quote: Mike Blakesley

---

I wish there was an online tutorial that would break this kind of thing down to where the average person could figure it out. I would just like to make some custom "slides" in DCP format that I could stick into appropriate places..."Welcome to the Roxy" with a picture of the Roxy on it for five seconds or something like that.

---

quote: Scott Norwood

---

Nice feature! Is there any chance of getting the source code to the latest version? The latest that I have found is 0.19.

---

quote: Dominic Espinosa

---

I was not aware openDCP did anything to colorspace actively.

---

quote: Scott Norwood

---

Send me a 1998x1080 (and/or 2048x858) image in some common image format and I'll make the DCP. If you just want a still image that fades in, stays on the screen for a few seconds, then fades out, and can have the logo itself already designed, it is trivial to make the DCP.

---

Thanks Scott, I will work on a couple of ideas.
 

---

Posted by Philip Jones (Member # 6677) on 03-16-2012, 04:01 PM:
 
Is there any simple program that will let you test a DCP to see what it will look like without actually putting it on the server and running the projector?
 

---

Posted by Jussi Siponen (Member # 5572) on 03-16-2012, 05:04 PM:
 
Hi Philip,

the cheapest DCP player software I've found so far is the DigitAll dcpPlayer.
 

---

Posted by Philip Jones (Member # 6677) on 03-16-2012, 05:18 PM:
 
Thanks Jussi. No free ones out there then? I suppose it is a bit of a niche market
 

---

Posted by Dominic Espinosa (Member # 2122) on 03-16-2012, 06:43 PM:
 
If it's not encrypted the newest versions of FFMPEG can be used to transcode MXF files down into an AVI, MPEG, etc.
Pay attention to the entry point and durations in the CPL as they can be different for both picture and sound.
I realize that's not QUITE what you were looking for but you can at least see if the content is there.
 

---

Posted by Doug Willming (Member # 728) on 03-17-2012, 01:20 PM:
 
Stereoscopic player from 3dtv is free - works great for playing back DCPs as long as your computer has enough "oomph".

http://www.3dtv.at/Downloads/Index_en.aspx
 

---

Posted by Philip Jones (Member # 6677) on 03-17-2012, 01:59 PM:
 
That's great, works perfectly. Thanks very much.
 

---

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 03-17-2012, 07:20 PM:
 
I think stereoscopic player (like FFMPEG) does not actually play DCPs/CPLs, but only the MXF parts of a DCP. That might be okay if you only want to test your own DCPs which usually have a 1:1 relation between media (MXF) play time and CPL (no offset in/out points). Most 'official' content like trailers have leaders, beeps, etc., which these simple players will not mask because they are not using the CPL.

The fraunhofer Easy DCP player is available as a free demo download. It will only play 15s or so, but at least it uses the CPL, so, it's another free tool for 'some' testing. The full version is expensive, around 1500€ I think.
It's available for Windows and Mac OS X.

http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/bf/bsy/produkte/easydcp/

The new VLC 2.0 is said to support J2k, and it WAS able to unwrap and play MXF content in earlier versions as well (e.g. MPEG-2 and audio MXF from unencrypted MPEG-Interop DCPs). However, I wasn't successful in trying to play ANY MXF content with the Mac version 2.0. I have yet to try the Windows version.

- Carsten
 

---

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 03-30-2012, 10:57 AM:
 
New free DCP creation software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux:

http://www.dcpbuilder.com/

I guess it's time to post an overview. There are probably 3-4 free software solutions now available, and about the same number in the commercial sub1000US$ range.

- Carsten
 

---

Posted by Tony Bandiera Jr (Member # 2365) on 03-30-2012, 12:44 PM:
 
This discussion is very interesting...I have a short film on Mini DV tape I would like to convert to DCP as well.

But I have one request please guys:

If you reference a program, can you include a link to a SAFE source to download said program (or the same site you downloaded from?) EDIT: LOL Carsten's post went up as I was typing this, so I will say thanks to him right here.

Google searches for some of those programs turns up a gazillion hits from sites I wouldn't feel comfortable downloading from.

Also, any info in regards to system requirements ( OS, Hard drive capacity, memory minimums, etc.) would be nice.

Some of us aren't as computer savvy as you guys.

Many thanks!!
 

---

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 03-31-2012, 08:06 AM:
 
Yes, it is true, the moment you google for something like DCP, you will get zillions of hits with obscure 'free DCP player converter' download options, offering basically everything imaginable - just not a DCP creator or player. The usual way of making you to download obscure software by jumping on any search topics.

Fortunately, the number of REAL software tools for DCP handling is very small, only half a dozend or so, and they are all only downloadable from their ' native' website afaik.

