Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Windows 8.1 and DCP-o-Matic

This is topic Windows 8.1 and DCP-o-Matic in forum Digital Cinema Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 06-30-2014, 12:52 PM:

Knowing that sooner or later, I'd have to learn to stop worrying and love Windows 8, etc. etc., I've installed it on a spare partition at home and have been playing around with it.

One discovery: DCP-o-Matic appears to render about 20% faster than under 7 and Ubuntu (14.04, 64-bit), and does not lock up the computer while it's doing it, either. Under 7, I basically had to leave the computer and go do something else while it was rendering, because other programs were so slow to respond that the thing was virtually unusable. Not so with Windows 8 - it's rendering a short for a show on Thursday as I'm writing now, with Firefox, Outlook and Excel being responsive and normal all the while.

So it seems that Microsoft has actually made a useful improvement in W8, in co-ordinating the processor capacity usage of different applications more effectively. It's just a pity that they had to break the front end in the process!

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 06-30-2014, 01:39 PM:

I haven't installed the free upgrade from Win 8.0 to 8.1 on my office desktop PC yet. Kind of scared to do so. I have some concerns about it and compatibility with Dell's system backup software. All my other applications are listed as having passed Microsoft's Win 8.1 compatibility check.

FYI, in case anyone uses Adobe Creative Cloud, the latest version of Premiere Pro added more export options, including Wraptor DCP 3.1 from Quvis. I haven't had a chance to test how well it performs, but it is kind of nice to have a straight-forward export to DCP option within Premiere rather than having to take extra steps outside the application.

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 06-30-2014, 06:56 PM:

quote: Leo Enticknap
One discovery: DCP-o-Matic appears to render about 20% faster than under 7 and Ubuntu (14.04, 64-bit)

Same version of DCP-o-matic? Carl did a few improvements to rendering in recent versions. Also, in a new install the number of encoding threads set may be different now. That can have quite an impact on foreground vs. background performance.

- Carsten

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 07-31-2014, 05:54 PM:

On this topic with DCP-o-MATIC:

I have been commissioned to create a DCP from an Apple iPhoto slide show with sound for use in our systems here at work.

Is this possible, or does this iPhoto file needs to be converted to AVI for easier conversion?

thx -Monte

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 07-31-2014, 06:52 PM:

It's probably not the ultimate workflow, but it works ok. Recent versions of iPhoto will allow you to export a slide show to a quicktime movie with useful export settings for resolution, frame rate, etc., and iPhoto renders crossfades, etc. smoothly, a lot better than e.g. PowerPoint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt7isu_JzXE

Then just throw this quicktime movie into DCP-o-matic.

If you don't need transitions, etc., then just throw the individual image files into DCP-o-matic, arrange into desired sequence, add the audio track, and render to a DCP. Photos will usually not have a typical cinema aspect ratio, you may need to zoom or crop them if you want to fill a full flat screen, but that is possible in iPhoto as well as DCP-o-matic.

- Carsten

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 08-04-2014, 09:28 PM:

This is a great program to use! "Thx for all of this!"

Have to ask: Finding out that new computers loaded with Win8 and 8.1 can process the information a bit faster than XP. Is there a trick in speeding up this processing time, or is this something that is a standard with this program and have to live with it?

With the massive length to process a file, it's still worth having a program like this when personal content needs to be converted in a short amount of time.

Thx again -Monte

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 08-05-2014, 05:13 AM:

The j2k compression is rather slow currently, basically with all free DCP converters. They use a common library which is not optimized for speed. For slide-show type content, the speed should be acceptable, though.

You can play with the number of encoding threads in Preferences-General, but usually DCP-o-matic will choose a near optimum setting anyway. You may still try to double it, depending on your computers CPU. But don't expect a tenfold boost or something.

If you do conversion often and if there is a network of computers in your cinema, you can use them as render clients for the main program. It is not too complicated to set up.

One major issue with the iPhoto workflow is: iPhoto will render out a quicktime movie at 24,25-30fps. Technically, this is not a slide show anymore, but a movie file. DCP-o-matic then has to compress every individual frame of this movie. This takes time. If you assemble the slides within DCP-o-matic, that is, add the images to DCP-o-matic one after another, DCP-o-matic will only convert the images ONCE, and then simply copy that frame for as long as it is set to be displayed. This works considerably faster than on a Quicktime movie. However, you can not use any effects, transitions, etc. as in iPhoto.

E.g. if you have a slide show converted from iPhoto with a picture that is simply displayed for 10s, DCP-o-matic needs to convert 10*24frames. If you load the same image into DCP-o-matic directly and set it to a duration of 10s, it only needs to convert 1 image and copy it 239 times. Goes in a fraction of the time needed for the Quicktime version.
The add content/timeline function of DCP-o-matic allows you to assemble multiple single images in a sequence, all with their own display time. Just that you can't have any transitions, fade to black,etc. Just hard cuts. You could, of course, at least use black images as separators.

And then of course, if you still go through iPhoto, create the Quicktime movie at 24fps, not 25 or 30fps. Picture resolution and colour depth is not relevant for encoding speed, you should always use best quality.

One important thing - due to a license issue with one of the libraries that DCP-o-matic uses, it can not load MP3 files directly as an underlying music track for slide shows or videos. You would have to convert this MP3 file to WAV, AIFF, etc. beforehand. No big deal with free tools (e.g. Audacity or iTunes).

- Carsten

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 08-05-2014, 06:37 PM:

Thx for the info and help.

The client, whom requested this commission, sent a thumbdrive with the iPhoto content already converted to a Quicktime file.

File was rendered at 30fps and is almost 800Mb in size.

Doing the conversion now on a laptop with 4G of Ram. Thus, it's processing 1.3FPS and will take rest of the evening to complete.

-Monte

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 08-06-2014, 03:06 AM:

In that case, you have no choice.

- Carsten