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Author Topic: Converting a Blu-ray (or DVD) to DCP Donnacha Kenny Film Handler Posts: 8 From: Oak Forest, IL, USA Registered: Jun 2011 posted 09-23-2014 07:51 PM                     Steve, I've appreciated your expertise over the last while whenever I've checked this site for assistance, so I know you'll understand my post was not designed to indicate that a 1080p Blu-ray was the equal to DCP just because it had comparable resolution, just to indicate that in the past I've been quite happy with the results. I happen to agree with your assessment of some older-flick DCPs. The Ghostbusters re-release, for example, is particularly galling; the current re-release scarcely looks better than the 2K version they released in 2011 (when they had the recurring Thursday shows in October), and even back then I was disappointed to see it bested by a Blu-ray of The Exorcist playing in the next auditorium.  |  IP: Logged Mark Strube Master Film Handler Posts: 322 From: Milwaukee, WI, United States Registered: Feb 2007 posted 10-10-2014 03:12 PM                        DCP-O-Matic question... are there any plans to implement any type of simple "matrix" audio feature? When I convert content that's 2.0 stereo, it would be nice to have the option to have a PLII-style matrixing feature so I'm not limited to only having audio come out of the L/R stage speakers. Unless I'm missing something?  |  IP: Logged Steve Matz Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 672 From: Billings, Montana, USA Registered: Sep 2003 posted 10-10-2014 03:44 PM                     Something I'm not following here because Digital is something I never Dealt with Theatrical Wise. You Theater Owners say you are converting Blu-Ray Discs to DCP for Showings in your theaters. I assume you purchased these Blu-Rays from a Retailier/Wholesaler like most consumers. Do you then have to pay a licensing Fee to the Film Studio/Distributor for these showings. I thought when you bought a VHS Tape,DVD,Blueray Disc that they were for Non-Commercial Use Only. Can someone Fill me in on this Process of who gets Paid for this type conversion...  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 10-10-2014 04:12 PM                     The studios do get their money. Honestly, sometimes the studios, for classics where they don't have a DCP available, tell the theatres to run a BluRay. They just want the money.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 10-10-2014 05:23 PM                        Nobody gets paid for doing the conversion. It's simply to make a BluRay easier to run (you can just add it to the playlist with everything else). To run it legally for an audience you still have to license it just like any other movie. (It's pure profit for the studios and their prices are ridiculous.)  |  IP: Logged Steve Matz Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 672 From: Billings, Montana, USA Registered: Sep 2003 posted 10-10-2014 09:01 PM                     LUCKY STUDIOS!....I knew there would be easy money involved here for them!  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 10-11-2014 05:20 PM                     quote: Mark Strube DCP-O-Matic question... are there any plans to implement any type of simple "matrix" audio feature? It's in the inofficial 2.x version, but still quite rudimentary. I've had excellent results with the Neo:6 implementation in our Datasat AP20 - but that works only realtime. There once was a 'free' Neo:6 coming with a range of creative soundblaster soundcards, which could be used for offline encoding. There are a lot of 'cheap' attempts to do this, but most of them sound rather unconvincing and produce strange artifacts. In most cases, a decent center generation is sufficient, though. If this is for your own cinema, you may find a way to activate matrix decoding on the first two DCI LPCM channels - some processors allow to do this. An alternative way is to split the AES/EBU signal of the first AES-pair to S/P-DIF and route it in parallel to a digital non-sync input of that same processor - these sometimes offer matrix or PLII decoding. Then you would have a separate preset/format for DCI+matrix. I heard that recent versions of Adobe Audition offer upmix options, but haven't looked into it yet. Other than that, software for good upmixing from stereo to 5.1/7.1 is quite expensive. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 11-22-2014 11:35 PM                     Alright...I'm giving a BD to DCP conversion another go with pedestrian equipment. I have an Lenovo Thinkpad W520 with an i7 quad-core and an old 1st gen iMac Intel Core 2 duo networked. I think I read somewhere that one should set the thread count to match the core count. However, on the Master (for this the Lenovo with the i7)...should I set the thread count to 6 (the total number of threads) or to 4? The iMac definitely is only processing 2-threads (says so in the terminal screen since that is what I set it to ask for). Can I set the thread count higher/lower on either to get a faster transfer rate? For this DCP...it is running at about 2.7fps. Can you change the thread count mid conversion? If you "cancel" make changes and start again...will it find where it left off and then start up from there or are you back to square one?  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 11-23-2014 02:31 PM                     As a matter of fact, some 'overthreading' will give slightly better performance. On a 4core i7 HT machine, choosing 12 to 16 threads will yield best performance. This will only work on 64Bit operating systems - 32Bit windows versions will usually crash with too many threads configured. No, you can't adjust the number of encoding threads during an encoding. However, you could kill a remote encode server any time during the transcode job and restart it with different settings. You can use an iMac as a remote encode server for a WIN machine, just make sure you run the same version of DCP-o-matic on both machines. There have been quite a few changes in the encoding pipeline recently and it is important that master and remote match. The remote encode server on the Mac does not yet have a nice GUI version, you have to launch terminal and start it with cd /Applications/DCP-o-matic.app/Contents/MacOS ./dcpomatic_server_cli The iMac is probably an i5 machine without HT, and DCP-o-matic will choose the best thread setting automatically, which is 4. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 11-23-2014 02:34 PM                     Yeah, the Win 7 machine is 64-bit. So when choosing the thread count on the host machine...do you select the TOTAL number of threads (local + remote) or just the local number of threads? I limited the number of threads on iMAC to 2 with the following line: cd /Applications/DCP-o-matic.app/Contents/MacOS ./dcpomatic_server_cli --threads 2 --verbose  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 11-23-2014 02:36 PM                     Only the number of local compute threads. The external machine will use it's own local setting. It's a 'one J2k frame per thread' distribution scheme. The master will try to keep all local and remote encoding threads busy with images for encoding. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 11-23-2014 02:40 PM                     What happens if you stop and restart? Will it pick up where it left off? Or are you back to square-1?  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 11-23-2014 02:45 PM                     The remote machine can be killed any time - the master will notice it missing - it will notice the frame it sent did not come back encoded (timeout) and will reissue it to another thread. You can add or kill remote machines any time during an encoding. The Master can be stopped as well. I keeps track of all encoded frames and will pick up where you stopped - unless you changed parameters around the image encoding, frame rate, etc. In that case, it will notice an essential change and create a new DCP with a new image file from scratch. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 11-23-2014 02:50 PM                     Thanks so much...this has been quite helpful.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 11-26-2014 08:41 PM                     On my second go around with the same equipment...making the changes you suggested...my speed went up by 22%, on average. Thanks again.  |  IP: Logged

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