Without a representative on stage, it was still their health, driven by their tentpole movies, that the symposium centered upon. On the contrary, theater owners Regal and AMC own Open Road Films, which produced last year’s Academy Award Best Picture and  Best Original Screenplay winner, Spotlight. And AMC’s owner Wanda has purchased the film finance/production group, Legendary Entertainment, which helped finance blockbuster hits such as The Dark Knight, Inception and Straight Outta Compton, among others.

Likewise on the dais, represented and pointed out by AMC’s President of Programming, Bob Lenihan, the theater chains are no slouches with joint partnerships among the other largest chains of new entertainment product (movies, essentially, though not entirely) and advertising and ticketing companies…and distribution. The largest satellite distribution company, DCDC, is owned by AMC Theatres, Cinemark Theatres, Regal Entertainment Group, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. which put movies onto 58% of US screens last year, plus several dozen “special events” including 5 live events.

The arc of Other Digital Stuff getting into cinema theaters has been a slow and haphazard one, filled with the promise of bringing the cinema’s unique social atmosphere to the entire range of high-profile events such as sports and opera, delivering both large productions world-wide and local content to distant diaspora. Several companies bet that they could break even installing equipment and use that installed base as a platform for a distribution empire of alternative content and special events. Several big companies lost big-time on that bet, starting with a spin-off of the giant broadcast manufacturing group EVS, whose large investments (among others) into dcinex was absorbed with little fanfare into Ymagis last year, and the earliest obvious success that has also morphed several times without attaining the traction that potential and bright ideas (and a lot of hard work and investment) promised, Cinedigm, né Access IT.

The dream and promise of low-cost distribution to the cinema (no need to make and fly prints all over the world) and easy programming flexibility at the cinema (Theater Management tools that decrease the team head-count at every point of the chain from the studio to the nonexistent projectionist), became a topic that flew by. “How does a small production get into the big cinema chains, in an era when new ‘studios’ such as Amazon are making their play.” With a large bit of the oxygen leaving the room, the panelist answered, “They don’t.” When another panelist tried to put a positive spin on a different small production’s attempt as having “so-so” results, he re-gained the audience’s sympathy by saying, “We would have killed for ‘so-so’.

That’s when it becomes obvious that each sector that looks like a giant monolith worthy of the Justice Departments scrutiny and other segments enmity, each are still an agglomeration of small entities trying to make their mark. Dolby, represented by the same Doug Darrow who steered the choppy waters of Texas Iinstrument’s digital cinema efforts when the path was obvious but no roads or bridges built, let us know that their successful Atmos system, by far the leader in immersive sound from artist viewpoint to installed base and customer respect, has 1,400 installations.

Given that it is still early days since the system’s release at CinemaCon four years ago, it is still a small number compared to the total number of screens that is approaching one hundred times that many. SMPTE arranged with AMC and Dolby a special set of High Dynamic Range (HDR) presentations after CinemaCon and before NAB that showed off the latest iteration of Dolby Vision at AMC Prime. That still boutique set of technologies known as DolbyVision (Dolby Million-to-One Contrast, High Brightness Laser Technology with comfortable chairs among other highlights) is still only two orders of magnitude smaller after a year of installations worldwide. …hardly a monolith compared to the 800 screen boutique of IMAX.

Dolby sits at the table with a market cap of USD$4.5 billion, IMAX, represented by the recently feted Phil Groves (SVP and EVP of International Distribution) sits at USD$2.25 billion. AMC at USD$2.8 billion, though purchased last year by the Wanda Group, a former property management group with a market cap of USD$30 billion, USD$18 billion of that now generally accepted to be the value of the Wanda Cinema Line…though only a billion of which comes from the 2,000 screens it has throughout China.

Duncan Stewart, Director of Research; Technology, Media and Telecommunications for Deloitte flew in from Toronto. Deloitte is a private firm, with a market cap valued at far over USD$100 billion, and famous for their CEO’s prediction of adding nearly 20,000 net jobs this year. Chris started out the quip-fest, with remarks that showed that a company in its position doesn’t have to cater to anyone – unlike your author who has to make nice with everyone since they all might be a customer or boss someday.

Rounding off the table, Chris Edwards who represents two private companies, The Third Floor (specializing in big-budget movie previz) and The Virtual Reality Company (specializing in the burgeoning VR creation world), who probably measures well financially though would rather talk in the value of helping develop the artists intent, some type of a pixels per idea quotient.

So, when exhibition is discussed, it means Virtual Reality and its twin AR, as well as all the streams of better pixels; high definition, wider gamut, high frame rate and lasers and immersive sound and plenty more.

Our future tech discussions will focus upon the different strategies that are developing, from the expansion of the boutique model that Dolby is implementing with their new product lines, through to Barco’s re-applying their magic to take the majority of the projector market, this time with LasersInside.

Consultants

MenuMeters for El Capitan is back

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Just a quick note for those who need but can’t find the open source OSX system monitoring tool MenuMeters, which got lost in the OSX 10.11 upgrade.

Go to: MenuMeters for OS X El Capitan 10.11

It works. It is a simple port and the changes are well explained by the author. There is an install quirk that the first time you double-click on the program that it won’t install. Close the Preferences Application. Double-click on the menumeters preference pane again and it will install.

Consultants

MenuMeters for El Capitan is back

Leave a comment

Just a quick note for those who need but can’t find the open source OSX system monitoring tool MenuMeters, which got lost in the OSX 10.11 upgrade.

Go to: MenuMeters for OS X El Capitan 10.11

It works. It is a simple port and the changes are well explained by the author. There is an install quirk that the first time you double-click on the program that it won’t install. Close the Preferences Application. Double-click on the menumeters preference pane again and it will install.

Consultants

Looking Through “Dynamic Release Windows”

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J. Sperling Reich shows why he is partnered with Patrick von Sychowski at Celluloid Junkie, with an in depth look at Paramount’s Dynamic Release Window:

Crunching The Numbers On Paramount’s Dynamic Release Windows

There are too many variables to know before it is possible to understand how this will play out. It is an interesting experiment but it is playing with fire for everyone involved. I’ll be glad to be the 3rd party that gets to look at the studios books and tell the exhibitors whether they were getting the proper cut. 

Consultants

Looking Through “Dynamic Release Windows”

Leave a comment

J. Sperling Reich shows why he is partnered with Patrick von Sychowski at Celluloid Junkie, with an in depth look at Paramount’s Dynamic Release Window:

Crunching The Numbers On Paramount’s Dynamic Release Windows

There are too many variables to know before it is possible to understand how this will play out. It is an interesting experiment but it is playing with fire for everyone involved. I’ll be glad to be the 3rd party that gets to look at the studios books and tell the exhibitors whether they were getting the proper cut. 

Consultants

The DCP USB on a Mac; CineTechGeek to Digital Cinema Tools, v1b

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First, let’s examine in more detail the problem that is being solved.

The Digital Cinema Package, or DCP, is the actual movie in a format that is transported from post production to the projector. It has been in use for over a decade, so one would think that the DCP is well defined and easy to create and use. But Alas~! it is not true. The insides of the DCP has been in transition, and leading to further revision, for much of its life. So, depending on when you picked up the story, it is only somewhat well defined and, it is in transition again. A DCP is easy to create, after perhaps the dozenth time that one tries. But there are are many variations of equipment that it needs to play on, and each of those have evolved in different ways. Some will accept any attempt, some will be very strict. Thus, a DCP that plays on one system …or one set of software on one system… will not necessarily play on another brand or version of a different…or even the same brand of equipment.

