DCP Encoding for Festivals and Distribution

DCP (Digital Cinema Package) encoding from £30 + vat.

DCP creation is the final step in film production for the delivery of a digital, high-resolution master for screening on digital cinema screens - for film festivals or for cinema distribution in preference to Apple Prores HQ. Maniac Films offer DCP encoding and QC playback checks as part of our DCP, Blu-ray and DVD production services. DCP is the industry standard for delivery of films - it is not a single file but a folder containing the video, audio, subtitle assets and some additional housekeeping files.

We offer 2K DCP encoding for short films from £30 + vat and 4K DCP from £40 + vat. We do charge more if you have 5.1 audio and if you have subtitles either burnt or as VF (seperate VF DCP creation). We can give you a fixed price for your DCP requirements and offer discounts for multiple verisions (ie 2K and 4K combined or burnt on captions and VF language caption DCPs).

Digital Cinema Packages are quickly becoming the standard way for theatrical distribution of movies. Many cinemas in the UK, United States and worldwide only have digital screens, especially the newer venues. More and more film festivals accept DCPs for competition and even the Academy Awards requests a DCP for consideration. By making a DCP, you guarantee that your movie will be able to screen in most theatres and with the best quality available.

Frame Rates for DCP and Spec

We can take your finished film and convert it to work with a digital cinema projector. If you have a specific cinema or festival in mind, we recommend that you ask them in advance for any preferences that they may have (such as compression rate, drive format, encryption), but in general the default standard is a 24p 2K DCP package in either 2K flat (1.85:1) 1998x1080 or Scope (2.39:1) 2048x858 format and this will be dictated by your film rather then by the venue. The video is compressed using a J2000 codec with an XYZ colour space. The compression is typically in the 125-200MBps range and audio may be 2.0 channel or 5.1 surround, uncompressed 48KHz 24bit for delivery. Your film will need to be exported to a lossless format from your editing suite and delivered to us as a video file (Prores HQ or similar) - along with any synced audio and any subtitle assets. We can resync your audio STEMS (WAV or AIFF 24bit please).

See the wikipedia spec on DCP which shows SMPTE encoding supporting these frame rates for DCP: 24,25,30,48,50 and 60p at 2K and the SMPTE DCP spec has been amended to include 100 and 120fps as well.

DCP naming

We use the Digital Cinema Naming Convention when creating our DCPs and are listed with the facility code MFL. We will use the naming convention to specify the projector aspect ratio, type of content, film title, Language of audio and captions, DCP size and audio type amongst other things. The data is human readable so that projectionists can make sure they know how best to playback your film.

DCP Captions

DCPs can be created with both Open and Closed captions, or captions burnt onto the DCP itself or created as seperate 'VF' DCPs that contain just the encoded captions and link to the original 'OV' DCP that was created from the audio and video. We can process all types of DCP captions to suit your needs and will convert these to DCP format from your supplied SRT captions. We can burn in captions for special screenings or we can create Open or Closed captions. Get in touch to discuss your DCP caption needs.

File Delivery

Modern broadband is sufficient to transfer large DCP files to the festival or cinema electronically, but some may still ask for a hard drive or SSD. We can receive your source film data electronically via Wetransfer, Mega or similar file transfer services if you require and if you send us a disc we can send it back again by Royal Mail Special Delivery.

If you do not have access to an online file transfer service of required size, we offer a free upload service using Mega. Get in touch with us to arrange your order and we will supply you with a link to upload your files. Mega provides a great app for upload and download that avoids delay or error that can happen with browser-based HTTP uploads.

Service Level:

Level 1: DCP Encoding with QC playback spot checks against the original with sound sync check at the start and finish. This is usually sufficient for most DCP encodes.

Level 2: QC check - DCP full playback computer based review. There is an additional cost for a real person to do a full playback review of the generated DCP from end to end. This is only to check the DCP is correctly formatted and not a QC of your film content itself, although we may point out anything obvious like framing issues.

Related Services:

Captions conversion - convert your existing DVD or BD subtitles files in to DCP format captions
Captions creation - create captions for your film to use on DVD or Blu-ray or online and also for DCP

Contact us for full pricing, and to discuss the best way for us to help you get your production on to the big screen.