Attached Trailers to Feature DCPs?

[Steve Guttag]

Are the studios starting to embed/attach or otherwise make trailers part of the feature DCP? I just got a question about needing/wanting to jump past that in an automated system (TMS creates the shows) and with a variety of servers and vintages.

[Carsten Kurz]

I haven't seen it so far myself. I remember that someone mentioned it on this forum a few days ago - Ryan? Maybe it's the same movie?

[Ryan Gallagher]

Wasn't me. It was Mike talking about a trailer attached to Jurassic World for "The Odyssey".
https://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/...tached-trailer

I have the distinct joy of never having to play a trailer unless we want to.

[Brad Miller]

Yes this is a new thing that the studios are starting to test the waters on and it is a terrible idea. Jurassic World was first and now Fantastic Four is doing it next week.

Personally I think if Regal/Cinemark/AMC doesn't gang together RIGHT NOW and adamantly refuse to run any DCP without the feature being a 100% separate DCP, they will be shooting themselves in the foot for all time. This is how the nonsense with preshow advertising started. They will OCCASIONALLY test with a super short teaser trailer and then maybe skip the next few features to see if there is a revolt or not. When there isn't because the first test is so minor they will do it with a longer one (and likely try to tie it into the movie somehow so they can use that excuse) and see if they can get away with that. Before long this will just be a thing that shits up the moviegoing experience. (Case in point most of my venues run trailers at around 4.5 and features at 7...so just imagine that pleasant experience getting to the point of the lights dimming fully, the theater's policy trailer playing and then getting absolutely assaulted with the attached trailer playing at 7.)

Then the server manufacturers will start to devise a way to jump over the attached trailer as a feature they can sell (which of course will not be as easy as it sounds), but the studios won't like that their new guaranteed forced advertising scheme is being bypassed so who knows if the theaters will then end up being required to submit logs to prove they played it or who knows what this will end up like down the road. The studios could theoretically end up controlling the entire trailer pack and preshow by forcing the playback of one DCP.

The big chains had better step up right now and put a stop to this.

[Frank Cox]

Doesn't the GDC server have an option for start playing at a certain point in a dcp? I've never used it (yet) but I'm pretty sure I've seen that in the playlist setup somewhere...

[Ioannis Syrogiannis]

Well, not that new a thing, but -back in the day- one could use a splicer. While now, if they don't have to have two of them, cinemas could use the intermission feature to force things back into their place. (Unless they run a Dolby DSS server, or as Frank says, a GDC, but what TMS would work well with that offset feature?)

Many pre-recorded theatre (National Theatre Live) have a bunch of trailers, intros and ads as well, but they tend to be relevant and (when I was working as a projectionist) I never had an issue with volume. Even though I am always checking the volume, I would write it down as 7.0, never to need to change it. (I doubt things have changed since, and I probably have to attribute that to the show being originally live.)

[Ryan Gallagher]

Old school doremi DCP2K4 can already do it, it permits custom user marks in content and then you can have a macro skip to them. I've used it before to skip past antiquated theme park advertisements attached to DCPs, if I'm feeling lazy and not just pausing and typing in the timecode. Or perhaps i'm remembering using in an intermission context, permitting other DCPs to roll during intermission, and then jumping back into a single DCP at the start of Act II.

I also suspect this experiment is loosely connected to the chain experiments with the dreaded "permium ad slot" ( https://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/...-before-movies )... studios want their premium slot back for trailers. Arms Race (to the bottom) it seems.