ISDCF is planning another Plugfest in June. This will carry on in the manner of the last Plugfest, but with a few additional tests. ISDCF will be studying the performance on various products of on and off-screen subtitle rendering, in particular checking to see if content synchronization problems with SMPTE standardized subtitles have been resolved. 3D on-screen subtitles will also be viewed, as SMPTE gets closer to finalizing the standard for this. For the first time, ISDCF will be studying the presence of and the product response to marker flags in the Composition Playlist (CPL). However, it is limiting its study to only the FFMC flag, which is described in SMPTE 429-7 as: “First displayable frame of content that contains any intensity of moving, rolling or scrolling credits, which appear at the end of the feature.”
High frame rate (HFR) issues will continue to be evaluated, as the HFR trailer for the Hobbit release this December could be released as early as this summer. The performance of projection systems with show playlists of content having mixed frame rates will be studied, and last but not least, the performance of audio routing will be studied. Notably, ISDCF is only testing audio routing performance to the older SMPTE 429-2 standard, and not the version of SMPTE 429-2 implementing individual audio channel labels that passed ballot in 2012.
ISDCF spends an inordinate amount of time discussing the informative text string entered into the ContentTitleText element of the Composition Playlist (CPL) known as the Digital Cinema Naming Convention. Trailers in the US are rated either Red Band or Green Band, Red Band indicating the trailer is for mature audiences. Apparently it has been difficult for some US operators to identify which trailers are not to be shown with family movies, so a revised version of the Naming Convention has been the hot topic of recent meetings. The proposed new version is at: