Digital Policy Trailers

[Marcel Birgelen]

A Dolby trailer usually contains a lot of high-end 3D rendered content, including sound design you'll only be able to reproduce if you have a decent mixing setup. Still, recent developments in content production allow even middle-tier productions to look sleek and professional. If you train someone in the usage of stuff like Premiere and AfterFX, you can also easily let him/her adopt specific templates and turn them into relevant content for your purposes.

One of the more challenging aspects still seems to be getting this out as a decent, correctly formatted DCP.

[Jon Dent]

I know for ours I used Houdini Indie ($250 a year) for the graphics, Reaper for audio editing ($60), Waves LoAir for LFE content ($30), Davinci Resolve for compositing and 5.1/7.1 mixing (free), and DCP-o-Matic for DCP creation (free). I did the mixing in my home theater and checked it multiple times in our theater until it sounded right. Definitely not up to the same level as the Dolby bouncing balls we used to use, but the owners love it and the audience reaction has been good as well.

[Scott Norwood]

Filmack and Cinema Concepts still exist and are making DCP policies. Tim Reed does great work, too, and can do custom jobs, although his stuff is mostly oriented towards drive-ins.

[Mike Blakesley]

Filmack seriously needs to update their website... they have the same list of trailers they've had for decades and there's no mention or method of ordering in DCP format

If Cinema Concepts is still making policies, there's no evidence of it on their website either. I wrote to them years ago asking about some of their clips that I wanted to get in DCP format and never got an answer, and I think I asked about it here on F-T and somebody said they only do corporate work for large companies now. Their website seems to reflect this.

I'd love to get some new classy well-animated clips. The newest stuff I have is a bunch of freebies that were released by someone around the beginning of the digital era. I forget the name of the company, but they all have a copyright date of 2009 and are pretty cheesy compared to what's possible today. Is there anyone doing anything new?

Tim Reed assisted me with finding the correct music for a really old Previews of Coming Attractions clip from the '60s which we still use quite a bit.

[Frank Cox]

That's Cinetize. I downloaded all of their stuff when they had it available for free and use it here all the time.

It would be nice to get some more/newer stuff but it's not something that's worth paying money out (to me, anyway) but if someone else puts stuff out for free I'll probably start using that too.

[Mike Blakesley]

The only thing I don't like about the Cinetize ones is the sound is so wimpy on them. I have a small collection of other (old) ones that I've downloaded from Youtube and made DCPs of. It looks kind of cool with the film scratches and all, but the real thing would definitely look better.

I found a couple of 3-D graphics programs that are supposed to be "simple" on the web.... might be with a bit of investment to make some cool stuff and just put in music of my choice. But there's always that pesky "time" issue!