NPP Projection Report 2/22 Open

To do this evening/ was completed: Lots of notes about Manchurian Candidate below, sorry for adding the extra hassle with this but I do believe that had we been able to make a good DCP of the file I found it would have been well worth the trouble. Giving it one more try so we can show it in better quality tomorrow. This should be ready to ingest before closing tonight!

The TL;DR of this whole saga is essentially that I'd like to suggest, for future cases like this one in which there is no DCP and 35mm isn't an option, that we get a blu-ray and rip/convert that whenever possible. This is definitely the most reliable choice.

Presentation Issues: Same thing happened as last week where there was a lamp off cue in the pack at the top of the SE playlist for T4. Wyatt radioed me again that there was sound but no picture during the preshow. After turning the lamp on, then checking the playlist and seeing the lamp off cue, I looked at other SEs and there was a lamp off cue at the top of almost all of them. Not in any of the A1s, though. I checked the DCP_Flat_1:85_PS pack on Screenwriter and there was no lamp off cue in there, so this is a bit of a mystery. I removed the lamp off cue from all playlists which had it and saved/synced them.

Preshow Clips/Playlist:

Trailer Updates:

Special Events/ AV set up: Started ingesting the latest Manchurian DCP we made to T4 first thing this morning but for a few reasons, I quickly decided to go with the first DCP we made.

The first issue which sealed the deal right away was that I noticed the download of the file I shared Wednesday night failed when I checked the download history on Chrome, so an incomplete file was used to make the second and third DCPs. It was some kind of network error which caused the download to fail. It was a big file, but still should have downloaded without much issue. You can tell the file is incomplete because of the file extension ".crdownload." This appears on files that are currently downloading via Chrome, and if the download doesn't finish it remains attached to the file name so you will know it's incomplete/corrupt. The incomplete file was copied to the DCPIII drive and it looked complete on there (lacking the .crdownload extension) but this copy was indeed corrupt as well. I'm sure the file being incomplete is what caused the iMac to lag heavily when the second DCP was being made.

While it seems the file was mostly missing the end credits there's no way to guarantee there are no glitches/dropped frames elsewhere without watching the whole thing which there was no time to do today, of course.

Also, the fact that this latest DCP was 25fps and had a 2.0 stereo soundtrack made me nervous, seems this happened in the iMovie conversion. The file I sent had a 5.1 soundtrack and was 24fps.

Finally, after starting the ingest I noticed the latest DCP was 5 minutes shorter than the other two, surely owing to the change in framerate. If the framerate automatically chosen for a file by DCP-o-matic doesn't seem right (sped-up, slowed-down, out of sync audio) when you play it back before converting, chances are excellent there's an issue with the file which changing the framerate in DCP-o-matic won't fix. At this point, I just canceled the ingest of the latest DCP.

I know the original DCP was looked at again and deemed passable and while it certainly could be worse it's also not something I feel particularly good about showing for paying customers.

I downloaded the larger file I found again and am making a second attempt to convert it to DCP before tomorrow's show. Looking good so far, no issues. Should finish this evening. It's converting directly onto the DCPIII hard drive, named "ManchurianCand-2004_FTR..."

Last detail, the DCP I'm currently making is 1.85 so make sure you remove the 1.78 lens/masking change cues when you add this new one to the playlist for tomorrow.

Ordering/Receiving (posters & trailers):

Ordering/Receiving (content):

Outgoing/Shipping (content):

Print/video Inspection:

Asset tracking doc updated/checked?:

Maintenance/cleaning:

Cue sheets updated/checked (every shift):

Marquee updated?:

Posters updated?:

Cleaning lights on for the night?:

Projection cart by entrance?:

Additional Notes: