Newbie to digital cinema- looking for a mentor with some time on their hands!

[Allan Barnes]

you need alot of hard drive space to make dcps..... alot 200 plus gb

[Mark Lane]

Robert, I take it you have talked to the studio, purchased the rights to show The Graduate, probably sent in the payment and told the studio exactly what days you will be showing their movie. When you do this, you can ask them to send you the movie on a hard drive. It will cost you about $40.00 in shipping but saves you some money on purchasing the bluray and is a lot less hassle.

I would suggest starting out with some public domain movies. These movies will not cost you any studio fees and allows you to get a feel for what your customers are going to want.
Right now booking a movie through the studios can be an adventure and they are more willing to work with you on fees right now. Once the pandemic is over, expect the cost of showing a movie to go up. Don't be shocked when they tell, the rights to a 30 year old movie is going to be $250.00 for the weekend. This is a good time to find out what movies might be worth the price and which ones to stay away from.

When I show a bluray.. I set the project to show the trailers, the "don't record this" message, the "no cell phones" message and the welcome graphics. I run this presentation but just before it gets to the end, I hit play or take the pause off the bluray, then switch the projector over to HDMI. If I time it right, it is pretty smooth. You might have to play with it a little as each dvd/bluray can be a little different.

[Vern Dias]

Thanks for all the help here so far.
I tried transponding (?) an the mkv file of THE GRADUATE twice and after many hours and the green bar being filled, in both instances the text beneath the green bar reads
"error cannot open file c:\desktop\TheGraduate\info\185_2K_33a751d80e503ca add5431cade6c1993_24_150000000_P_I_0_610256000 for read/write"

while the above file in the "info" folder in "the graduate" DCP saved to the desktop shows a green check next to it in the status column, the one in the "video" folder with the .mxf extension shows an x in a red circle in the status column and that same x in a red circle shows up as a badge in my file explorer on onedrive, desktop, the graduate, and video
(185_2K_33a751d80e503caadd5431cade6c1993_24_150000 000_P_I_0_610256000.mxf)

not sure if or how I need to fix this before copying the graduate folder to an external drive for transfer to the server...
Thanks for any insight,

Robert

Rule # 1:Never store any data in or on the "Desktop". The Desktop is for short cuts that point to application files, not for data.

You probably filled up the entire C: drive with the DCP file.

Make sure you have created a folder to store the DCP on a drive with lots of free space (preferably not on the C: drive as that should be reserved for the Windows OS files). If you fill the C: drive with "stuff", you could easily crash the system.

It sounds like you may need to take the time to take a basic Windows course, learn what the file structure on the HD looks like, and learn some best practices before you go much farther.

[Andrew Thomas]

I'm just going to echo that you really must rip the blurays and make your own DCPs on a Solaria One. No matter the server, it does not handle HDMI or DVI content well. Converted DCPs will look substantially better!

[Andrew Thomas]

you need alot of hard drive space to make dcps..... alot 200 plus gb

You really don't. I've tested it a ton of times and there really is no visible benefit to going over 50Mbps in DCP o Matic for bluray content, which leaves a typical 2 hour movie right around 50GB.

[Mike Blakesley]

you can ask them to send you the movie on a hard drive. It will cost you about $40.00 in shipping but saves you some money on purchasing the bluray and is a lot less hassle.

Well that's not always true. Not every movie is available on a studio hard drive. (I'm not sure about The Graduate.) And if you use your own Blu-Ray to make a DCP, not only do you save the shipping charge but you will often get a better deal from the studio on film rent if they don't have to ship you the hard drive. Some are half-price. And you won't have to mess with keys or fiddle with blu-ray menus.

There's also the advantage that you can keep your home-made DCP to book again later and have zero hassle at all.

The various studios are all over the map with regard to pricing for classic movies.

Warner Bros - very reasonable and accommodating, usually
Sony - Often pretty expensive but can be surprisingly cheap sometimes
Universal - reasonable to expensive, depends on the title
Paramount - reasonable
Lionsgate - Expensive to very expensive
Disney / Fox - does not allow any such bookings at all, don't even bother asking for anything Disney, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Fox, or Searchlight, unless you have a giant pot of money to throw at them (and even that might not work)

Some studios are absolutely nutty with their procedures. Universal (and maybe others) always has a list of movies that are "out of service" that you can't book. We tried to play the original Top Gun last summer when we were playing a lot of other classics and they wouldn't book it due to the new one coming out in four months (which of course has still not come out). We played The Outlaw Josey Wales but had to wait six weeks after our preferred date for it to "become available" due to some TV deal they had with it. Stuff like that. So don't promise anything to people until you talk to the studio or your booker.

[Robert Kwalick]

This has all been very helpful, and I have finished transcoding my first MKV into a DCP, and learned to use a lot of new three-letter acronyms (TLA's). Headed over to the cinema in a bit to try my hand at having the new IMB ingest it. I did get an external hard-drive to save things to having discovered that with the PC connected to OneDrive (which I have disabled) I was running into issues.

NEXT CHALLENGE- we are having a graphic designer create a couple of "slides" with the names of all of our donors and special thanks (we are an NFP) for our opening event. We would like this two-three slide "slide show" to be on some sort of continuous loop or scroll while people are sipping wine and getting settled in so they can see their names on the screen, before we show our Bantam Cinema "sizzle reel" (also being created right now... and who knows what format THAT will come to me in?...) and the feature.

In what format should such a slideshow be saved so that it will be both large enough that all the text is readable (we have hundreds of folks who have donated that we want to acknowledge) and can be made into a DCP? Powerpoint? Keynote? Quicktime? Something I don't know about? I HAVE NO IDEA! Similarly, we sell on-screen ads, and the old fella who used to run them when the place was operated for profit ran them off a disc before showing features as I understand it, but it would be good to get those ads looping as a DCP as well so they play from the server and can be added to a playlist. The old ad loops are saved in the theater's google drive as .key files which I don't think is what we want moving forward. HOw do ya'll make those "Don't record this" and "Turn off your cellphone" slides referenced in an earlier post in this thread?

Thanks for any insight, guidance, assistance!

[Jon Dent]

Just make your preshow a DCP as well. DCP-O-Matic can take still images and have them display for a set amount of time. Put a bunch of them together with some ads and there you go. If you want it to repeat just schedule it back to back on your server.

DCP-O-Matic can work with all kinds of files, including Quicktime. Depending on what it has to adjust to get to proper DCP format (frame size, frame rate, etc...) it may not look the best. But it's definitely convenient to have everything running off the server scheduler.

[Carsten Kurz]

I guess most people would like it 'wild' if their donor credits would show up as actual movie credits - rolling titles. These have to be done e.g. in Adobe After Effects, and it would be wise to have someone do them who knows what he is doing, since smooth scrolling titles for a big screen are not that easy to do. But I am pretty sure your donors would really like to be presented that way.

This could be exported from AE in a common video format, as Jon mentions them (e.g. Quicktime), and then be used in DCP-o-matic again. You should keep the frame rate constant, 24fps, in order not to have jitter, as, again, rolling titles are a very delicate species. Depending on your DCP server, you may be able to create the title master and DCP in 30fps or even 60fps SMPTE DCPs. That may help a little bit in getting the rolling movement smooth. 24fps is doable, as most current commercial DCPs prove, but these are done by professionals who know to apply the right amount of filtering/smoothing to get them right even at such a low frame rate.

[Mike Blakesley]

I've used Vegas Movie Studio software to create graphics with rolling titles before - it works well, is cheap, and will produce just about any type of file you would want. It comes with plug-ins that will create all kinds of text displays.... rolling or whatever else you could think of. I think it's up to version 18 now. There is definitely a learning curve, so be prepared to invest some time and experimentation before you load up something to show to an audience.

http://www.vegascreativesoftware.com

For my no-smoking, silence your cellphone slides, I use ones that we got years ago from Cinetize. They make almost any kid of policy trailer you could imagine. I'm not sure of their current status but their website is still alive.....

http://www.cinetize.com.

You can also download Youtube videos (or use your staff/volunteers to make your own) and create your own using DCP-O-Matic. My favorite Youtube downloader is called 4K Video Downloader. You can also create DCPs of trailers this way, which comes in very handy since it's basically impossible to get trailers for old titles.

https://www.4kdownload.com/products/videodownloader/6

When you get all settled down, be sure to send a monetary donation in to the fine folks at DCP-o-Matic. They appreciate any amount. That software has been the most useful thing that's come out of the whole DIgital Cinema change-over, I think. Whatever you donate will be money well spent.

[Sean Falk]

You can also download Youtube videos (or use your staff/volunteers to make your own) and create your own using DCP-O-Matic. My favorite Youtube downloader is called 4K Video Downloader..

VLC media player is also a good tool for downloading Youtube videos, among other things like testing DCP audio and video (separately unfortunately). Doesn't have as many features for ripping video as the product Mike mentioned and it will require a tutorial, but it is free.