So we get stories of DCPs that need re-wraping during a Film Festival which, after great frenzied work by the festival techs, gets it to run – but the DCP doesn’t work 2 weeks later at another festival. Or, when the director takes the DCP that his editor or kid brother created – a DCP that worked once somewhere – a professional house won’t accept it for duplication without charges for repair. Have you ever had your car’s transmission repaired and been told that you have to spend a grand just to drop it down and look inside? …drop that DCP down…

Second, there is a problem that often occurs when inserting a USB drive into a Macintosh computer. The problem isn’t a problem for the Mac, of course, but rather a solution that causes problems for other systems. What happens is that the Mac OSX operating system tries to put an index of drive and other user-cuddly info into invisible files. It will even make invisible thumbnail versions of graphics files. Not a problem until they are a problem – they can sometimes confuse the heck out of other systems, both Windows and Linux.

Part two of the Mac problem is that most often a USB drive that has been properly formatted for a DCP won’t open at all on the Mac – which, given the problems it creates with invisible files, is probably a good thing. But the bad news is that if you have made a DCP on your Mac with one of the many DCP creation programs, what do you do with that file? In an imaginary ‘best of worlds’ one just inserts a USB stick or drive into the slot, the drive opens and one drags the file to the USB device. 

It is a goofy world out there for disk formats. Many companies don’t want to pay for proprietary formats, or can’t use anything but open source tools. There are exceptions and work-arounds. The standard USB drive that is formatted with the standard Windows NTSF format can be read by OSX, but not written to, unless a 3rd party extension is installed. The standard USB drive that is formatted with the standard Linux ext format can’t be read or written to from the Mac unless a 3rd party extension or the open source FUSE extensions are put into the system.

While either of these solutions might make it simple to exchange files, having them on the OSX system will cause a problem when using the solution that James details. If someone is able to contort the FUSE system to make your mac read and write to an ext formatted USB drive, more power to you. Getting it to read is fairly straight forward, but it means that the Mac will be able to grab the drive before that drive can be grabbed by the tools in James’ solution. Not impossible, but a bit wonky and not always simple. Since we’re going to use the Ubuntu system for other purposes, we’ll stick with moving forward with James’ install advice, skipping the idea of adding FUSE or other extensions to the Mac.

Take home lesson, if nothing else:

If you put in a USB stick or drive which might have a DCP on it, and the Mac tells you, “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer”, the option that you want to choose is “Eject”. That way OSX will release the drive without trying to write to it, and allow another operating system to grab it.
In other words, the Mac will place invisible files on the drive with the DCP, and these invisible files have the certain opportunity to cause havoc.  

If you don’t get to eject the file, then this will not be a ext formatted drive, in which case, happy formatting…

James choses the free VirtualBox program instead of Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion for creating the virtual machine. In slow-person-talk that means that there will be a 2nd operating system put onto the harddisk – in this case the Linux variant named Ubuntu 14 – and in order to do all the work of keeping Ubuntu from messing with OSX while it shares the network and hard drive and wifi, etc., it needs a software device that Ubuntu can be placed “into”. 

Go to https://www.virtualbox.org and click on “Downloads” on the left side. You’ll see a small clickable “amd64” note next to the “OSX hosts” line. You’re thinking, I know enough to know that my Mac has an Intel, not an AMD chip, right? As it turns out, AMD wrote the spec and while different companies use different notations to hide that, VirtualBox uses what we will eventually get used to as the standard notation, amd64. Download the file and install it as James describes. Don’t add too much memory if you don’t have much to spare or you’ll get yelled at. 

Then, as James points out in the video, install the VM VirtualBox Extension Pack by downloading it and double clicking on it and following the directions. Since you will be using your username in other procedures, keep it simple: the best suggestion is to use your initials. With luck the two programs will talk to each other and everything will work together. Eventually, when VirtualBox tells you to upgrade, don’t ignore the reminder – upgrade the Extension Pack right away. Otherwise your USB drives won’t work and you’ll be rebooting and kicking yourself while trying to get in sync again. 

Side note: What’s with this big Oracle logo on the VirtualBox product site you might be asking. Isn’t Oracle that huge company who everyone has a brother or cousin or nephew/neice working for? And the answer is yes. Oracle got VirtualBox from their purchase of Sun Micro along with Java and MySQL. All three are variants of free and Open Source, and Oracle does a very good job of servicing the community with these tools.

Next is the free and open sourced operating system named Ubuntu. James’ advice is that you follow the instructions for leaving Ubuntu as an .iso file, which will then fire up like an operating system on a CD or DCD would. This saves space if you are only going to use this solution once or twice a year. Which makes sense. But if you are going to make DCPs of pre-show slides then you might want to install the free and open source “Digital Cinema Tools” from Wolfgang Woehl which includes the versatile and easy to use “CinemaSlides” program.

If you choose this route, install the program as standard instead of as an .iso boot drive. Follow the rest of his instructions. That is, up until the spot where he starts connecting with the network. We’re going to use the Shared Folders method instead. It is a bit more simple to use for us punters. 

First step to make an easy to access Shared Folder on the Mac computer make a new folder using the Mac Finder. Drag the new folder over to the Sidebar. (If the Sidebar isn’t open when you have a Finder window open, Option-Command-S will open it. 

Go to ubuntu.com, click on the Download tab (on the far right) and pull down to Desktop. If the flavour says 64-bit, click the download button. Find it and put the file into your new Shared folder…its right over there in the sidebar.

Now, with Ubuntu running and on top, choose Devices from the VirtualBox top menu. Pull down to Shared Folders. On the Shared Folders window, there is a ‘plus sign’ on a folder icon – click this. Pull down “Folder Path” to “Other”. You will see the Mac Finder window and your new folder in the Mac Sidebar~! Miracle, eh? Anything put into this folder will be available from both sides.

Now, how to make this directory/folder easily accessible on the Ubuntu side? If there is no Finder window, click on the Folder icon on the top left of the screen…a couple icons down from the three dots. On the Sidebar, click on Computer, which is in the Devices section. There will be a Folder or directory named Media, and in this Folder is your Shared Folder. Open that Folder, then click Control-D. Magic again. Under the Bookmark section of the Sidebar will be your shared folder.  

As far as using the Terminal to make an ext formatted USB drive, James has basically nailed it.

The first problem that you will encounter is knowing what the operating system calls your USB drive. Some will say to use a command sudo fdisk -l, which gives a lot of information…the last line of which is likely about your USD drive. In the following case, you can see that my USB disk, the one that I will be formatting, is called /dev/sdb1

[Note Note Note Note Note: Make certain that the drive is not originally formatted with FAT32. FAT32 has a 4 Giga Byte file limit. Formatting the drive with the following over a FAT32 base will give a problem when your files exceed 4 Gigs. End Note.

Note 2: If you are trying to copy and paste between the Mac and the VirtualBox Ubuntu Terminal window, you can Copy as normal with a Cmd-C, but pasting in the Ubuntu Terminal window must be done with a Control-Shift V.

A more complicated command, but with much simpler exposition of the the partition name and path is (cut from this with your usual command keys, but in Ubuntu your Paste keys will be Control-Shift-V):
    sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL

So, we know that my USB stick is named sdb1, and is already formatted with vfat at the factory.
Armed with this info, the first step – before making the file system (mkfs) – you must unmount the drive
    sudo umount /dev/the_partition_name_found_with_the_above
In this example, that would be sudo umount /dev/sdb1

 The ISDCF document mentions a slightly different nomenclature for the command line than James does,

mkfs -t ext3 -I 128 -m 0 /dev/xddN

And here are some other commands that work, including the one that James is using. Myself, I prefer the last one since it allows you to name the partition as it is being made.

sudo mkfs.ext2 -j -I 128 /dev/sda1 – the basic difference between ext 2 and 3 is journaling, so this adds journaling to ext2

sudo mke2fs -t ext3 -I 128 -L DCPs 0 /dev/sdb1 – slightly different command set

sudo mkfs.ext3 -I 128 -m 0 -L your-chosen-name-of-drive /dev/sdb1 – this one adds a disk name (change “DiskName” to ‘my_dcp_drive’ or whatever name you want to give it) while formatting and partitioning…change that ‘sdb1’ to the proper partition number.

Formatting the disk is not so quick – Those Superblocks might take a few minutes to assemble.  

Follow up by giving permissions to the folder with: (755 is usually recommended, but I use 777 for myself)
    sudo chmod -R 777 /media/USR_NAME/your-chosen-name-of-drive

You’ll have to Mount the disk first, which is done either at the bottom in the Ubuntu Dock (did you install a dock?) or by using the little plugin character at the bottom right of the VirtualBox window. 

There is a simple way to find out the exact trail – Roll over the name of the drive in the sidebar.
Since I don’t actually log in as ‘root’ all the time, and since I just make test files, I like to keep my permissions much more loose. I use 777 instead of 755. 

As an option, if indeed it is your drive, you can sudo chown owner:owner /media/owner/your-chosen-name-of-drive

In the above command, put your name twice, such as ‘cj:cj’, then ‘/media/cj/ctt_dcps’

And finally, in the Virtualbox menu, pull down Devices down to USB, then USB Settings. It will open a window…click on the plug icon that has the plus ‘+’ sign, on the right hand side of the window. The brand of the USB Flash Drive will appear at the bottom of the list. Click the checkbox next to the drive then click OK. From then on, if you put in the drive after Ubuntu is booted and ready to go, the drive will mount without going through the Apple OS, eliminating a step and the dangerous possibility of putting invisible files on the USB drive that could complicate the servers that you need to put DCPs on.

Using Your New Drive

Ubuntu may or may not make a big deal about automatically mounting the USB drive. You might have to go to the USB plug icon on the bottom right of the VirtualBox window and make certain that the drive has a check mark next to it. Or, it may be mounted but you didn’t notice that it appeared at the bottom of the Dock that is along the left side of the screen. Jeesh…there is a lot more going on with computers than what my grandfather had to teach Edison. Sometimes there is no solution but to reboot Ubuntu.

But the main thing is that you can transfer files from the “shared folder” on the Mac where you are making your DCPs to the UBB drive that will move them to the media server.

 Further updates to this article will include:

The command is: 

Coming up as this article evolves – installing and using CinemaSlides.

Getting out of problems.

This is copied from the marvelous Digital Cinema Tools website of Wolfgang Woehl

See Digital Cinema Tools Distribution for an easy-to-use Setup script. It will install everything required (batteries included) to use dcp_inspect, cinemaslides and a bunch of other useful tools related to digital cinema.

Please consider contributing to Testing encrypted DCPs and KDMs.

The real trick that he gives is an incredible Digital Cinema toolset, and now that you have Ubuntu running, open Terminal, paste in the following command and hit Return. 

wget http://git.io/digital-cinema-tools-setup && bash digital-cinema-tools-setup

Mind the && in there. When finished type the following and hit return

exec $SHELL

and you’re done. But what have you done?

You’ve installed asdcplib, ruby, openjpeg, nokogiri, and other libraries, plus dcp_inspect, cinemaslides, a cinemacertstore, and other items in the digital cinema tools toolset. I think that I even remember seeing graphicsmagick go by there.

Make a Slide Presentation is the next topic in this evolving piece. Here is a command line that makes a DCP that I have put into Terminal in Ubuntu recently. What do we need to set up to make that work, I wonder? My guess is making files with Audacity and Keynote, putting them into the Shared Folder, then blending them together to make a friendly DCP…maybe we will even check it with dcp_inspect.

Here is a command that I give in Terminal to make a DCP of slides to warn any lingering mortals that the automated test tool is going to start an audio test. We’ll review what it all means.

cinemaslides –type dcp “/media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/wav_files/audio_warning_chirp-18.wav” “/media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/tiff_slide_masters/Audio Warning Slides” -x cut,3.33 –title DXG_Audio_Warnings-18 –annotation DXG_Audio_Warnings-18 -o /media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/DCP_Finals/DXG_Audio_Warnings-18

Explication: cinemaslides is obviously the name of the program that we are going to invoke and dcp is the type of item that we are going to create. From where will it grab all this stuff…the next two parts tell cinemaslides where to find the .wav file and where to find a folder of slides. We are going to cross between them with a cut every 3.33 seconds (this will be a 20 second warning.) The name of the dcp follows, and how it is annotated internally and what to call the file for human readable purposes closes out the command. And look…the file is being placed in a folder within the Shared Folder named DCP_Finals…and made from files that are in the Shared Folder as well. 

So, the set up is, create a set of directories using the mac finder named tiff_slide_masters and wav_files and DCP_Finals

Make a wav file using audacity and store it in the wav_files folder. (A document will be posted in the next few weeks showing how to do that.)

Make a set of slides using Keynote (or Powerpoint or LibreOffice) and save them as tiff files. Put them in the tiff_slide_masters folder. (Another article will flesh this process out a bit more as well, but suffice to say that you should start with a 2048×1080 slide. Do what seems logical and Bob’s your uncle. Myself, I have to set up a Skype call with my dad and my Uncle Bob so that happy birthday wishes can ensue. More later.)

Finally, navigate to the DCP_Finals directory (folder), sort by clicking on the Modified header, drag the file to the USB drive on the sidebar, and let it copy over.

A great resource: Knut Erik Evensen’s site: THE BEST COMMON PRACTICE TO DELIVER A DIGITAL CINEMA PACKAGE (DCP)

 

A follow-up article: Validating a DCP

Consultants

The DCP USB on a Mac; CineTechGeek to Digital Cinema Tools, v1b

Leave a comment

First, let’s examine in more detail the problem that is being solved.

The Digital Cinema Package, or DCP, is the actual movie in a format that is transported from post production to the projector. It has been in use for over a decade, so one would think that the DCP is well defined and easy to create and use. But Alas~! it is not true. The insides of the DCP has been in transition, and leading to further revision, for much of its life. So, depending on when you picked up the story, it is only somewhat well defined and, it is in transition again. A DCP is easy to create, after perhaps the dozenth time that one tries. But there are are many variations of equipment that it needs to play on, and each of those have evolved in different ways. Some will accept any attempt, some will be very strict. Thus, a DCP that plays on one system …or one set of software on one system… will not necessarily play on another brand or version of a different…or even the same brand of equipment.

So we get stories of DCPs that need re-wraping during a Film Festival which, after great frenzied work by the festival techs, gets it to run – but the DCP doesn’t work 2 weeks later at another festival. Or, when the director takes the DCP that his editor or kid brother created – a DCP that worked once somewhere – a professional house won’t accept it for duplication without charges for repair. Have you ever had your car’s transmission repaired and been told that you have to spend a grand just to drop it down and look inside? …drop that DCP down…

Second, there is a problem that often occurs when inserting a USB drive into a Macintosh computer. The problem isn’t a problem for the Mac, of course, but rather a solution that causes problems for other systems. What happens is that the Mac OSX operating system tries to put an index of drive and other user-cuddly info into invisible files. It will even make invisible thumbnail versions of graphics files. Not a problem until they are a problem – they can sometimes confuse the heck out of other systems, both Windows and Linux.

Part two of the Mac problem is that most often a USB drive that has been properly formatted for a DCP won’t open at all on the Mac – which, given the problems it creates with invisible files, is probably a good thing. But the bad news is that if you have made a DCP on your Mac with one of the many DCP creation programs, what do you do with that file? In an imaginary ‘best of worlds’ one just inserts a USB stick or drive into the slot, the drive opens and one drags the file to the USB device. 

It is a goofy world out there for disk formats. Many companies don’t want to pay for proprietary formats, or can’t use anything but open source tools. There are exceptions and work-arounds. The standard USB drive that is formatted with the standard Windows NTSF format can be read by OSX, but not written to, unless a 3rd party extension is installed. The standard USB drive that is formatted with the standard Linux ext format can’t be read or written to from the Mac unless a 3rd party extension or the open source FUSE extensions are put into the system.

While either of these solutions might make it simple to exchange files, having them on the OSX system will cause a problem when using the solution that James details. If someone is able to contort the FUSE system to make your mac read and write to an ext formatted USB drive, more power to you. Getting it to read is fairly straight forward, but it means that the Mac will be able to grab the drive before that drive can be grabbed by the tools in James’ solution. Not impossible, but a bit wonky and not always simple. Since we’re going to use the Ubuntu system for other purposes, we’ll stick with moving forward with James’ install advice, skipping the idea of adding FUSE or other extensions to the Mac.

Take home lesson, if nothing else:

If you put in a USB stick or drive which might have a DCP on it, and the Mac tells you, “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer”, the option that you want to choose is “Eject”. That way OSX will release the drive without trying to write to it, and allow another operating system to grab it.
In other words, the Mac will place invisible files on the drive with the DCP, and these invisible files have the certain opportunity to cause havoc.  

If you don’t get to eject the file, then this will not be a ext formatted drive, in which case, happy formatting…

James choses the free VirtualBox program instead of Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion for creating the virtual machine. In slow-person-talk that means that there will be a 2nd operating system put onto the harddisk – in this case the Linux variant named Ubuntu 14 – and in order to do all the work of keeping Ubuntu from messing with OSX while it shares the network and hard drive and wifi, etc., it needs a software device that Ubuntu can be placed “into”. 

Go to https://www.virtualbox.org and click on “Downloads” on the left side. You’ll see a small clickable “amd64” note next to the “OSX hosts” line. You’re thinking, I know enough to know that my Mac has an Intel, not an AMD chip, right? As it turns out, AMD wrote the spec and while different companies use different notations to hide that, VirtualBox uses what we will eventually get used to as the standard notation, amd64. Download the file and install it as James describes. Don’t add too much memory if you don’t have much to spare or you’ll get yelled at. 

Then, as James points out in the video, install the VM VirtualBox Extension Pack by downloading it and double clicking on it and following the directions. Since you will be using your username in other procedures, keep it simple: the best suggestion is to use your initials. With luck the two programs will talk to each other and everything will work together. Eventually, when VirtualBox tells you to upgrade, don’t ignore the reminder – upgrade the Extension Pack right away. Otherwise your USB drives won’t work and you’ll be rebooting and kicking yourself while trying to get in sync again. 

Side note: What’s with this big Oracle logo on the VirtualBox product site you might be asking. Isn’t Oracle that huge company who everyone has a brother or cousin or nephew/neice working for? And the answer is yes. Oracle got VirtualBox from their purchase of Sun Micro along with Java and MySQL. All three are variants of free and Open Source, and Oracle does a very good job of servicing the community with these tools.

Next is the free and open sourced operating system named Ubuntu. James’ advice is that you follow the instructions for leaving Ubuntu as an .iso file, which will then fire up like an operating system on a CD or DCD would. This saves space if you are only going to use this solution once or twice a year. Which makes sense. But if you are going to make DCPs of pre-show slides then you might want to install the free and open source “Digital Cinema Tools” from Wolfgang Woehl which includes the versatile and easy to use “CinemaSlides” program.

If you choose this route, install the program as standard instead of as an .iso boot drive. Follow the rest of his instructions. That is, up until the spot where he starts connecting with the network. We’re going to use the Shared Folders method instead. It is a bit more simple to use for us punters. 

First step to make an easy to access Shared Folder on the Mac computer make a new folder using the Mac Finder. Drag the new folder over to the Sidebar. (If the Sidebar isn’t open when you have a Finder window open, Option-Command-S will open it. 

Go to ubuntu.com, click on the Download tab (on the far right) and pull down to Desktop. If the flavour says 64-bit, click the download button. Find it and put the file into your new Shared folder…its right over there in the sidebar.

Now, with Ubuntu running and on top, choose Devices from the VirtualBox top menu. Pull down to Shared Folders. On the Shared Folders window, there is a ‘plus sign’ on a folder icon – click this. Pull down “Folder Path” to “Other”. You will see the Mac Finder window and your new folder in the Mac Sidebar~! Miracle, eh? Anything put into this folder will be available from both sides.

Now, how to make this directory/folder easily accessible on the Ubuntu side? If there is no Finder window, click on the Folder icon on the top left of the screen…a couple icons down from the three dots. On the Sidebar, click on Computer, which is in the Devices section. There will be a Folder or directory named Media, and in this Folder is your Shared Folder. Open that Folder, then click Control-D. Magic again. Under the Bookmark section of the Sidebar will be your shared folder.  

As far as using the Terminal to make an ext formatted USB drive, James has basically nailed it.

The first problem that you will encounter is knowing what the operating system calls your USB drive. Some will say to use a command sudo fdisk -l, which gives a lot of information…the last line of which is likely about your USD drive. In the following case, you can see that my USB disk, the one that I will be formatting, is called /dev/sdb1

[Note Note Note Note Note: Make certain that the drive is not originally formatted with FAT32. FAT32 has a 4 Giga Byte file limit. Formatting the drive with the following over a FAT32 base will give a problem when your files exceed 4 Gigs. End Note.

Note 2: If you are trying to copy and paste between the Mac and the VirtualBox Ubuntu Terminal window, you can Copy as normal with a Cmd-C, but pasting in the Ubuntu Terminal window must be done with a Control-Shift V.

