Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Multiple CPL DCP package authoring

This is topic Multiple CPL DCP package authoring in forum Digital Cinema Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Frank Anderson IV (Member # 8929) on 06-29-2015, 11:02 AM:

Thank you for the registration approval on the forums. Long time reader, first time poster.

I work for a company that handles preshow DCP delivery to movie theaters.

We have recently come across a situation which requires us to build one long preshow DCP out of many single CPLs. I have been experimenting with a few software packages that edit/author DCP packages to no avail.

From what I understand, it should be a simple matter of adding all of the CPL information to the assetmap, however, the assetmap cannot be edited manually, because there is a hash included inside of the assetmap.

Does anyone know how to generate this hash if I manually adjust the assetmap to include all of the CPLs? Does anyone know if there is software available (free or paid) that will allow me to do this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 06-29-2015, 04:48 PM:

Try DCP-o-matic V2 with the 'add folder' and timeline view option.

- Carsten

Posted by Carl Hetherington (Member # 7107) on 06-30-2015, 03:39 AM:

It sounds like what you want to do is make a new CPL which lists the content of all your existing CPLs, then make up a PKL and AssetMap with all the required bits.

DCP-o-matic version 2 won't quite do that, but it will (should!) be able to import all your DCPs and then create a new one with them all joined together. They'll all be in one MXF but it won't transcode the JPEG2000 files so they should look the same and it should be fairly quick to do.

This isn't as good as the "proper" method of listing the existing assets in a new CPL. That capability is probably not imminent in DCP-o-matic unless it were written on a consultancy basis. Get in touch if you want to talk about that.

Alternatively your requirements could well be met by Dietrich if you want to investigate that.

Posted by Jay Wyatt (Member # 8768) on 07-27-2015, 01:47 PM:

If I were in your situation I would hand edit the PKL and asset map to reference the different CPLs.

If your on mac or linux(dont know about windows) this command with generate the new hash if you modify anything: openssl sha1 -binary "FILE_NAME" | openssl base64

In my experience only the PKL stores the hash (it also stores the file size so do an ls or ll command to get that).

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 07-28-2015, 08:27 AM:

If I understand Frank right, it is not just a matter of packaging multiple CPLs in one DCP in assetmap,PKL, etc, but also to create a new CPL containing all the MXFs/reels of the existing CPLs in a sequence. That still can be done by hand, but it's getting quite complicated to get everything right that way.

- Carsten

Posted by Jay Wyatt (Member # 8768) on 07-29-2015, 12:04 PM:

If he can get opencinematools to compile on his machine, the command line tools mkpkl, mkcpl, and mkmap could re-wrap to his liking. Getting the tools to compile on a Mac or Linux machine can be quite difficult at times though.

Posted by Polona Van Langen (Member # 8322) on 08-04-2015, 05:33 AM:

You can do that easily with Fraunhofer software, just drag all of the DCPs into the interface and assemble in the order as you would like it.
Alternatively you could use Open DCP cli to make a multireel DCP from the existing mxf parts of the DCPs.

In both cases you will get problems if the original DCPs are having different fps (25/24fps) and different standards (Interop/SMPTE). If they are not the same you need to unwrapt the mxfs and then make completely new compilation.