Aaron Owen
Forum Replies Created
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My understanding is that Deluxe Technicolor ships Hollywood movies to theaters worldwide on drives formatted to the ISDCF standard as Deluxe was the creator of the so-called standard based on many rounds of trial and error. I may be wrong about this, (especially in regards to Australia) but if a theater ingests from a Deluxe drive, it’s probably formatted that way.
Cinema Mastering & DCP Authoring
cinematiq.com | dcp-transfer.com -
USB 3 thumb drives are a great way to go. Just make sure you put a tag on them with the relevant information (film title, encryption status, running time, credits offset, frame rate, etc) as theaters have lots of drives and they can easily get mis-placed.
As for the actual drive format, NTFS will work if you ::know:: that the drive will end up at a multiplex with a library management system (LMS) or another sort of theater management system (TMS). The problem with this approach is that this isn’t a universally recognized format. If your DCP drive ends up being plugged into a rented projector/server combo at a film festival, or is sent to a single screen theater where it’s plugged directly into the playback server for ingest, it won’t work.
Every time I’ve seen issues with a drive that is formatted ext2 or ext3, it’s been because of the inode size. DCP Transfer checks the all the parameters of the drive format against the ISDCF specs to ensure universal compatibility.
Cinema Mastering & DCP Authoring
cinematiq.com | dcp-transfer.com -
Use Telestream’s Switch player. Using FFMPEG is only going to make your life difficult unless you really know your way around it.
Cinema Mastering & DCP Authoring
cinematiq.com | dcp-transfer.com -
You could allow your 1:78 film to exist at it’s original resolution inside the 1998×1080 flat container. This would result in a slight pillar box on either side, which is not going to be noticeable in the theater unless their masking is spot on. My experience is that in most theaters, you won’t be able to tell the difference between 1:78 and 1:85 since the difference is so slight once projected.
Viewing a projected image is much more forgiving than viewing on a screen with a built-in edge.
Cinema Mastering & DCP Authoring
cinematiq.com | dcp-transfer.com -
I highly recommend Switch Player from Telestream. It’s $10 and is a very solid player with a lot of pretty cool features. The more expensive version lets you open up two different files and play them “butterfly’d” so you can compare the differences. It’s a great tool
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Short answer to your last question: maybe.
What NLE are you using? If you’re in Premiere and you’re editing in a 23.976 timeline, Premiere is already doing the conversions on the fly during playback, and when you output. Your final export will be a QuickTime or MP4 file that only has a single frame rate (the timeline’s).
If you’re looking towards DCP output, there’s a couple of things to consider:
1. DCPs usually play at 24fps (true 24, not 23.976) since they were designed for movies, but the newer SMPTE DCP spec allows for 30fps content.
2. How much of your film is at 29.97? If the bulk of the footage is 23.976, then keep it there.
If your budget allows, you could run the 29.97 footage through the Teranex and then overcut the new footage back into place, but that’s a real headache. If you don’t mind what Premiere is doing in terms of the frame rate conversion, it’s probably ok to just output and send the file to a DCP authoring house like Cinematiq.
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So you’ve got a DCP that you are ready to send out… That’s only half the battle. If you want the DCP to be read on any digital cinema playback system in the world, there’s still some work to do.
You’ve got to put it onto a Linux formatted drive according to theISDCF spec (master boot record, ext2 or ext3 filesystem, inode size at 128) and ensure that the package was transferred onto the drive without getting any read or write errors that would cause the server’s validation process to fail.
That’s where DCP Transfer comes in. Check out the guided tour:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NftjF4jFZVc
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What happens if you export audio only to an uncompressed format like WAV? Do you get the same result or does it output correctly?
If it outputs correctly, a workaround might be to output a 48k stereo WAV mix, then bring that back into premiere and lay it back onto a new version of the sequence, muting or deleting the original clips and then output to the desired settings.
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I’ve worked with Apple on their iPad screen savers that go into their retail stores. Because the only place the video that we were working on was for iPad, we worked at the target resolution in Premiere. Most everything was screen captures, or animated UI elements which were done in After Effects, but all of it was done at 2048×1536. Our timelines were set up for 2048×1536 and when it got to the iPad, it was displayed 1:1.
If you want your image to play full screen, or want the most control over how the image will look when displayed on the iPad, I would suggest creating a new timeline at 2048×1536, scaling your 1920×1080 image to 142.2% and then shifting the image horizontally to ensure that the framing of each shot is in-tact. You can then copy the first clip, and paste attributes to the following clips, and adjusting the horizontal position shot by shot. If your sequence isn’t tool long, this approach can work with only a few hours worth of work.
Formatting a feature length film this way may be too time intensive.
It all just depends on what’s important to your situation. If you don’t care that it’s letterboxed, then output 1920×1080 and let the device scale as previously mentioned.
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The key is to create your subclips at your desired frame rate. If you’ve got 59.94 master clips and you want to create a subclip or set of subclips at 23.976, then you’ll want to duplicate your master clip, interpret the footage to 23.976, then create your sub-clips. Changing the rate after the fact will indeed alter your ins and outs because of the change in TC rate.