Theater asking for this format, how do I do this??

[Denialorcoped]

I am showing a short film at an art theater. They are asking for a DCP Dolby Format (*for D-cinema).

I don't really know what this means. I am editing cineform files in adobe premiere. Will I be able to deliver what they are asking for?

[Chris Adler]

None of the video editors master out to DCP (Digital Cinema Package). I recently completed a short and one of the deliverables we requested from the post house was to create a 2K DCP for us. Its a hard drive with the movie on it in a specific format. Its a universal standard and you can walk into any digital theater in the world, hand them your drive, and it plays perfectly.

I'm not aware of any free DCP workflows out there. There are some opensource attempts but last I saw they still required some utilities that cost money. If you need a DCP I'd contact the local post houses in your area and start to get quotes.

[Denialorcoped]

Thanks, it makes a lot more sense now.

They said if I can't deliver a DCP then they can still show a Bluray; Do you think I should just burn it to a bluray instead? Sounds much easier, but not sure how much worse the quality will be...

[Chris Adler]

The easiest route is to author a Blueray, but it won't look anywhere near as good as a DCP of the same material due to compression. If you have no budget for this I'd say just go with the Bluray.

[Denialorcoped]

Grrrr, I HATE the thought of projecting my movie knowing it's not the best quality; you put so much time and effort in, you kinda feel you deserve to have it the best quality it can be ya know?

I did some further research and came across some DCP plugins, like Quivis Wraptor: http://www.quvis.com/?Action=Products&SubAction=wraptor

It sells for $700 which aint bad. Only thing is it is for Final Cut and I am using Premiere. I suppose I can just bring the whole uncompressed avi into final cut and use the plugin from there...

[Michael Carter]

I suppose I can just bring the whole uncompressed avi into final cut and use the plugin from there...

You could also use streamclip to convert the AVI to ProRes & save a rendering step in FCP. Streamclip is pretty fast on a reasonably fast machine. (and it's free and a really useful swiss army knife sorta thing...)

[Postmaster]

A Digital Cinema Package (DCP) is a collection of digital files used to store and convey Digital cinema (DC) audio, image, and data streams.

There are 3 open source packages as far as I know:

http://code.google.com/p/opencinematools/

http://code.google.com/p/opendcp/

http://www.cinecert.com/asdcplib/



Hope that helps, Frank

[robotsound]

I believe OpenDCP is a successor to Open Cinema Tools, and uses the AS-DCP library.

Definitely start with OpenDCP if you're going the open source route. It's all command line though at the moment, although a GUI is planned for a future release. Personally I like the command line, but I'm probably in the minority here.

I've tested it on my local computer and it seems to work well. I haven't tried playing it back as I don't currently have access to a DCI projector setup, but there are reports online of it working for people.

[Postmaster]

Stupid thing is, the OP is already using Cineform - which is a wavelet/JPEG2000 based codec and exactly this is used in Digital Cinema. The DCP (Digital Cinema Package) is actually just a wrapper or container for the wavelet codec and some additional information and scripts.

So in a ideal world, any digital theater should be able to play Cineform files without any further recoding and quality degradation - but sadly they aren't, the hardware is there but the software does prohibit it.

Frank

[robotsound]

Stupid thing is, the OP is already using Cineform - which is a wavelet/JPEG2000 based codec and exactly this is used in Digital Cinema. The DCP (Digital Cinema Package) is actually just a wrapper or container for the wavelet codec and some additional information and scripts.

So in a ideal world, any digital theater should be able to play Cineform files without any further recoding and quality degradation - but sadly they aren't, the hardware is there but the software does prohibit it.

Frank

Good point. However, the DCP JPEG2000 data is in the XYZ color space with a gamma of 2.6 (not sure about what Cineform uses). This is speculation, but I doubt converting full quality JPEG2000 data from Cineform to the DCP JPEG2000 format would incur a visually noticeable loss in quality though.