I have a linklist for them, might be able to post a small overview over the weekend.

- Carsten
 

---

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 03-31-2012, 08:46 AM:
 
Tony--the short answer is that you need to make a 24P version of that video (real 24P, not 23.98PsF). Depending upon how you do this, you will probably introduce weird motion artifacts if the original version was shot at 59.94i. Then, you need to extract a series of TIFF files of each frame (letterboxed or pillarboxed as needed to fill one of the two DCP resolutions) and 48K 24-bit WAV files for each sound channel.

That is the hard part.

Once you have this series-of-TIFFs and collection-of-WAVs at the correct frame rate and in sync, you can feed these to the DCP conversion software. On a modern-ish computer, figure on about one or two seconds per frame for the encoding process. Once you have the DCP, you can put the files in the root directory on a hard disk or flash drive (typically formatted as ext3, though fat32 works for shorts).

I have had success with OpenDCP, and have not tried any of the other encoding options. The good thing is that the only real cost here is time.
 

---

Posted by Antti Nayha (Member # 4980) on 03-31-2012, 09:49 AM:
 

quote: Scott Norwood

---

Once you have the DCP, you can put the files in the root directory on a hard disk or flash drive (typically formatted as ext3, though fat32 works for shorts).

---

quote: Antti Nayha

---

I just heard about a situation where a colleague’s Doremi refused to ingest a Linux-formatted (either ext2 or ext3) USB drive, apparently because it didn’t like the way the drive was partitioned and/or formatted.

---

quote: Scott Norwood

---

letterboxed or pillarboxed as needed to fill one of the two DCP resolutions

---

quote: Tony Bandiera Jr

---

Also, any info in regards to system requirements (OS, Hard drive capacity, memory minimums, etc.) would be nice.

---

OS: Mac or Windows, depending on your personal preference

HD capacity: that depends on how large projects you are going to handle. Plan for about 550GB per hour for the uncompressed TIFF images used as input - possibly multiple times depending what kind of processing steps you take (scaling, padding, etc.).

Memory: 2-4GB should be enough. The limiting factor is usually how fast you can push data to/from disk or your CPU (if your disks are fast enough)

If you are not in a hurry, almost any current hardware will do. I can't really recommend using a laptop - CPUs, memory and especially hard drives tend to be painfully slow. Also hard drive space is going to be tight, unless you have external drives.

My workstation has a 3 GHz Intel Core i7 950, 4 cores (8 logical processors) and 4GB RAM. Nothing to see here, moving along...

The storage setup is a *bit* more elaborate:

- System volume: 150GB RAID1 (2 x 150GB)
- Scratch volume: 5.5TB RAID0 (4 x 1.4TB)
- Data volume: 1.4TB RAID1 (2 x 1.4TB)

Now with RAID0 you can't *ever* store anything you can't afford to lose in there. It's essentially a glorified C:\TEMP (or /tmp) directory where I store the temporary TIFF files.

DCP encoding reads from the scratch volume and writes the compressed data to the data volume. This way the compression software - Fraunhofer easyDCP - is CPU bound (all 4 cores are +98% busy) rather than I/O bound.

With this rig, encoding takes roughly 2.5x the play time. Here's the log for a 40 second clip:


Package Generation started at: 22:12:14 (1.4.2012)
Package Generation successfully finished at: 22:13:53 (1.4.2012)
Number of samples processed: 1001
Target path:T:/BLAH
Project Type: 2k
JPEG2000 bitrate: 150MBits/sec
Framerate: ( 24 / 1 )
Number of processed Trackfiles: 2
Packing method: InterOp


I bought this computer back in January 2010, so I'd expect the current hardware available either is or will soon be capable of real time encoding.
 

---

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 04-01-2012, 07:54 PM:
 
This table of commercial and free DCP creation tools looks fairly complete:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package#DCP_creation_tools

- Carsten
 

---

Posted by Santi Parres (Member # 7092) on 08-03-2012, 11:37 AM:
 
Hi, mates.

I've been reading this interesting post and finally I could test my project on Stereoscopic (packed with Open DCP). I have downloaded the codecs, but when I watch my film, the voices sound like satanic voices and I can hear some light noises too. Any idea to resolve it? The video seems perfect.

Thank you in advance.
 

---

Posted by Santi Parres (Member # 7092) on 08-05-2012, 05:03 AM:
 
well, now I can answer myself: after exporting and processing again the wav files, it sounds perfectly (good bye, Evil). Maybe I had exported channels R and L as stereo, I can't remember how I did it.

A current "problem" with the video : when I test my 15 first seconds of DCP with dcpPlayer, the size is right, but testing with Stereoscopic, my film seems halfsized. Only when I apply double size, it appears as 1920 x 1080.
 

---