Cinema Application

CINEMA.JAR is an advanced digital cinema automation program that runs on the JNIOR to provide central control functionality for a theatre implementing a digital cinema system. The Cinema program can also be used for other audio-visual applications because of its ability to control both I/O on the JNIOR and to send commands to devices on the network.

The core JNIOR provides the capability to work with various digital cinema servers (Doremi, GDC, Christie, Dolby, Barco, Qube) to allow the JNIOR to act as GPIO (General Purpose IO) to control the lighting levels (low, medium, high), masking curtains (scope, flat), sound, doors and various other items.  The digital cinema server sends commands to the JNIOR to ‘pulse’ its relays to change the desired function.

When you add the Cinema.Jar application, it allows the JNIOR to become a central automation device capable of interacting with the digital cinema server, preshow systems, projectors, sound controllers, scalers and various other industry devices and systems.  The application integrates these devices and systems with the JNIOR via the Ethernet and/or serial ports. To see how to setup the serial connection for Cinema.Jar, click here.

Central to Cinema.jar is its ability to execute ‘macros’ on the JNIOR.  A macro consists of one or more ‘actions’.  An action can control a JNIOR relay or send a command to one of the external devices.  The external ‘devices’ and ‘macros’ are easily configured by using the JNIOR Support Tool.

Once the macros have been configured, the JNIOR is very flexible in providing a variety of methods to trigger a macro:

• The digital cinema server or other client can send the ‘run macro name’ command.
• A predefined ‘message’ can be sent by the client that will trigger a user-configurable macro name.
• The JNIOR digital inputs can be configured to ‘trigger’ a specific macro when the input goes “high” (transitions from “off” to “on”).
• A macro can be ‘scheduled’ to execute on boot-up of the JNIOR or at a specific time of day.
• A macro can be triggered based on a ‘logical expression’.
• The ‘switches’ on the JNIOR Control Panel can trigger a macro.