Creating the Digital Cinema Package (DCP)

Greg Popp, a frequent contributor on LGG, saw one of my posts and reached out with his phone number so I could call him to discuss the process he had just completed, using the same Adobe products. He provided great personal insight into creating DCPs for festivals, and his help was instrumental to my success in the endeavor. It's not at all straightforward, but it is logical. Basically, it involves installing a plug-in called J2K from fnord that allows After Effects to read/write JPEG2000 files, which are the required image frame format in DCPs. Once installed, from After Effects, you import your DCP Master sequence from Premiere, reinterpret the footage as 24 fps (assuming your Premiere timeline is 23.976 fps) and Rec 709, and export it as a JPEG2000 file sequence. The tricky part is the color management that has to take place. Although there are methods to do the color space conversion (from Rec 709 to DCI XYZ) outside of After Effects, I found that using After Effects color management features was the most robust. This involves setting the color space in After Effects to DCDM X'Y'Z' (Gamma 2.6) 5900K (by Adobe), which upon import, would force a conversion of the Rec 709 footage into the proper DCI XYZ color space, making it look a little pinkish. That's OK, since this is the color space standard digital theater systems expect, and which will correctly convert to the right colors again during projection.

After exporting your JPEG2000 picture files, you must do the same for your audio. DCPs require a separate mono WAV file for each channel to be played, in my case six: L, R, C, LFE, Ls, Rs. In Audition, it is a simple matter once you mix down your 5.1 mix to a single 6 channel file in the Waveform Editor to extract those channels into separate files. Audition has a menu option to do just that, and adds an _L, _R, etc., to the end of each file name for you, indicating the proper channels. Put your 6 audio files and your thousands of JPEG2000 files in a directory and create the DCP. For this task, I used an open source program called OpenDCP to package the picture and audio files in a DCI standard format and to create the requisite XML files to accompany them. OpenDCP has the capability to both convert TIFF files into JPEG2000 format and convert the color from Rec 709 to DCI XYZ, but I believe After Effects is not only faster, but more accurate. Some people on the forums would agree, others would not. It worked perfectly for me. Fnord also has a plug-in that will do the color conversion in both directions, and works both in After Effects and Premiere. Its color conversion varies only slightly from the After Effects approach, but it is different, which I found to be slightly darker.

In OpenDCP, I required use of only the packaging components of the program, since I had done everything else in After Effects. First I packaged the JPEG2000 into a picture MXF file, and then packaged the six WAV files into a sound MXF file. Next I created a properly configured title for the DCP (which is encoded with a lot of information about the film in a standard formatted string of characters) using its handy title generator and, following that, OpenDCP creates a DCI compliant DCP, consisting of six files: 2 MXF files, and 4 XML files that contain information about the DCP, consistency checksums, info on how it should be played, etc. These six files are then copied to my DCP drive ready for delivery to theaters. OpenDCP can also handle subtitles, if your film requires them.

DCPs are Linux formatted hard drives installed in a standard carrier that slides into standard HW in theaters worldwide. Did I mention these were standard? In fact, the maker of the standard carriers (the DX115) and receivers, CRU, now provides pre-configured DCP kits consisting of carriers, with or without preformatted drives installed, and Pelican cases, for prices much better than you could build yourself. These drives are not something you can do natively on either a Mac or a PC; it requires Linux. Also, YouTube has already figured all this out for us, and good tutorials exist, especially one from Cine Tech Geek. Similar to what James describes in his video on Cine Tech Geek, I use a bootable ISO of Ubuntu Linux on a USB stick to boot my HP, after which I can mount, partition, format (correctly), and copy my DCP files over directly from my Windows NTFS-formatted internal drives to the CRU drive, ready for delivery to festivals. There are ways using third party applications to do this on the PC and Mac, but your mileage may vary. Linux is by far the safest way. I've tested 6 different DCPs, 6 times in 3 different theaters and none have had issues ingesting or playing.

Festivals recommend that you test your DCP before submitting, or have it done professionally. You really should test it in a theater if at all possible. At a minimum, test 15 seconds at a time of it with the free downloadable demo version of easyDCP Player from Fraunhofer. In this demo version, you can even do color management and covert the DCP back to Rec 709 so that it appears as you designed it on your computer monitor. You can therefore test not only your color, but also your sound in full surround with this demo.

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