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Outside Researched Views Immersive
The leaders want something great that no one else can have so they can attract the great clients. This is true in production, in post-productin and in now more commonly in exhibition. Do they want to have competing systems that mean that their big-super-room is locked out from 50% of the movies? Probably not 50%, but there is a number that is probably palatable. To discuss it another point has to be made.
Digital Cinema in full transition has been 100% of digits-to-the-chip with some standard deliverable to all the cinema theaters. It couldn’t have worked with only 10% of the facilities making the change. Paragraphs could be written on this point, but not now.
Immersive audio isn’t in that category. There will not be 100% saturation of immersive audio ever. Does anyone venture to say that it will reach 20%? Even with less expensive systems built from less robust hardware and technical support, the majority will find that it is too expensive to put in the dozens of even more expensive amplifiers and speakers in the majority of their auditoriums. Which fits in with a lot of other points that say: there is and always will be a myriad of rooms with different capabilities.
When M:I5 got kicked out of the best room in the house for its tepid replacement, it goes to a lesser room and most of the remaining audience won’t care. The movie is enough of a ride or they kick themselves for going late or whatever. Most facilities probably won’t have a 2nd great room to move it into. And if a movie comes along that is mixed exclusively in another format – for the super sound system – it will also have a standard 5.1 or 7.1 mix that will play just fine for the majority of the audience.
What is the message when an exhibition company says (as Randi writes): “The cinema owners are concerned about investing in one format only for another to become the standard. To quote one panel member, “No one wants to own an HD-DVD when the world has gone Blu-ray.””
First, false corollary. There will always be the uncompressed 5.1 or 7.1 mix that, when in a room that is properly tuned, will rock most listeners regardless that it ain’t an AuroMax or Atmos or DTS:X/MDA variant. What they are probably saying is, I don’t want to have what everyone else has, especially if it is Dolby, because they are ubiquitous and I want special. But I also don’t want to get stuck with something that will be a doorstop in a few years…and they are thinking in the back of their minds: No one ever got fired for buying IBM Dolby.
Fair enough, but when the majority of the cost is in speakers and amplifiers and wiring that can be plugged into the winning system, best you can hope for is that you can market whatever you buy in the time that it was special. Good luck. Basically, it isn’t the same as it was when a $30,000 investment in the best film projector possible would last for 30 years or more. Servers and projectors that cost 3 times as much and last for 10 years will be held in high regard. It used to be that changing the DTS or Dolby or SDDS head at $15 grand was a huge unthinkable sum. That’s just not the way it is anymore.
There is other nuance in what Randi writes. There is a most important question that shouldn’t be ignored: Of whether a perfectly homogenized system that can input anything and playback to what-I-installed …will actually sound as good as something that is input/output to the system it was mixed in?. This is where a writer who is on the committees has to be careful. Nobody can talk about Fight Club. You don’t have to go to the SMPTE committee meetings to know that theory says: It is just algorithms and laws of physics. On the other hand, this author’s grandfather helped figure out how to get lights working in an under-river tunnel that 10 years previous had to be given up on because electricity science had gotten that far for that distance yet.
Choose your speakers and amps and cables wisely.
Outside Researched Views Immersive
The leaders want something great that no one else can have so they can attract the great clients. This is true in production, in post-productin and in now more commonly in exhibition. Do they want to have competing systems that mean that their big-super-room is locked out from 50% of the movies? Probably not 50%, but there is a number that is probably palatable. To discuss it another point has to be made.
Digital Cinema in full transition has been 100% of digits-to-the-chip with some standard deliverable to all the cinema theaters. It couldn’t have worked with only 10% of the facilities making the change. Paragraphs could be written on this point, but not now.
Immersive audio isn’t in that category. There will not be 100% saturation of immersive audio ever. Does anyone venture to say that it will reach 20%? Even with less expensive systems built from less robust hardware and technical support, the majority will find that it is too expensive to put in the dozens of even more expensive amplifiers and speakers in the majority of their auditoriums. Which fits in with a lot of other points that say: there is and always will be a myriad of rooms with different capabilities.
