GDC server intermittent problem

[Steve Guttag]

Frank, I've never encountered needing to scroll its playback screen. Now, the IMS3000, that is one, in its current form, where it is like looking through a slit to see what is in the playlist. On the SR-1000, it's all there on the right side. Or, perhaps you are referring to the play-by-play of it connecting/loading/playing, with time stamps?

[Ryan Gallagher]

The SR1000 control screens are fixed size and too long to fit on a standard laptop screen. It's a square window (height==width) so the bottom of the screen is always off of the current screen unless you drag your mouse down to see it. And stuff is always scrolling down past the bottom of the screen so you have to do that.

If they made their window adapt to the current size of the web browser window, that would be a whole lot better.

I think a photo would useful to share Frank. Perhaps it depends on the desktop resolution in use?

[Frank Cox]

Or, perhaps you are referring to the play-by-play of it connecting/loading/playing, with time stamps?

That. Plus the "sm connected" status message and current time at the bottom which you can't see unless you scroll down. And the "close" button on the ingest screen. And I'm sure there's more if I think about it further.

They're all past the bottom of the screen unless I scroll down to find them.

[Steve Guttag]

Hmmm. I just looked at some of the ones I'm able to log into (remotely). All of them I could see the whole thing without having to scroll. Now, if I shrunk the window down, then yes the scroll bars appear. But, I could shrink the magnification too so it all appears again. Would it be better if it automatically rearranged itself? Perhaps. I've found that those windows that can do that, also tend to have things rearrange such that some items disappear or locate themselves in odd locations.

Clearly, they were used to their 4:3 display of the original and merely ported it to HTML and then applied a Doremi "Classic" structure to it.

For the most part, I'm actually pretty cool with the SR-1000's UI. Again, how they handled the automation cues in the Edit screen is one of my bigger beefs...mostly because they made a change to cause it to be worse than the prior form. The other HUGE beef is nagging people about the warranty. That should have an option to turn off. Then again, most of my SR-1000 installations were sold with a 10-year warranty...so that nag is kicked way down the road. Kudos to GDC for offering a 10-year warranty option.

[Frank Cox]

I just set up next week's movie and paid special attention to what I was scrolling to accomplish that task.

I'm using an older HP laptop with Firefox set to the full screen size.

On ingest, when you select the source the list of directories and dcp's that shows up on the left side goes down past the bottom of the screen so you have to scroll both the window and the list of directories to see what's past the bottom of the screen. The Close button is below the screen as well, as mentioned above.

On the playlist edit screen the cue "insert" button is below the bottom of the screen unless you scroll down to find it.

On the Status screen the "shutdown" button is below the bottom of the screen unless you scroll down to find it.

And I'm sure there's a lot more but that's enough examples to show that, as I said, their fixed window size is too long for the screen.

This type of fixed window screen handling is simply sloppy programming, similar to their sloppy programming that makes the directory list on the ingest screen non-resizable so you can't see the full titles unless you click on each individual entry. The three reasons for it that I can see are don't give a damn, laziness, and reluctance on their part to pay a programmer for the extra hour or two it would take to do it right.

[Martin McCaffery]

Bumping this up because we were/are having the same problem Mike was describing with our Solaria One with GDC 1000.

Christie replaced the server with a refurbed one, and the problem continues (sporadically, which is part of the problem). So now they are saying we should replace the ReadyNas 2001 raid. It's from 2014, so not an unreasonable suggestion.

They have proposed 3 different GDC Storage devices: Portable Storage PE 2TB, Portable Storage (SSD 4TB) and Enterprise Storage 4TB.

We're single screen, so don't need too much storage, but figure going to 4TB may be a good idea.

Anyone have any opinions, pro and con about these devices? Other options?
Thanks

[Ryan Gallagher]

Bumping this up because we were/are having the same problem Mike was describing with our Solaria One with GDC 1000.

Christie replaced the server with a refurbed one, and the problem continues (sporadically, which is part of the problem). So now they are saying we should replace the ReadyNas 2001 raid. It's from 2014, so not an unreasonable suggestion.

They have proposed 3 different GDC Storage devices: Portable Storage PE 2TB, Portable Storage (SSD 4TB) and Enterprise Storage 4TB.

We're single screen, so don't need too much storage, but figure going to 4TB may be a good idea.

Anyone have any opinions, pro and con about these devices? Other options?
Thanks

No experience with adding storage to our GDC room, but we are single screen essentially (well two rooms). Storage capacity need really depends on what your cinema use case is. We get by with 2TB on our box servers but we don't show trailers or long policy pre-show content either. If you have titles in rep you hang onto to save money on shipping/delivery that changes the storage math too. We have one big festival but they install their own NAS and takes some of the burden off our server storage.

Really to expand cold storage an off server NAS is more cost effective than paying industry prices for larger and larger IMS/Server capacity. Really just depends on how much content needs to be playable without file shuffling.

If in your current use case you are constantly having to manage storage for capacity reasons, I'd say doubling what you have now is an easy decision.

[Jim Cassedy]

GDC_Intermittent.jpg
Maybe it's just 'me', but, when I saw this, the first thing to run through my
mind was: When did they start putting intermittents into digital servers?

(yep. . . it's probably just me. . . . )

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I had an intermittent GDC server that had a bad stick of memory. It would randomly freeze, and then reboot on it's own and not go into play... GDC could see it in the logs and sent me new memory which fixed it.

[Steve Guttag]

Bumping this up because we were/are having the same problem Mike was describing with our Solaria One with GDC 1000.

Christie replaced the server with a refurbed one, and the problem continues (sporadically, which is part of the problem). So now they are saying we should replace the ReadyNas 2001 raid. It's from 2014, so not an unreasonable suggestion.

They have proposed 3 different GDC Storage devices: Portable Storage PE 2TB, Portable Storage (SSD 4TB) and Enterprise Storage 4TB.

We're single screen, so don't need too much storage, but figure going to 4TB may be a good idea.

Anyone have any opinions, pro and con about these devices? Other options?
Thanks

I'm not a fan of the original PSD (portable storage). I've had 100% grief from them. It's the cable, it's the drives, it's the drive frame...I've changed them all and multiple times on the same system. Even GDC will tell you that getting good HDD drives is getting to be a challenge. That is why they brought out the SSD system (completely different PSD and different drives). I don't have any experience with the new PSD-SSD system yet. A nice feature though is you can ingest at full speed, even when the show is running.

I've been using the Enterprise Storage with my systems and it has been rock solid. It is a frame for up to five 3.5" drives. For a 4TB system, you'd get three 2TB drives in a RAID-5 configuration (two empty slots). Again, it has been rock-solid for me. The Enterprise Plus version includes a CRU drive bay.

What is giving me concern is sourcing Enterprise grade HDD in the 1TB and 2TB sizes is starting to get more difficult. This is particularly true of the 1TB size (legacy servers like the GDC SX-2001 and Dolby DSS200 or even Doremi DCP-2000). 2TB is easier but I'm sure it won't be long before they become difficult too. Since servers should go for 10-15 years (at least that is what the servers we put in between 2010 and 2013 have been doing), you should expect to change the drives a couple of times before the unit is retired. Then again, your server/projector has age on it so you may not need that much longevity.