A more complicated command, but with much simpler exposition of the the partition name and path is (cut from this with your usual command keys, but in Ubuntu your Paste keys will be Control-Shift-V):
    sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL

So, we know that my USB stick is named sdb1, and is already formatted with vfat at the factory.
Armed with this info, the first step – before making the file system (mkfs) – you must unmount the drive
    sudo umount /dev/the_partition_name_found_with_the_above
In this example, that would be sudo umount /dev/sdb1

 The ISDCF document mentions a slightly different nomenclature for the command line than James does,

mkfs -t ext3 -I 128 -m 0 /dev/xddN

And here are some other commands that work, including the one that James is using. Myself, I prefer the last one since it allows you to name the partition as it is being made.

sudo mkfs.ext2 -j -I 128 /dev/sda1 – the basic difference between ext 2 and 3 is journaling, so this adds journaling to ext2

sudo mke2fs -t ext3 -I 128 -L DCPs 0 /dev/sdb1 – slightly different command set

sudo mkfs.ext3 -I 128 -m 0 -L your-chosen-name-of-drive /dev/sdb1 – this one adds a disk name (change “DiskName” to ‘my_dcp_drive’ or whatever name you want to give it) while formatting and partitioning…change that ‘sdb1’ to the proper partition number.

Formatting the disk is not so quick – Those Superblocks might take a few minutes to assemble.  

Follow up by giving permissions to the folder with: (755 is usually recommended, but I use 777 for myself)
    sudo chmod -R 777 /media/USR_NAME/your-chosen-name-of-drive

You’ll have to Mount the disk first, which is done either at the bottom in the Ubuntu Dock (did you install a dock?) or by using the little plugin character at the bottom right of the VirtualBox window. 

There is a simple way to find out the exact trail – Roll over the name of the drive in the sidebar.
Since I don’t actually log in as ‘root’ all the time, and since I just make test files, I like to keep my permissions much more loose. I use 777 instead of 755. 

As an option, if indeed it is your drive, you can sudo chown owner:owner /media/owner/your-chosen-name-of-drive

In the above command, put your name twice, such as ‘cj:cj’, then ‘/media/cj/ctt_dcps’

And finally, in the Virtualbox menu, pull down Devices down to USB, then USB Settings. It will open a window…click on the plug icon that has the plus ‘+’ sign, on the right hand side of the window. The brand of the USB Flash Drive will appear at the bottom of the list. Click the checkbox next to the drive then click OK. From then on, if you put in the drive after Ubuntu is booted and ready to go, the drive will mount without going through the Apple OS, eliminating a step and the dangerous possibility of putting invisible files on the USB drive that could complicate the servers that you need to put DCPs on.

Using Your New Drive

Ubuntu may or may not make a big deal about automatically mounting the USB drive. You might have to go to the USB plug icon on the bottom right of the VirtualBox window and make certain that the drive has a check mark next to it. Or, it may be mounted but you didn’t notice that it appeared at the bottom of the Dock that is along the left side of the screen. Jeesh…there is a lot more going on with computers than what my grandfather had to teach Edison. Sometimes there is no solution but to reboot Ubuntu.

But the main thing is that you can transfer files from the “shared folder” on the Mac where you are making your DCPs to the UBB drive that will move them to the media server.

 Further updates to this article will include:

The command is: 

Coming up as this article evolves – installing and using CinemaSlides.

Getting out of problems.

This is copied from the marvelous Digital Cinema Tools website of Wolfgang Woehl

See Digital Cinema Tools Distribution for an easy-to-use Setup script. It will install everything required (batteries included) to use dcp_inspect, cinemaslides and a bunch of other useful tools related to digital cinema.

Please consider contributing to Testing encrypted DCPs and KDMs.

The real trick that he gives is an incredible Digital Cinema toolset, and now that you have Ubuntu running, open Terminal, paste in the following command and hit Return. 

wget http://git.io/digital-cinema-tools-setup && bash digital-cinema-tools-setup

Mind the && in there. When finished type the following and hit return

exec $SHELL

and you’re done. But what have you done?

You’ve installed asdcplib, ruby, openjpeg, nokogiri, and other libraries, plus dcp_inspect, cinemaslides, a cinemacertstore, and other items in the digital cinema tools toolset. I think that I even remember seeing graphicsmagick go by there.

Make a Slide Presentation is the next topic in this evolving piece. Here is a command line that makes a DCP that I have put into Terminal in Ubuntu recently. What do we need to set up to make that work, I wonder? My guess is making files with Audacity and Keynote, putting them into the Shared Folder, then blending them together to make a friendly DCP…maybe we will even check it with dcp_inspect.

Here is a command that I give in Terminal to make a DCP of slides to warn any lingering mortals that the automated test tool is going to start an audio test. We’ll review what it all means.

cinemaslides –type dcp “/media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/wav_files/audio_warning_chirp-18.wav” “/media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/tiff_slide_masters/Audio Warning Slides” -x cut,3.33 –title DXG_Audio_Warnings-18 –annotation DXG_Audio_Warnings-18 -o /media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/DCP_Finals/DXG_Audio_Warnings-18

Explication: cinemaslides is obviously the name of the program that we are going to invoke and dcp is the type of item that we are going to create. From where will it grab all this stuff…the next two parts tell cinemaslides where to find the .wav file and where to find a folder of slides. We are going to cross between them with a cut every 3.33 seconds (this will be a 20 second warning.) The name of the dcp follows, and how it is annotated internally and what to call the file for human readable purposes closes out the command. And look…the file is being placed in a folder within the Shared Folder named DCP_Finals…and made from files that are in the Shared Folder as well. 

So, the set up is, create a set of directories using the mac finder named tiff_slide_masters and wav_files and DCP_Finals

Make a wav file using audacity and store it in the wav_files folder. (A document will be posted in the next few weeks showing how to do that.)

Make a set of slides using Keynote (or Powerpoint or LibreOffice) and save them as tiff files. Put them in the tiff_slide_masters folder. (Another article will flesh this process out a bit more as well, but suffice to say that you should start with a 2048×1080 slide. Do what seems logical and Bob’s your uncle. Myself, I have to set up a Skype call with my dad and my Uncle Bob so that happy birthday wishes can ensue. More later.)

Finally, navigate to the DCP_Finals directory (folder), sort by clicking on the Modified header, drag the file to the USB drive on the sidebar, and let it copy over.

A great resource: Knut Erik Evensen’s site: THE BEST COMMON PRACTICE TO DELIVER A DIGITAL CINEMA PACKAGE (DCP)

 

A follow-up article: Validating a DCP

Consultants

The DCP USB on a Mac; CineTechGeek to Digital Cinema Tools, v1b

Leave a comment

First, let’s examine in more detail the problem that is being solved.

The Digital Cinema Package, or DCP, is the actual movie in a format that is transported from post production to the projector. It has been in use for over a decade, so one would think that the DCP is well defined and easy to create and use. But Alas~! it is not true. The insides of the DCP has been in transition, and leading to further revision, for much of its life. So, depending on when you picked up the story, it is only somewhat well defined and, it is in transition again. A DCP is easy to create, after perhaps the dozenth time that one tries. But there are are many variations of equipment that it needs to play on, and each of those have evolved in different ways. Some will accept any attempt, some will be very strict. Thus, a DCP that plays on one system …or one set of software on one system… will not necessarily play on another brand or version of a different…or even the same brand of equipment.

So we get stories of DCPs that need re-wraping during a Film Festival which, after great frenzied work by the festival techs, gets it to run – but the DCP doesn’t work 2 weeks later at another festival. Or, when the director takes the DCP that his editor or kid brother created – a DCP that worked once somewhere – a professional house won’t accept it for duplication without charges for repair. Have you ever had your car’s transmission repaired and been told that you have to spend a grand just to drop it down and look inside? …drop that DCP down…

Second, there is a problem that often occurs when inserting a USB drive into a Macintosh computer. The problem isn’t a problem for the Mac, of course, but rather a solution that causes problems for other systems. What happens is that the Mac OSX operating system tries to put an index of drive and other user-cuddly info into invisible files. It will even make invisible thumbnail versions of graphics files. Not a problem until they are a problem – they can sometimes confuse the heck out of other systems, both Windows and Linux.

Part two of the Mac problem is that most often a USB drive that has been properly formatted for a DCP won’t open at all on the Mac – which, given the problems it creates with invisible files, is probably a good thing. But the bad news is that if you have made a DCP on your Mac with one of the many DCP creation programs, what do you do with that file? In an imaginary ‘best of worlds’ one just inserts a USB stick or drive into the slot, the drive opens and one drags the file to the USB device. 

It is a goofy world out there for disk formats. Many companies don’t want to pay for proprietary formats, or can’t use anything but open source tools. There are exceptions and work-arounds. The standard USB drive that is formatted with the standard Windows NTSF format can be read by OSX, but not written to, unless a 3rd party extension is installed. The standard USB drive that is formatted with the standard Linux ext format can’t be read or written to from the Mac unless a 3rd party extension or the open source FUSE extensions are put into the system.

While either of these solutions might make it simple to exchange files, having them on the OSX system will cause a problem when using the solution that James details. If someone is able to contort the FUSE system to make your mac read and write to an ext formatted USB drive, more power to you. Getting it to read is fairly straight forward, but it means that the Mac will be able to grab the drive before that drive can be grabbed by the tools in James’ solution. Not impossible, but a bit wonky and not always simple. Since we’re going to use the Ubuntu system for other purposes, we’ll stick with moving forward with James’ install advice, skipping the idea of adding FUSE or other extensions to the Mac.

Take home lesson, if nothing else:

If you put in a USB stick or drive which might have a DCP on it, and the Mac tells you, “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer”, the option that you want to choose is “Eject”. That way OSX will release the drive without trying to write to it, and allow another operating system to grab it.
In other words, the Mac will place invisible files on the drive with the DCP, and these invisible files have the certain opportunity to cause havoc.  

If you don’t get to eject the file, then this will not be a ext formatted drive, in which case, happy formatting…

James choses the free VirtualBox program instead of Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion for creating the virtual machine. In slow-person-talk that means that there will be a 2nd operating system put onto the harddisk – in this case the Linux variant named Ubuntu 14 – and in order to do all the work of keeping Ubuntu from messing with OSX while it shares the network and hard drive and wifi, etc., it needs a software device that Ubuntu can be placed “into”. 

Go to https://www.virtualbox.org and click on “Downloads” on the left side. You’ll see a small clickable “amd64” note next to the “OSX hosts” line. You’re thinking, I know enough to know that my Mac has an Intel, not an AMD chip, right? As it turns out, AMD wrote the spec and while different companies use different notations to hide that, VirtualBox uses what we will eventually get used to as the standard notation, amd64. Download the file and install it as James describes. Don’t add too much memory if you don’t have much to spare or you’ll get yelled at. 

Then, as James points out in the video, install the VM VirtualBox Extension Pack by downloading it and double clicking on it and following the directions. Since you will be using your username in other procedures, keep it simple: the best suggestion is to use your initials. With luck the two programs will talk to each other and everything will work together. Eventually, when VirtualBox tells you to upgrade, don’t ignore the reminder – upgrade the Extension Pack right away. Otherwise your USB drives won’t work and you’ll be rebooting and kicking yourself while trying to get in sync again. 

Side note: What’s with this big Oracle logo on the VirtualBox product site you might be asking. Isn’t Oracle that huge company who everyone has a brother or cousin or nephew/neice working for? And the answer is yes. Oracle got VirtualBox from their purchase of Sun Micro along with Java and MySQL. All three are variants of free and Open Source, and Oracle does a very good job of servicing the community with these tools.

Next is the free and open sourced operating system named Ubuntu. James’ advice is that you follow the instructions for leaving Ubuntu as an .iso file, which will then fire up like an operating system on a CD or DCD would. This saves space if you are only going to use this solution once or twice a year. Which makes sense. But if you are going to make DCPs of pre-show slides then you might want to install the free and open source “Digital Cinema Tools” from Wolfgang Woehl which includes the versatile and easy to use “CinemaSlides” program.

If you choose this route, install the program as standard instead of as an .iso boot drive. Follow the rest of his instructions. That is, up until the spot where he starts connecting with the network. We’re going to use the Shared Folders method instead. It is a bit more simple to use for us punters. 

First step to make an easy to access Shared Folder on the Mac computer make a new folder using the Mac Finder. Drag the new folder over to the Sidebar. (If the Sidebar isn’t open when you have a Finder window open, Option-Command-S will open it. 

Go to ubuntu.com, click on the Download tab (on the far right) and pull down to Desktop. If the flavour says 64-bit, click the download button. Find it and put the file into your new Shared folder…its right over there in the sidebar.

Now, with Ubuntu running and on top, choose Devices from the VirtualBox top menu. Pull down to Shared Folders. On the Shared Folders window, there is a ‘plus sign’ on a folder icon – click this. Pull down “Folder Path” to “Other”. You will see the Mac Finder window and your new folder in the Mac Sidebar~! Miracle, eh? Anything put into this folder will be available from both sides.

Now, how to make this directory/folder easily accessible on the Ubuntu side? If there is no Finder window, click on the Folder icon on the top left of the screen…a couple icons down from the three dots. On the Sidebar, click on Computer, which is in the Devices section. There will be a Folder or directory named Media, and in this Folder is your Shared Folder. Open that Folder, then click Control-D. Magic again. Under the Bookmark section of the Sidebar will be your shared folder.  

As far as using the Terminal to make an ext formatted USB drive, James has basically nailed it.

The first problem that you will encounter is knowing what the operating system calls your USB drive. Some will say to use a command sudo fdisk -l, which gives a lot of information…the last line of which is likely about your USD drive. In the following case, you can see that my USB disk, the one that I will be formatting, is called /dev/sdb1

[Note Note Note Note Note: Make certain that the drive is not originally formatted with FAT32. FAT32 has a 4 Giga Byte file limit. Formatting the drive with the following over a FAT32 base will give a problem when your files exceed 4 Gigs. End Note.

Note 2: If you are trying to copy and paste between the Mac and the VirtualBox Ubuntu Terminal window, you can Copy as normal with a Cmd-C, but pasting in the Ubuntu Terminal window must be done with a Control-Shift V.

A more complicated command, but with much simpler exposition of the the partition name and path is (cut from this with your usual command keys, but in Ubuntu your Paste keys will be Control-Shift-V):
    sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL

So, we know that my USB stick is named sdb1, and is already formatted with vfat at the factory.
Armed with this info, the first step – before making the file system (mkfs) – you must unmount the drive
    sudo umount /dev/the_partition_name_found_with_the_above
In this example, that would be sudo umount /dev/sdb1

 The ISDCF document mentions a slightly different nomenclature for the command line than James does,

mkfs -t ext3 -I 128 -m 0 /dev/xddN

And here are some other commands that work, including the one that James is using. Myself, I prefer the last one since it allows you to name the partition as it is being made.

sudo mkfs.ext2 -j -I 128 /dev/sda1 – the basic difference between ext 2 and 3 is journaling, so this adds journaling to ext2

sudo mke2fs -t ext3 -I 128 -L DCPs 0 /dev/sdb1 – slightly different command set

sudo mkfs.ext3 -I 128 -m 0 -L your-chosen-name-of-drive /dev/sdb1 – this one adds a disk name (change “DiskName” to ‘my_dcp_drive’ or whatever name you want to give it) while formatting and partitioning…change that ‘sdb1’ to the proper partition number.