When M:I5 got kicked out of the best room in the house for its tepid replacement, it goes to a lesser room and most of the remaining audience won’t care. The movie is enough of a ride or they kick themselves for going late or whatever. Most facilities probably won’t have a 2nd great room to move it into. And if a movie comes along that is mixed exclusively in another format – for the super sound system – it will also have a standard 5.1 or 7.1 mix that will play just fine for the majority of the audience.
What is the message when an exhibition company says (as Randi writes): “The cinema owners are concerned about investing in one format only for another to become the standard. To quote one panel member, “No one wants to own an HD-DVD when the world has gone Blu-ray.””
First, false corollary. There will always be the uncompressed 5.1 or 7.1 mix that, when in a room that is properly tuned, will rock most listeners regardless that it ain’t an AuroMax or Atmos or DTS:X/MDA variant. What they are probably saying is, I don’t want to have what everyone else has, especially if it is Dolby, because they are ubiquitous and I want special. But I also don’t want to get stuck with something that will be a doorstop in a few years…and they are thinking in the back of their minds: No one ever got fired for buying IBM Dolby.
Fair enough, but when the majority of the cost is in speakers and amplifiers and wiring that can be plugged into the winning system, best you can hope for is that you can market whatever you buy in the time that it was special. Good luck. Basically, it isn’t the same as it was when a $30,000 investment in the best film projector possible would last for 30 years or more. Servers and projectors that cost 3 times as much and last for 10 years will be held in high regard. It used to be that changing the DTS or Dolby or SDDS head at $15 grand was a huge unthinkable sum. That’s just not the way it is anymore.
There is other nuance in what Randi writes. There is a most important question that shouldn’t be ignored: Of whether a perfectly homogenized system that can input anything and playback to what-I-installed …will actually sound as good as something that is input/output to the system it was mixed in?. This is where a writer who is on the committees has to be careful. Nobody can talk about Fight Club. You don’t have to go to the SMPTE committee meetings to know that theory says: It is just algorithms and laws of physics. On the other hand, this author’s grandfather helped figure out how to get lights working in an under-river tunnel that 10 years previous had to be given up on because electricity science had gotten that far for that distance yet.
Choose your speakers and amps and cables wisely.
Validating a DCP
To avoid black screens, the tech teams at the festivals do the yeoman’s work of cracking open recalcitrant DCPs and re-making them at the last minute. The artist may not even know that they should be relieved, and gets to the next festival believing…or saying, “Hey, it played at the last festival, it must be good.” Alas. Or they take it to a facility that specializes in subtitles likeTitra who is then forced to add a fee for remastering because they know that the old DCP won’t be accepted at a duplicators because of some error they are seeing. More alas, especially when it is going to cost time and money to find the reason for the error too.
One of those teams who have been providing tech support at large and high profile festivals for the past decade, such as the Berlinale, is zweiB, from the northern-most city in Italy – Munich. (This just in. Some are saying that Bavaria is part of Germany. Hmmm. Notwithstanding.) Their site has a tool named DCP-Validator which actually is a front end that humanizes a command line only tool named DCP-Inspect from Wolfgang Woehl’s Digital Cinema Tools excellent package of goodies.
Just writting “…providing tech support…such as the Berlinale…” doesn’t do justice to the amount of work it takes to juggle hundreds upon hundreds of DCPs over a two week span at dozens of cinema screens. (Commercial cinemas, it should be added – who don’t necessarily want to have working software/firmware changed just for the festival at night when they are playing regular schedules during the day, for example.) Likewise, describing DCP-Inspect as just an excellent package or listing a few features doesn’t tell of the years of keeping up with non-existent and moving standards. But here is a list nonetheless, taken from the zweiB’s site:
It is a tool for deep inspection and validation of DCPs. This includes integrity checks, asset inspection, schema validation, signature and certificate verification and composition summarization.
The GUI convinces with its user-friendly operation. Additionally, the Digital Cinema Packages are checked by its test functions for all DCI standards to ensure the playback performance on popular DCI players.
