You knew there would be a “but”…
We still hear from theater operators who insist they must have the pieces and parts. They want us to ship them our “masters” instead. As you’ve probably deduced if you’ve read this far — that’s not the way it works.
It is our policy that we do NOT ship dome masters to customer sites — only movies.
For most of our users, it’s not an issue. Many tell us they don’t want to have to assemble movies from dome masters. They say they don’t have the time, the computer resources, the software — nor in some cases, the talents and abilities necessary. They just want to hit the “Play” button. We’re on their side, actually. We think it should be that easy too!
For every fulldome system that can play a single-channel movie, we can provide it in a usable form — MPG and MOV are most prevalent, very rarely WMV — sized from 768px up to 4096px. We confer with amenable hardware vendors to ensure we make our movies compatible with the viewer software they ship with their systems. The rendering of each different movie format can take many hours — sometimes days. And unfortunately for us, the fact that there simply *are* so many formats makes our jobs much harder than they need to be.
If only we could make just one movie that everyone could play… but no. There are literally dozens of different makes/models of fulldome projector systems we support, and nearly all of them have some particular quirk that makes the rendering unique — not just frame size, but file format, encoding, bitrate, audio sampling rate, and other details.
It’s no surprise that others looking to distribute fulldome shows simply can’t or don’t even try to support all these different formats. They send out their dome masters and audio to the customer, assuming someone, somehow, will be able to figure out how to put it all together correctly, but never knowing for sure. This is particularly true with many “free” shows.
As anyone who’s tried it can attest, putting together a fulldome movie from frames is not for the fainthearted. There are many, many things that can go wrong, and even the most knowledgeable person will bump into them. Here at LNP, with our years of experience doing this, we’re dismayed by how often we run into some “gotcha” ourselves, and we like to think we know what we’re doing!
As just one example: out of the tens of thousands of frames in a typical show, a single corrupted bit in one frame can cause an entire encode to fail, and you have to start all over again. Of course, this usually happens near the end of the encode, thus wasting the most time and providing the maximum annoyance. The process requires way more patience and time than some people can devote!
Again, for most of our customers, the ready-to-play fisheye movies we ship are what they want. They’re not the ones asking for our dome masters — it’s the larger theaters with the edge-blended, multi-channel fulldome systems.
Page 1 – Masters of the Dome Masters
Page 2 – But…
Page 3 – The Reasons for Not Shipping Frames
Page 4 – It’s the hardware
Page 5 – A Sense of Entitlement
Page 6 – Don’t panic!
Subscribe to our blog!