Hard Drive Format for DCP Delivery?

[EncoreMedia]

What Hard Drive format (i.e: NTFS , ext2, ext.3, ext4, etc) is the most widely accepted for DCP delivery? We had one location tell use that ext2 was the "industry standard" but have recently been told by a major Theatre Company that NTFS was preferred... The issue we are running into is using ext2 on Ubuntu Linux, the data copy rate is excruciatingly slow and painful. Any suggestions or ideas why copy times are so slow? Do we need to purchase special drivers for Ubuntu to speed up copy times via USB or Firewire?
-Scott

[carl]

Hi Scott,

My understanding is that ext2 is the only format that is guaranteed to work, and indeed it seems to be the format that the Big Distributors use.

What data rate are you seeing when writing ext2? It is pretty much Ubuntu's native format so there is certainly no need to purchase any drivers.

[EncoreMedia]

Less than 1MB per second, actually much less (<30Kb at some point) when trying with Firewire800 and USB2. I know part of the bottleneck is the massive amount of small files (135K+) for a 90 minute movie. Slow on a PC as well. The method that worked the fastest for us was to compress the DCP-o-Matic folder to .tar format directly to the drive (in Ubuntu) that we were shipping to the theater and then uncompressing directly back to that same drive then deleting the compressed file. We did two version of HD Deliverables - one formatted ext2 and one formatted NTFS for two different Theaters - one of the theaters requested a NTFS formatted drive and it went faster in transfer time on the PC, (not using compression method), but still took about 8-9 hours! Total data was around 130GB On a side note, what partition format do you recommend? we chose MBR for this one... choices were MBR, GUID, Apple or None... with "None", the Paragon ExtFS for Windows would not mount the drive...

Thanks Carl -
Scott

[carl]

I know part of the bottleneck is the massive amount of small files (135K+)

It sounds like you are copying the whole "film" directory that DCP-o-matic creates. That does indeed have a lot of small files. However, the only bit that the theatre needs is the actual DCP. See:

http://dcpomatic.com/manual/html/ch11.html

for an explanation. There should only be one directory containing 4 XML files and 2 MXF files. If you just copy that your transfer speeds should be much higher.

On a side note, what partition format do you recommend?

At the moment I would go for MBR, though I have no solid justification for saying so.

[carl]

Carsten posted this, but I accidentally deleted in when moderating it!

Thanks Carsten!

Carl - a lot of DCI servers run outdated kernels, or OS's in general, for reliability reasons. Some even still run XP. Doremis e.g. still run kernel 2.6.18 to my knowledge. Most of these older kernels do not support GUID/GPT.

ext2/3, followed by NTFS is supported by most servers.

ext2/3 should have inode size 128 (non-standard nowadays, most partitioning tools default to 256), for the sake of older kernels and those servers with ext2 drivers operating under windows. ext3 is ext2 with journaling, which is of little use for distribution drives.

NTFS is supported by Doremi, Dolby DSS200,GDC and Sony. Some earlier software versions still around, however, will lack support.
For the sake of trailers on optical media, UDF is also supported on some machines.

ext2/ext3 with inode size 128 on MBR is the best choice. In a controlled distribution environment, NTFS may be an option if the DCPs are created on windows systems.

- Carsten

[edzus1987]

normally the format is ext3. If you dont have linux to preformat drive or just dont want to do it yourself, you can find dcp different submition standarts here: http://www.span.com/feature/DCP__kits_l ... _pack~1293

[smorgasbord]

I've got my DCP built and now am trying to figure out how to deliver.

The ISDCF compliant named folder and its contents is only 46GB. Can I actually deliver it on a USB Stick?

I'm on a Mac running 10.9, so I believe my best option is to format it as NTFS, including a MBR (Master Boot Record).

Is this all OK? My movie is 64 minutes long, 2K flat, 30fps, with 2 channels of plain 'ole stereo sound.

If a USB stick isn't universally acceptable, what is the cheapest way to go?

[carl]

USB stick ought to be fine. The file system is more important than the medium. NTFS is acceptable to a lot of systems these days. Your best approach probably depends a bit on the sort of distribution you are doing: is it to a few cinemas where you have time to check whether each has managed to ingest the DCP OK? Or is it to a lot where you need it to work and you haven't the time to fix each one?

[smorgasbord]

It's a few theaters that are out of town, so I need it to work. I probably get two tries before the deadline, though.

I'm assuming that means using the ext3 filesystem on the USB stick. I could use this software (https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/) on my Mac for formatting the USB drive.

Or, do you think I need to go a hard disk route? That's a lot more money...

[carl]

I haven't personally tried that EXT software but, assuming it works, it would be your safest bet.

If it's only a few theaters you could try to find out what systems they use and we could then check whether NTFS would be ok.

Hard disk or USB really makes no difference (apart from the fact that you may be more likely to get hard drives returned than USB sticks