Putting a front end on this is a nice touch. It can print out a list of working DCPs and add a sense of calm in an otherwise rushing preasure situation. Making it available to us on an easy to use site with a running list of versions and fixes is a nice touch and extremely kind. The DCP Validator package works with the Ubuntu and Debian flavors of Linux.
The article The DCP USB on a Mac; CineTechGeek to Digital Cinema Tools ends with using cinemaslides, another of the Digital Cinema Tools program. So installing DCP Validator is a very logical next step for a HowTo article.
…and easy to do.
Download a copy from the download page of the zweiB site, Zweib Download Site for dcp_inspect DCP Validator
Put the downloaded copy into your Shared Folder if you have downloaded it using your Mac or PC. Go into your Ubuntu installation and drag the installer package (marked at the end as a .deb file) onto the Desktop (or into the Desktop folder.) (This can all be done from the command line, but if you can do this from the command line, you don’t need any of these instructions.) It doesn’t have to be the Desktop, but the package will not install from the Shared Folder.
Right-Click or Command-click on the .deb package and open it using the Ubuntu Software Center…which will actually open if you merely double-click on the .deb file. Eventually the Software Center will put up an Install button, which you should click.
Eventually the installer will ask for an admin password which, when given, will allow the installation to finish.
Reboot Ubuntu (or Debian.) This allows WebRick, a little webserver to run. DCP Validator runs on this webserver with your browser.
Open Firefox. Go to http://localhost:8080 – The Validator should come up.
Click on the “Login” button. Type dcp, then click “Confirm”. You are now in the Admin area.
(The online manuals show where and how to change the port number should you have something else running on 8080, and how to change the password if you into things like that.)
Click “Settings”. We need to put in the route for DCP-Validator to look for your DCPs on your hard drive. DCPs on a USB stick or USB drive will show up without this step.
Click the “Add” button. If you know how to type in the root path, go ahead. Otherwise, open a folder using the Dock on the side, click on the Shared Folder, then hit the List icon on the top right if required. Manipulate your windows so that you can drag the folder containing your DCPs into the little Rootpath window on the DCP Validator page. If you are like me it will say file:///media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/DCP_Finals. Erase the “file://” at the front, leaving the Rootpath as: “/media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/DCP_Finals.”
Click the “Confirm” button. Click the “Back” button.
Click “Validate A New DCP”
Click on the /media folder line in the rectangle on the side.
Click on a DCP. Click on the DCP folder again. You’ll see the innards, the ASSETMAP, the VOLINDEX, and all the audio and video and reference files that make up the DCP. You should be able to hit the Validate button now.
Click on “Validate” button. Make some coffee. Write a note telling me what was confusing about this or the DCP on a Mac article.
Pass? Green dot or Red? Click Show. Look at the report. Look at the levels. Balanced left and center? right and center? left and right? Surrounds look right? LFE? Cool.
If you followed James’ directions to a T, installing VirtualBox on the computer then Ubuntu as an iso drive, you can follow the zweiB manual to do the installation. Your USB drive should show right up on the list and things should be great without the step of showing the program of where to look.
And that is the end of this particular process.
The final version of the ISDCF document on Hard Disc Drive formats for DCP is just released, so download that from the ISDCF Technical Papers site.
Stay Standard. Do us all a favor, and Join SMPTE.
Validating a DCP
To avoid black screens, the tech teams at the festivals do the yeoman’s work of cracking open recalcitrant DCPs and re-making them at the last minute. The artist may not even know that they should be relieved, and gets to the next festival believing…or saying, “Hey, it played at the last festival, it must be good.” Alas. Or they take it to a facility that specializes in subtitles likeTitra who is then forced to add a fee for remastering because they know that the old DCP won’t be accepted at a duplicators because of some error they are seeing. More alas, especially when it is going to cost time and money to find the reason for the error too.
One of those teams who have been providing tech support at large and high profile festivals for the past decade, such as the Berlinale, is zweiB, from the northern-most city in Italy – Munich. (This just in. Some are saying that Bavaria is part of Germany. Hmmm. Notwithstanding.) Their site has a tool named DCP-Validator which actually is a front end that humanizes a command line only tool named DCP-Inspect from Wolfgang Woehl’s Digital Cinema Tools excellent package of goodies.
Just writting “…providing tech support…such as the Berlinale…” doesn’t do justice to the amount of work it takes to juggle hundreds upon hundreds of DCPs over a two week span at dozens of cinema screens. (Commercial cinemas, it should be added – who don’t necessarily want to have working software/firmware changed just for the festival at night when they are playing regular schedules during the day, for example.) Likewise, describing DCP-Inspect as just an excellent package or listing a few features doesn’t tell of the years of keeping up with non-existent and moving standards. But here is a list nonetheless, taken from the zweiB’s site:
It is a tool for deep inspection and validation of DCPs. This includes integrity checks, asset inspection, schema validation, signature and certificate verification and composition summarization.
The GUI convinces with its user-friendly operation. Additionally, the Digital Cinema Packages are checked by its test functions for all DCI standards to ensure the playback performance on popular DCI players.
Putting a front end on this is a nice touch. It can print out a list of working DCPs and add a sense of calm in an otherwise rushing preasure situation. Making it available to us on an easy to use site with a running list of versions and fixes is a nice touch and extremely kind. The DCP Validator package works with the Ubuntu and Debian flavors of Linux.
The article The DCP USB on a Mac; CineTechGeek to Digital Cinema Tools ends with using cinemaslides, another of the Digital Cinema Tools program. So installing DCP Validator is a very logical next step for a HowTo article.
…and easy to do.
Download a copy from the download page of the zweiB site, Zweib Download Site for dcp_inspect DCP Validator
Put the downloaded copy into your Shared Folder if you have downloaded it using your Mac or PC. Go into your Ubuntu installation and drag the installer package (marked at the end as a .deb file) onto the Desktop (or into the Desktop folder.) (This can all be done from the command line, but if you can do this from the command line, you don’t need any of these instructions.) It doesn’t have to be the Desktop, but the package will not install from the Shared Folder.
Right-Click or Command-click on the .deb package and open it using the Ubuntu Software Center…which will actually open if you merely double-click on the .deb file. Eventually the Software Center will put up an Install button, which you should click.
Eventually the installer will ask for an admin password which, when given, will allow the installation to finish.
Reboot Ubuntu (or Debian.) This allows WebRick, a little webserver to run. DCP Validator runs on this webserver with your browser.
Open Firefox. Go to http://localhost:8080 – The Validator should come up.
Click on the “Login” button. Type dcp, then click “Confirm”. You are now in the Admin area.
(The online manuals show where and how to change the port number should you have something else running on 8080, and how to change the password if you into things like that.)
Click “Settings”. We need to put in the route for DCP-Validator to look for your DCPs on your hard drive. DCPs on a USB stick or USB drive will show up without this step.
Click the “Add” button. If you know how to type in the root path, go ahead. Otherwise, open a folder using the Dock on the side, click on the Shared Folder, then hit the List icon on the top right if required. Manipulate your windows so that you can drag the folder containing your DCPs into the little Rootpath window on the DCP Validator page. If you are like me it will say file:///media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/DCP_Finals. Erase the “file://” at the front, leaving the Rootpath as: “/media/sf_shared_w_ubuntu/DCP_Finals.”
Click the “Confirm” button. Click the “Back” button.
Click “Validate A New DCP”
Click on the /media folder line in the rectangle on the side.
Click on a DCP. Click on the DCP folder again. You’ll see the innards, the ASSETMAP, the VOLINDEX, and all the audio and video and reference files that make up the DCP. You should be able to hit the Validate button now.
Click on “Validate” button. Make some coffee. Write a note telling me what was confusing about this or the DCP on a Mac article.
Pass? Green dot or Red? Click Show. Look at the report. Look at the levels. Balanced left and center? right and center? left and right? Surrounds look right? LFE? Cool.
