Making Advanced DCPs with EasyDCP Plus: A Guide

When making and testing advanced DCPs with multiple reels/encryption/subtitles I use Easydcp Plus.

Easydcp Plus includes Easydcp Creator +, Easydcp Player +, and Easydcp KDM Generator and costs €148 for 1 month.

Main advantages of Easydcp Plus:

JPEG 2000 GPU encoding/decoding acceleration on PCs with Nvidia CUDA graphics cards.
Using Easydcp Creator and Easydcp Player together you can easily preview how the DCP will look before generating the DCP.
Make supplemental packages
Receive DKDMs to make localized versions

I have also written tutorials on how to make DCPs in Davinci Resolve Studio and DCP-o-matic

Table of Contents

How to make a DCP in Easydcp Creator +

Typically, a DCP has some logo reels at the start and the feature may be divided into reels. The audio and picture assets in each reel can have an offset, and each reel may have a subtitle track.

Video and audio assets

A typical video file on a short film is a Prores 422 HQ/4444 video file in rec 709 2.4 gamma with 5.1 sound or separate sound files.

Sound can be 6 mono 24-bit, 48 Hz wav files labeled:

film.L.wav
film.R.wav
film.C.wav
film.LFE.wav
film.Ls.wav
film.Rs.wav

Choose letterboxing/scaling

All video reels need to have the same resolution. If the feature is Flat 1998×1080, the logo reels also must be Flat 1998×1080. Click on the letterbox icon to scale video files to fit Flat or Scope.

Choose color transform

You can choose between different color transforms. I mostly use the old ITU 709 2.4 Gamma to X´Y´Z´ transform without chromatic adaption on normal video material to avoid color shifts.

Example Easydcp color transform

Rec 709 2.4 gamma to X’Y’Z’

<?xml version="1.0"?> 
<color_transformation>	
<transformation version="2.0" name="ITU 709 (Gamma 2.4) -> X'Y'Z'" 
comment="source: RGB (ITU-R BT.709) full range, gamma 2.4, D65
destination: XYZ (DCI), full range, gamma 2.6,
no chromatic adaption">
<!-- destination color space: XYZ, gamma 2.6, normalized with 48/52.37 -->
<destination color_space="X'Y'Z'" primaries="XYZ" gamma="2.6" white_projector_luminance="48.0" normalizing_constant="52.37" />
<!-- source color space: R'G'B' gamma 2.4 -->
<source color_space="Rec709"  primaries="RGB" gamma="2.4" />
<matrix>
<row>0.412390799265960;0.357584339383880;0.180480788401830</row>
<row>0.212639005871510;0.715168678767760;0.072192315360730</row>
<row>0.019330818715590;0.119194779794630;0.950532152249660</row>
</matrix>	
</transformation>
</color_transformation>

Offset on video and audio reels.

Sometimes there is an offset on both video and audio tracks and sometimes only on the audio track or video track. Sometimes the duration is cut short because there are textless elements after the feature that should be cut.

No offset on video

192 frame offset on audio

Adding XML subtitles

Each reel has a subtitle track. I wrote a post about converting SRT subtitles to SMPTE XML in Subtitle Edit here.

Choose either burned-in subtitles or soft subtitles. If the burn-in icon is activated, the subtitles will be burned in.

Previewing the DCP in Easydcp player +

When you click on the play button in the upper right corner, the DCP project will open in Easydcp Player and you can check that the subtitles and sound are in sync.

Checking the sound

Before generating the DCP you can check if the sound channels are correct in the sound meter and you can check sync.
1: Left
2: Right
3: Center
4: LFE
5: Ls
6: Rs

Checking subtitles

When you click on a subtitle in the Subtitle Inspector it will jump to that subtitle. You can check sync on all the reels quickly.

Smooth playback

In EasyDCP player you can lower the quality of playback until you have no dropped frames. Go to Preferences – JPEG 2000 and slide the slider from Quality to Performance until you have smooth playback.

Downmix to 5.1 in easyDCP player

To check the sound on a laptop with only stereo speakers you can downmix 5.1 to stereo. Go to “Preferences – Audio settings” and change “Output channel mapping” to “5.1 to stereo downmix”.

Encrypting DCPs

I wrote a post about encrypting DCPs here.

Make supplemental packages with 7.1 or other languages.

I wrote a post about making supplemental packages here.

Read more about supplemental packages with subtitles in my ebook.

Deliver the DCP

Most film festivals and cinemas accept a download link made with Aspera or Filemail and similar services. Read more in this post.
A MBR NTFS or ext3 hard drive can also be used to deliver the DCP . Read more in this post.

Making and testing advanced DCPs in EasyDCP Plus