Formatting the disk is not so quick – Those Superblocks might take a few minutes to assemble.  

Follow up by giving permissions to the folder with: (755 is usually recommended, but I use 777 for myself)
    sudo chmod -R 777 /media/USR_NAME/your-chosen-name-of-drive

You’ll have to Mount the disk first, which is done either at the bottom in the Ubuntu Dock (did you install a dock?) or by using the little plugin character at the bottom right of the VirtualBox window. 

There is a simple way to find out the exact trail – Roll over the name of the drive in the sidebar.
Since I don’t actually log in as ‘root’ all the time, and since I just make test files, I like to keep my permissions much more loose. I use 777 instead of 755. 

As an option, if indeed it is your drive, you can sudo chown owner:owner /media/owner/your-chosen-name-of-drive

In the above command, put your name twice, such as ‘cj:cj’, then ‘/media/cj/ctt_dcps’

And finally, in the Virtualbox menu, pull down Devices down to USB, then USB Settings. It will open a window…click on the plug icon that has the plus ‘+’ sign, on the right hand side of the window. The brand of the USB Flash Drive will appear at the bottom of the list. Click the checkbox next to the drive then click OK. From then on, if you put in the drive after Ubuntu is booted and ready to go, the drive will mount without going through the Apple OS, eliminating a step and the dangerous possibility of putting invisible files on the USB drive that could complicate the servers that you need to put DCPs on.

Using Your New Drive

Ubuntu may or may not make a big deal about automatically mounting the USB drive. You might have to go to the USB plug icon on the bottom right of the VirtualBox window and make certain that the drive has a check mark next to it. Or, it may be mounted but you didn’t notice that it appeared at the bottom of the Dock that is along the left side of the screen. Jeesh…there is a lot more going on with computers than what my grandfather had to teach Edison. Sometimes there is no solution but to reboot Ubuntu.

But the main thing is that you can transfer files from the “shared folder” on the Mac where you are making your DCPs to the UBB drive that will move them to the media server.

 Further updates to this article will include:

The command is: 

Coming up as this article evolves – installing and using CinemaSlides.

Getting out of problems.

This is copied from the marvelous Digital Cinema Tools website of Wolfgang Woehl

See Digital Cinema Tools Distribution for an easy-to-use Setup script. It will install everything required (batteries included) to use dcp_inspect, cinemaslides and a bunch of other useful tools related to digital cinema.

Please consider contributing to Testing encrypted DCPs and KDMs.

The real trick that he gives is an incredible Digital Cinema toolset, and now that you have Ubuntu running, open Terminal, paste in the following command and hit Return. 

wget http://git.io/digital-cinema-tools-setup && bash digital-cinema-tools-setup

Mind the && in there. When finished type the following and hit return

exec $SHELL

and you’re done. But what have you done?

You’ve installed asdcplib, ruby, openjpeg, nokogiri, and other libraries, plus dcp_inspect, cinemaslides, a cinemacertstore, and other items in the digital cinema tools toolset. I think that I even remember seeing graphicsmagick go by there.

Make a Slide Presentation is the next topic in this evolving piece. Here is a command line that makes a DCP that I have put into Terminal in Ubuntu recently. What do we need to set up to make that work, I wonder? My guess is making files with Audacity and Keynote, putting them into the Shared Folder, then blending them together to make a friendly DCP…maybe we will even check it with dcp_inspect.

Here is a command that I give in Terminal to make a DCP of slides to warn any lingering mortals that the automated test tool is going to start an audio test. We’ll review what it all means.

cinemaslides –type dcp “/media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/wav_files/audio_warning_chirp-18.wav” “/media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/tiff_slide_masters/Audio Warning Slides” -x cut,3.33 –title DXG_Audio_Warnings-18 –annotation DXG_Audio_Warnings-18 -o /media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/DCP_Finals/DXG_Audio_Warnings-18

Explication: cinemaslides is obviously the name of the program that we are going to invoke and dcp is the type of item that we are going to create. From where will it grab all this stuff…the next two parts tell cinemaslides where to find the .wav file and where to find a folder of slides. We are going to cross between them with a cut every 3.33 seconds (this will be a 20 second warning.) The name of the dcp follows, and how it is annotated internally and what to call the file for human readable purposes closes out the command. And look…the file is being placed in a folder within the Shared Folder named DCP_Finals…and made from files that are in the Shared Folder as well. 

So, the set up is, create a set of directories using the mac finder named tiff_slide_masters and wav_files and DCP_Finals

Make a wav file using audacity and store it in the wav_files folder. (A document will be posted in the next few weeks showing how to do that.)

Make a set of slides using Keynote (or Powerpoint or LibreOffice) and save them as tiff files. Put them in the tiff_slide_masters folder. (Another article will flesh this process out a bit more as well, but suffice to say that you should start with a 2048×1080 slide. Do what seems logical and Bob’s your uncle. Myself, I have to set up a Skype call with my dad and my Uncle Bob so that happy birthday wishes can ensue. More later.)

Finally, navigate to the DCP_Finals directory (folder), sort by clicking on the Modified header, drag the file to the USB drive on the sidebar, and let it copy over.

A great resource: Knut Erik Evensen’s site: THE BEST COMMON PRACTICE TO DELIVER A DIGITAL CINEMA PACKAGE (DCP)

 

A follow-up article: Validating a DCP

Consultants

Soundly Said | Mel Lambert Gets Immersive

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SMPTE/NAB 2015 DCinema History Panel
Bill Mead (DCinemaToday) speaks to Tim Cook (Alamo Drafthouse), David Pflegl (Carmike), Steven Tsai (Sony), Sean Romano (Deluxe), Wendy Aylsworth (Warners) – Photo from Mel Lambert

Remember to visit our sponsor please:

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Welcome To The New Digital Monitoring Age

For a less focused but full-of-dat article on the Summit:

NAB Cinema Summit: On the Trail of Hollywood’s Biggest Villains from David Keene at AVNetwork

A lot of great data, but it derives a whole paragraph of analysis from the correct but asterisk’d data about the terrible reduction in ticket sales. From 10 billion something to 10 billion something…which is truly a rounding error when put under the scope of the limited number of movies released in 2014. 2015 is already on track to soundly beat 2014 and there are many big pictures in queue that should make this year more on trend.

