Creating a DCP file

For my theatrical release I need to have my movie converted into a DCP.  Remember the ticker and flicker of film projectors?  Well those days are gone and now with digital projection, theaters have super fancy computerized machines that take encryptable, specially formatted files called Digital Cinema Package or DCP.

You can pay to have someone do this for you.  That can run you $1,500 to $3,000 for a feature.  Or if you're a micro budget filmmaker like me, you can now do it yourself!  But be warned this is a complex, time consuming, hair-pulling thing to do on your own.

I used Open DCP, free software you can find here.  And I used the wonderful, extremely helpful walk-through from another filmmaker Danny Lacey here. 

Let me start by telling you that it took me Terabytes of footage, days that ran into nights of computers crunching files and weeks to finally get through all this.  I needed to create 3 DCP files in 2k (you can do either 2k or 4k.)  I needed one file of my movie trailer in 1:85, one of my trailer in 2:35 and one of my whole movie in it's native aspect ratio 1:85.  The trailers were a great way to test out my work flow and make sure everything worked before doing the whole movie.

There's no way for you to play the file once you've made it.  You have to take it to a movie theater and have them load it into their giant, fancy projector and play it for you.  Luckily the Fine Arts Theater, one of our art house movie theaters in town, has the most awesome staff that are really supportive of independent filmmakers and they let me test out my DCPs on their super duper projector.

Briefly, the process goes something like this: first you have to export your movie as a TIFF sequence (this took up 1 Terabyte of space and took a full day to export!) then you export WAV files for the audio, then you run it through the Open DCP software and finally you put it on your drive.

You're supposed to put them on a hard drive formatted for Linux, but I didn't go that far.  I used a flash drive (formatted FAT32 which works with both mac and PC, but you can't transfer a file larger than 4 gigs) for the trailers because they were small enough to fit and that loaded fine.  Then for my movie I used a hard drive formatted for a mac and that also worked.  I've read it might be possible to get NTFS to work, but if you can't go in person to test out the transfer I would recommend going with the standard delivery format in Linux.  Here's a great link to more info on how you should deliver a DCP.