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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: NEC Series 1 subtitle issues
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Antti Nayha
Master Film Handler
Posts: 268
From: Helsinki, Finland
Registered: Oct 2008
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posted 02-28-2013 04:04 PM
I’m looking for experiences in using a Series 1 NEC’s in a festival setting – that is, running lots of subtitled international DCP’s of varying authoring quality.
Given the amount of ”indie” DCP’s that arthouse film festivals tend to receive, I tend to try and standardize the D-Cinema equipment across all venues as far as possible to prevent any nasty surprises regarding compatibility. For me, this usually means going exclusively with Series 2 DLP projectors, Dolby DSS200 servers and Cat 862’s, since that’s what most cinemas already have in the country.
In a couple of months I’ll be doing a festival where one of the venues has a NEC NC1600C projector pre-installed. I’m not entirely comfortable with this, particularly as the same unit straight out refused to play the subtitles on one festival DCP last year. The projector logs mentioned a ”SubtitleError--Send Setup-Font error” and then an ”SubtitleError--Internal comm error (DSP)”. It seemed like a standard-issue 24 fps Interop DCP and dcp_inspect reported no errors, but regrettably I never got a chance to inspect it any further. Anyway, the subtitles worked just fine in another venue where an identical DSS200 was connected to a Series 2 Barco instead.
Later it turned out that the NC1600C wasn’t running the latest software (doh!), so this might have been the cause. However, I’ve heard about other subtitle problems even with mainstream DCP’s and the latest software. These are related to out-of-memory errors and they’re apparently different issues from what I described above. Needless to say, those reports haven’t made me any more comfortable.
With a Doremi, I could render the subtitles in the server, but sadly that’s not an option.
Of course, my festival location is extremely remote, and both budget and pre-festival testing time are limited. I’m just trying to decide if I should go through all the budgetary and logistic trouble of temporarily replacing the NC1600C with a rental Series 2 machine just to get through a five-day festival…
Care to share any war stories to help me with the decision? And/or any hints for identifying possible problem DCP’s beforehand?
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Antti Nayha
Master Film Handler
Posts: 268
From: Helsinki, Finland
Registered: Oct 2008
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posted 07-16-2013 02:34 PM
OK, the festival is happily over. We ran twenty DCP's (both 24fps Interop and 25fps SMPTE, most of them subtitled) with the NC1600C and had zero problems this time.
I had the projector's software updated to latest versions. However, the DSS200 was running 4.3.9, and the service company responsible for this venue didn't like the idea of updating that unless absolutely necessary. Apparently they were worried about possible problems running a DCI Dolby software together with a series 1 NEC projector. Since it's not possible to downgrade back to 4.3 in case of such problems, I decided to agree with them.
I wonder how long they can keep using non-DCI-compliant software, though... they're not under VPF, but presumably there will be problems with new studio DCP's at some point.
Thanks to Wolfgang's recent update to dcp_inspect, I was able to spot one DCP where the subtitle font file was larger than 640 kB. Since I found out about this two months before the festival, we simply didn't schedule any screenings of this film at this venue. It played back just fine elsewhere with Series 2 projectors and DSS200's with 4.4.2 software. (Although I suppose I could have re-authored the DCP with a smaller Arial.ttf file.)
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