This is only pointed out since a year of minor growth or minor sales diminishment is not the way that good management thrives. Or maybe not. But the point is that the management of several industries are working together and at odds to maintain some semblance of an exhibition industry. Clearly, the major movie studios are all parts of larger interests, and exhibition has long known that it isn’t exhibition friendly. The solution was long thought to be Alternative Content, (or ODS as the punsters like to say – Other Digital Stuff, and perhaps odious for the purests) or as the new group in the EU calls it: Event Cinema. Tim Cooks speaks to how they are doing it well. Picture house in London do too. See Event Cinema Association

Consultants

Soundly Said | Mel Lambert Gets Immersive

Leave a comment
SMPTE/NAB 2015 DCinema History Panel
Bill Mead (DCinemaToday) speaks to Tim Cook (Alamo Drafthouse), David Pflegl (Carmike), Steven Tsai (Sony), Sean Romano (Deluxe), Wendy Aylsworth (Warners) – Photo from Mel Lambert

Remember to visit our sponsor please:

Digital Test Tools Logo
Welcome To The New Digital Monitoring Age

For a less focused but full-of-dat article on the Summit:

NAB Cinema Summit: On the Trail of Hollywood’s Biggest Villains from David Keene at AVNetwork

A lot of great data, but it derives a whole paragraph of analysis from the correct but asterisk’d data about the terrible reduction in ticket sales. From 10 billion something to 10 billion something…which is truly a rounding error when put under the scope of the limited number of movies released in 2014. 2015 is already on track to soundly beat 2014 and there are many big pictures in queue that should make this year more on trend.

This is only pointed out since a year of minor growth or minor sales diminishment is not the way that good management thrives. Or maybe not. But the point is that the management of several industries are working together and at odds to maintain some semblance of an exhibition industry. Clearly, the major movie studios are all parts of larger interests, and exhibition has long known that it isn’t exhibition friendly. The solution was long thought to be Alternative Content, (or ODS as the punsters like to say – Other Digital Stuff, and perhaps odious for the purests) or as the new group in the EU calls it: Event Cinema. Tim Cooks speaks to how they are doing it well. Picture house in London do too. See Event Cinema Association

Consultants

Kommer Kleijn On the Importance of the DCP

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This functionality removes the classical “brightness/saturation/contrast” adjustments from the projection chain and puts these settings back in the hands of the laboratory and film makers as was the case with 35mm film previously.

Although, as you rightly state, some of the films shown in festivals may indeed agree to do without encryption and trust no copies will remain, the second functionality cited is very important to cinematographers and directors, certainly also during festivals where their movies are often shown to professional viewers, press and potential buyers.  Therefore the ‘Calibrated Chain’ functionality of the DCP format is very important, also in festivals, even in cases where encryption against piracy is not required.

A film that is sent to a festival in any format other than DCP is not reliably calibrated. This means that ideally the movie needs to be pre-screened at least partly in the theatre it will be shown in, with the director and/or cinematographer in the room (and no audience) to check if the contrast, black level and saturation settings are acceptable or need to be adapted. The same may be true for the sound level.

A DCP is the first and till now ONLY electronic format we know that reliably allows these settings to be determined in the mastering suite, and allow to subsequently sent out a movie in an electronic form while having confidence in the result without the need to sent out a crew member to check before the show.

And we are not only worried about esthetic details: Incorrect settings for black level and/or contrast can result in important story elements (a gun in a drawer, a plane in the sky) to disappear entirely, causing a risk for loss of story comprehension.  Note that this can also happen with an incorrect sound level.

Cinematographers world wide have stressed that digital cinema would not be acceptable without such a “Calibrated Chain” feature. The implementation of this Calibrated chain feature has on the contrary resulted in the world wide support of cinematographers for Digital Cinema. (as 35mm film projection already provided this functionality)

Festivals (or theatres) showing movies in any other format is considered video (and not Cinema) and a correct reproduction can not be guaranteed without verification by the authors or their representatives in each room.

As such verification is not always practical, cinematographers would like to stress that all possible efforts would be made to use the DCP format also in festivals whenever possible at all.

Another important detail that DCP projection solves in comparison to using consumer computers for playback is that a consumer computer generally does not provide straight frame playback. Indeed, output cards of consumer computers are almost always driven at 60 Hz free-run and will force the projector to run at 60 fps as well, and often without any sync to the source material. Movies played back on consumer computers will therefore often show erratic camera movement (2:3 pulldown, often worse), erratic contents (read: actor) movements and sometimes even show split frames (upper part the screen shows a new frame while the lower part shows a previous frame)

This is another reason why DCP playback is greatly preferred by cinematographers, and because it is the only standardized cinema playback system.

So please let us indeed concentrate on how to make DCP playback easier and more convenient for festival operators, in order to avoid at all cost that they might need to revert to a less reliable alternative, as such could eventually cause important damage to the content and subsequently to the industry.

We should try to make DCP playback as easy as possible for them, preferably as easy as 35mm playback was if at all possible. And if direct play from a transport disc helps to that goal, then I wish to encourage that idea too.

Best regards!,

Kommer Kleijn SBC,
Chair of the IMAGO technical committee.

Consultants

Kommer Kleijn On the Importance of the DCP

Leave a comment

This functionality removes the classical “brightness/saturation/contrast” adjustments from the projection chain and puts these settings back in the hands of the laboratory and film makers as was the case with 35mm film previously.

Although, as you rightly state, some of the films shown in festivals may indeed agree to do without encryption and trust no copies will remain, the second functionality cited is very important to cinematographers and directors, certainly also during festivals where their movies are often shown to professional viewers, press and potential buyers.  Therefore the ‘Calibrated Chain’ functionality of the DCP format is very important, also in festivals, even in cases where encryption against piracy is not required.

A film that is sent to a festival in any format other than DCP is not reliably calibrated. This means that ideally the movie needs to be pre-screened at least partly in the theatre it will be shown in, with the director and/or cinematographer in the room (and no audience) to check if the contrast, black level and saturation settings are acceptable or need to be adapted. The same may be true for the sound level.

A DCP is the first and till now ONLY electronic format we know that reliably allows these settings to be determined in the mastering suite, and allow to subsequently sent out a movie in an electronic form while having confidence in the result without the need to sent out a crew member to check before the show.

And we are not only worried about esthetic details: Incorrect settings for black level and/or contrast can result in important story elements (a gun in a drawer, a plane in the sky) to disappear entirely, causing a risk for loss of story comprehension.  Note that this can also happen with an incorrect sound level.

Cinematographers world wide have stressed that digital cinema would not be acceptable without such a “Calibrated Chain” feature. The implementation of this Calibrated chain feature has on the contrary resulted in the world wide support of cinematographers for Digital Cinema. (as 35mm film projection already provided this functionality)

Festivals (or theatres) showing movies in any other format is considered video (and not Cinema) and a correct reproduction can not be guaranteed without verification by the authors or their representatives in each room.

As such verification is not always practical, cinematographers would like to stress that all possible efforts would be made to use the DCP format also in festivals whenever possible at all.

Another important detail that DCP projection solves in comparison to using consumer computers for playback is that a consumer computer generally does not provide straight frame playback. Indeed, output cards of consumer computers are almost always driven at 60 Hz free-run and will force the projector to run at 60 fps as well, and often without any sync to the source material. Movies played back on consumer computers will therefore often show erratic camera movement (2:3 pulldown, often worse), erratic contents (read: actor) movements and sometimes even show split frames (upper part the screen shows a new frame while the lower part shows a previous frame)

This is another reason why DCP playback is greatly preferred by cinematographers, and because it is the only standardized cinema playback system.

So please let us indeed concentrate on how to make DCP playback easier and more convenient for festival operators, in order to avoid at all cost that they might need to revert to a less reliable alternative, as such could eventually cause important damage to the content and subsequently to the industry.

We should try to make DCP playback as easy as possible for them, preferably as easy as 35mm playback was if at all possible. And if direct play from a transport disc helps to that goal, then I wish to encourage that idea too.

Best regards!,

Kommer Kleijn SBC,
Chair of the IMAGO technical committee.