If you followed James’ directions to a T, installing VirtualBox on the computer then Ubuntu as an iso drive, you can follow the zweiB manual to do the installation. Your USB drive should show right up on the list and things should be great without the step of showing the program of where to look.
And that is the end of this particular process.
The final version of the ISDCF document on Hard Disc Drive formats for DCP is just released, so download that from the ISDCF Technical Papers site.
Stay Standard. Do us all a favor, and Join SMPTE.
Looking Through “Dynamic Release Windows”
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.
Looking Through “Dynamic Release Windows”
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.
Fitting TSN into IoT – Synopsis
What isn’t written is a synopsis of equipment that use AVB and the adventure of video into AVB…but there is too much going on for me to research it…keep you eyes open in other places and let me know.
Fitting TSN into IoT – Synopsis
What isn’t written is a synopsis of equipment that use AVB and the adventure of video into AVB…but there is too much going on for me to research it…keep you eyes open in other places and let me know.
The DCP USB on a Mac; CineTechGeek to Digital Cinema Tools, v1b
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.
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
The DCP USB on a Mac; CineTechGeek to Digital Cinema Tools, v1b
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.
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
The DCP USB on a Mac; CineTechGeek to Digital Cinema Tools, v1b
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.
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
JOIN SMPTE NOW~!
Why do I recommend that you join SMPTE, and JOIN SMPTE NOW? What has it meant for me?
Well, being the dullest knife in the drawer and from a different part of the entertainment technology biz, it has meant that I get a little bit closer to the unadulterated technical information that I use to make sense of things. For me, this means the free to members webcasts…and a digital copy of the Imaging Journal…far above my head, but every once in a while I stumble on an article from someone I know – I’ll say to them, “Hey! saw your article in the Journal. Nice. Thanks.” That’s worth the price of admission right there.
“But can’t I have gotten that without spending $145 for an individual membership,” you ask? Maybe. But it actually feels good when I can say that I am a member. “Couldn’t it be less expensive?,” you ask. “I mean, is SMPTE gouging?” I don’t think so, and let me explain why.
If you want to go the next step in SMPTE, contributing your time and efforts to committees and study groups, then you have to pay a bunch more…something like $250. That additional cost goes into keeping the SMPTE structure up to the standards of the international groups that SMPTE belongs to, most especially the ISO. Imagine all the work that goes into submitting the SMPTE Standards and Recommended Practices to the ISO…then having the ISO say, “You didn’t have the required time period between draft submission and voting closure dates.” The costs of making all that right might have been wrapped into the costs of general membership, making the $145 a lot more – putting membership far out of reach of many. “Why~!~! That’s the opposite of gouging,” you say.
The hard part is the realization that you learn too much, yet how little that you know. As the saying goes: Kilometers wide, millimeters deep. People who you respect openly asking questions. You find that you can no longer pontificate since it is not only bad form, but you know that there is always so much more nuance that can be told.
So, if you need an excuse to get some of your time back by not pontificating, and feel good if someone says, “You are a SMPTE member, aren’t you?”, join now. And tell them that C J sent you.
Here’s the official SMPTE Membership Referral Program link:
SMPTE Member Referral Program | Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers
JOIN SMPTE NOW~!
Why do I recommend that you join SMPTE, and JOIN SMPTE NOW? What has it meant for me?
Well, being the dullest knife in the drawer and from a different part of the entertainment technology biz, it has meant that I get a little bit closer to the unadulterated technical information that I use to make sense of things. For me, this means the free to members webcasts…and a digital copy of the Imaging Journal…far above my head, but every once in a while I stumble on an article from someone I know – I’ll say to them, “Hey! saw your article in the Journal. Nice. Thanks.” That’s worth the price of admission right there.
“But can’t I have gotten that without spending $145 for an individual membership,” you ask? Maybe. But it actually feels good when I can say that I am a member. “Couldn’t it be less expensive?,” you ask. “I mean, is SMPTE gouging?” I don’t think so, and let me explain why.
If you want to go the next step in SMPTE, contributing your time and efforts to committees and study groups, then you have to pay a bunch more…something like $250. That additional cost goes into keeping the SMPTE structure up to the standards of the international groups that SMPTE belongs to, most especially the ISO. Imagine all the work that goes into submitting the SMPTE Standards and Recommended Practices to the ISO…then having the ISO say, “You didn’t have the required time period between draft submission and voting closure dates.” The costs of making all that right might have been wrapped into the costs of general membership, making the $145 a lot more – putting membership far out of reach of many. “Why~!~! That’s the opposite of gouging,” you say.
The hard part is the realization that you learn too much, yet how little that you know. As the saying goes: Kilometers wide, millimeters deep. People who you respect openly asking questions. You find that you can no longer pontificate since it is not only bad form, but you know that there is always so much more nuance that can be told.
So, if you need an excuse to get some of your time back by not pontificating, and feel good if someone says, “You are a SMPTE member, aren’t you?”, join now. And tell them that C J sent you.
Here’s the official SMPTE Membership Referral Program link:
SMPTE Member Referral Program | Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers
CineEurope Solutions: NOC and Screen Verify (UPDATE)
Harkness Screens is offering their new iPhone Luminance meter – Oops! Digital Screen Verifier app – at a 25% discount this week – until 28 June. This is another tool that brings expertise to the “your own staff”, but it also brings the data into the Harkness database tool, which management or a service provider can use externally to make certain that the projector/screen interface is working well.
USL has announced that their model two version of the LSS-100, as the LSS-100P, incorporating new features, in some cases surpassing and some cases keeping up with the Digital Test Tools Digital eXperience Guardian – both have a method for detecting speakers (or amp) that are not playing – the Guardian’s as part of the NewNoise Detection System that points out the area of new rattles or noises, while the 100 has added a satelite sync test, this being a new and clever feature in this Event Cinema Era.
Sony has 3 interesting items at the CinemaEurope 2015 assemblag. First is showing 2 of their 4K systems in one box! The is good for screens up to 19.5 meters (1.8 gain white) at 48 candela/m2 and 15.4 cd/m2 for 3D on a 2.4 gain silver screen. The nice claim is 8000:1 contrast ratio, which should really make things nice. Oops! These press releases should be read better: The units are not in one box but are a match set of projectors that can be placed side to side or on top of each other. That shoud be interesting to see anyway.
They also point out that their managed services are compelling due to VPFs disappearing.
Finally, and most interesting is how Sony is promoting the Alternative Content, or as it is better described, Event Cinema market.
Leading the way in Event Cinema
Projected in Sony 4K for an unforgettable experience, the fast-growing Event Cinema market is attracting new audiences with a revenue-boosting blend of live and recorded events to suit every screen owner.
In February 2015, Sony Digital Cinema 4K announced a ground-breaking initiative with the National Theatre and Vue Entertainment to screen four NT Live stage productions in detail-packed 4K. The first of these –Behind the Beautiful Forevers – was recorded in March and screened as a series of exclusive 4K presentations across Vue’s 83-site estate.
Details of the next 4K productions covered by this historic agreement will be confirmed during the ECA (Event Cinema Association) hosted panel discussion: “Event Cinema- Taking Stock and Looking Forward”, which takes place at CineEurope on the tradeshow floor, 4pm on Tuesday 23rd June. Addressing the session will be Emma Keith, National Theatre Live and Johnny Carr, Vue Entertainment. They’ll be discussing the recording of Behind the Beautiful Forevers – and outlining more exciting technical developments for the upcoming shows – with John Bullen, VPF and Content Manager for Sony 4K Digital Cinema (Europe).
Learn more about Event Cinema
“It’s great to be back at CineEurope once more”, says David McIntosh. “Since we last came to Barcelona a year ago, Sony Digital Cinema 4K has successfully implemented a unified new global business structure. Today we’re seeing this pay dividends with an improved service for our exhibition customers, significant business wins across Europe and beyond – and a further strengthening in our product offering, with industry-leading 4K solutions for cinemas of every size.”
Sony has filled in the details of their next Event Cinema adventure and it sounds like a good one.