misc Need to create DCP for film festival

[sir_piven]

I have made a few low-budget films, but I am new to the festival game. It seems that most big festivals require DCPs, and while I will not be making the DCP myself, I am just wondering if there is anything I need to know in advance while shooting and editing. I would hate to find someone to create my DCP and have them tell me that I should have done this or that in regard to editing workflow, exporting, etc.

Thanks!

 

[Scoopicman]

A DCP can be made from a file of your movie, or you can export from the timeline. I use Adobe Media Encoder and Davinci Resolve's Kakadu. The first one makes much smaller files than the other.

I had a basic stereo MP4 file of my movie, which Adobe Media Encoder used. I edit on Davinci, so I just exported my movie, right from the timeline, to Kakadu DCP. I output to 2K DCI Flat. Most of the theaters around me use 2K projectors.

The one issue I ran into was with a particular theater was that they were using Linux formatted drives to put the file onto. What a pain. Another filmmaker buddy downloaded a program that could take files and put them on a Linux formatted drive. Your DCP file remains the same, it was just the drive that you are putting it on. See if you can find out whether they are using standard Mac/Windows format or Linux.

Once you've made your DCP file, you can't play it back, unless you have a DCP software player. I did not bother with this. I was able to open it (but not realtime play) with VLC media player. You can move the cursor to any part of the video to check and see that your images are there. The DCP file package will have the audio file, which you can also check.


Pretty good video here. She goes through the settings for both platforms.

 

[sir_piven]

A DCP can be made from a file of your movie, or you can export from the timeline. I use Adobe Media Encoder and Davinci Resolve's Kakadu. The first one makes much smaller files than the other.

I had a basic stereo MP4 file of my movie, which Adobe Media Encoder used. I edit on Davinci, so I just exported my movie, right from the timeline, to Kakadu DCP. I output to 2K DCI Flat. Most of the theaters around me use 2K projectors.

The one issue I ran into was with a particular theater was that they were using Linux formatted drives to put the file onto. What a pain. Another filmmaker buddy downloaded a program that could take files and put them on a Linux formatted drive. Your DCP file remains the same, it was just the drive that you are putting it on. See if you can find out whether they are using standard Mac/Windows format or Linux.

Once you've made your DCP file, you can't play it back, unless you have a DCP software player. I did not bother with this. I was able to open it (but not realtime play) with VLC media player. You can move the cursor to any part of the video to check and see that your images are there. The DCP file package will have the audio file, which you can also check.


Pretty good video here. She goes through the settings for both platforms.

Thank you very much!