Looking for advice on replacing LMS/TMS

[Frank Cox]

Wouldn't a film rating office be a perfect venue for using the "play directly from the cru drive" feature, instead of having to ingest every dcp that comes in the door?

It's a one-shot showing of a movie for a restricted audience and if it quits in the middle (or stutters or whatever), nobody cares since it's just a technical screening anyway.

That would save a ton of set-up time in their screening room.

[Carsten Kurz]

If the server doesn't allow for direct play, no chance.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Mark:
These were both at provincial government film rating services. As can be imagined these have to ingest a LOT of DCPs, they had to screen and rate every movie before it could play in the province. They bought the recommended Dell servers and the GDC "Enterprise Storage". One used Barco ICMP servers, the other had Doremi. One issue was that these sites used the projector to show both DVD or PC based links from distributors and DCP content. DCP content was ingested and playlisted by trained staff but the screeners set up the DVD and PC link contents from their desk in the screening room: they were not trained and were not able to access the TMS room. The GDC TMS could not use the server's built-in black, it assembles playlists using its own black MOS clips as you know. A Barco ICMP in HDMI mode will not play a normal playlist: to play a playlist if the server is in HDMI input mode you must insert an internal black section as the first playlist element and attach a cue to switch to server input. The GDC TMS absolutely could not use the ICMP internal black so switching to DCP playback could not be automatic.
That's operational, no big deal, a workaround was found - but the way their workflow was planned did not anticipate this limitation.
The real problem was the "Enterprise Storage" RAIDs kept disappearing. I believe you mentioned in another thread (I think it was about a content downloader) that the GDC TMS does have things disappear now and then? Well these sure did. Once the storage box is missing from the TMS all the already loaded content also disappears. And content being ingested goes to the OS drive which fills up pretty fast. That happened so often - with many attempts by GDC to fix it (and failing) - that both sites just shut their TMS off and used the servers directly. Both review boards have since been eliminated, so nothing more to say about them.
We do use the GDC TMS in some commercial cinemas but they are only used for scheduling (using schedule data from Vista) and have no local RAID. These have been working OK with a few hiccups now and then ... but other sites with Dolby/Doremi TMS systems (used for all ingests with large RAID storage units attached) have been almost totally trouble free although admittedly they are used with 100% Doremi servers.

Just sounds like the wrong equipment for the job. I'm not sure how well the GDC storage servers work with other manufacturers servers and is the link just 1G or is it 10G?. Although I can vouch for their TMS working fine with about a dozen different manufacturer's servers. I would have gone for a couple of the 2000AR's with 2 TB drives in them or a pair of DSS-200's with the same drives. Even the GDC TMS transfer speed is limited by the obvious 1 gig network link in most servers. Expanding it to 10G might help, but I doubt it would ever run at that speed anyway as the RAID is going to limit that.. I did find that moving content server to server over the GDC TMS is quite a bit faster than TMS to server. But either of those two are still faster than the internal bay or the eSATA connection.

[Dennis Benjamin]

We have the GDC TMS at all of our locations except our single screen location (and a location that uses TCC). While GDC is a little behind the rest of the TMS world, they are catching up.

We have their streaming system (CA2.0) at our site in Ocean City, Maryland. Now that all the bugs are worked out - it works great. I actually wish we had this system at all of our other sites. I am happy that we will be rolling out the automated version (AutoSPL) at our other locations soon. It has been a while in process, but overall we are happy with their software.

I hope they get a web based version of their TMS software someday.

It really comes down to how much money you want to spend initially and factor in how much payroll you want to save in the future. With a fully automated system, you do lower the "user error" factor.

We also use GDC TMS at locations that have zero GDC servers. While we can't use all the "bells and whistles" of the software, it does a good job interfacing with the other company's IMBs.