Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: creating 1 DCP from multiple dcp

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Posted by Kris Verhanneman (Member # 5562) on 07-01-2011, 03:54 AM:

Hello,

does somebody know how to creat a singel DCP from multiple DCP's?

I would like to creat a singel dcp for my complet advertisement block.

Thanks in advance for all the help / advice.
Kris

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 07-01-2011, 04:06 AM:

I don't know wether any available tool can concatenate existing MXF files.
With the appropriate tool, also compiling a multi-reel CPL from existing single-reel CPLs should ne easy.

For now, I would unwrap all the content to single images and wav files, concatenate/rename them into a single sequence, then recompile to a new DCP.

Possible problem - the raw data of existing trailers from official sources often contains more material than the CPL plays - audio test tones, leftovers, etc, Concatenating the source media will make them visible and audible, if not skipped by the new CPL.

The guys working on the open source software packages should be able to compile existing CPLs into a multi-reel CPL without too much effort. Maybe automatically adding a standard clip divider (1s black, no audio) in between.

As far as I know, they are all working on multi-reel support anyway.

- Carsten

Posted by Terrence Meiczinger (Member # 5059) on 07-01-2011, 08:05 AM:

If you are comfortable with a command line tool, OpenDCP will create multi-reel DCPs. You'd need to look at each individual CPL and get all of the MXF file picture/sound filename pairings. You could then pass each pairing as a separate reel into OpenDCP and it will create one multi-reel DCP.

As Carsten points out you may get some ancillary video or audio because there are starting offset and duration values for each media piece.

Posted by Dominic Espinosa (Member # 2122) on 07-11-2011, 02:54 AM:

Read through each CPL and log down the entry point and duration entries for each MXF file as well as the files location.
If there are a lot, this is a good time to use PERL and XML::Simple.

Then run any of the open-source DCP tools to create a new CPL and PKL files.

If this is a one-off kind of thing you could probably get away with copying/pasting the contents of the ReelList from each CPL into one CPL and then create a new PKL.
The CPL doesn't have a hash of itself and the hashes of the essence files wont be changing.
In this way you surely would preserve the EntryPoint and Duration information which is important.
Theoretically it should work...

Posted by John Gavin (Member # 5949) on 08-02-2011, 01:50 AM:

Basically a new Packing list, Assetmap and CPL would have to be made. Since it is for advertising, non encrypted, you could try download a demo version of CineAsset as I think that can do it. The demo version is limited to 30s content duration, but you could at
least see if it has the functionality.

CineAsset

The way i understand it would work is you import the MXF video
and audio into the CineAsset database, then create a new CPL
containing all the MXF files in the sequence you want them in.

I will try to confirm 100% that CineAsset can do this and post
here later.