Do theaters get a Hard Drive with the digital copy? Do they stream? Consider the thousands of theaters getting a movie that opens at the same time across the country, I want to know the logistics of getting that data to the theater.
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Most of the distbuters send the theator a physical copy of the movie in a Special hardrive enclosure called CRU Drive. The drive is formated in the EXT2 format and movie is saved as 10- bit jpeg 2000 files in ‘xyz’ color space and the sound track as a seperate wav file.
In my cultural center/ movie theater we get a digital key via mail and then use that key to upload the movie over the internet to our digital projector, which then checks the hardware key and only then you can choose the format you want to play the movie in.
Had a problem when the CPU of the projector had to be replaced and then the movie wouldn’t play because of the key being wrong.
Yes. They receive a hard drive, or some get it via satellite, several days prior to release. Then it’s connected with a “key”. A code that will only be valid and allow play for certain days & times.
But who adds the pornography clips to childrens films?
Didn’t work in the industry, but I run a little movie group and got a tour of the “projection booth.” The manager told us they do the hard drive version mentioned by others but that they came in two pieces. So the whole movie wasn’t all on one drive and that they were moving to the satellite method.
Also it wasn’t a booth. It was the whole upstairs, the projectors were huge like a refrigerator and they are all programed. No one attends them. So if there’s something wrong with your movie, don’t yell up to the booth. You have to go out to the lobby and tell someone.
It’s weird to me that I’m 37 and I might be part of the youngest people that used to build, splice, and break down movie prints.
Heh, I actually wanted to know that too. I was a projectionist in the 90s and every week we got a truckload full of big heavy film canisters that I had to put together before showing and taken apart again afterwards. Was a real pain to do and imagine hauling 20 of those suckers up and down 2 flights of stairs… I knew everything has long since gone digital but never really knew how.
The last movie I saw (pre-covid), we watched them go through the netflix menu and hit play. This was a Cineplex-Odeon, which is the big chain in Canada.
Things are all digital now. I worked at a theater when I was a freshman in college (’07) and an armed guard would drop off the film reals. I get it, but it was goofy considering he was dropping them off to a bunch of kids that spent their entire shift smoking weed all over the building.
Digital Cinema Packages are sent via physical hard drive or (more commonly nowadays) digitally transmitted via a secure tunnel over the ‘net. They don’t stream in general.
Once a complete DCP is received by the exhibitor it’s ingested into their central management system or directly into players. However, they can’t play it without a KDM – a cryptographic key that uses the serial number of the security manager to decrypt the DCP and make it playable.
Feel free to bug me with questions, literally been doing this since 2012.
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