Luke Kreger
You’ve finally done it! After all the time spent working on crafting a great story with your film, you’ve been accepted into a film festival. You’ve created a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) and submitted it to the theater… but then you get that dreaded email from the festival. “Dear Filmmaker, your DCP does not meet the requirements for playback at our festival and has been rejected.” You start to panic and the festival isn’t giving much information on why it hasn’t been accepted. Looking for answers, you go to Reddit just to find more and more confusing information. Let’s stop, take a breath, and take a dive as to some possible reasons your DCP was rejected and what can be done to fix it!
Digital cinema projection has been around since the early 2000s. With the rapid growth of digital cinema technology, there are a wide array of projection systems in use today. To ensure that a DCP can be played on any projection system, SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) created a set of global regulations that allow a DCP to be played on old and new systems. Over the years there have been several standards released, each one building on the last.
These standards can be complicated for those who are new to the digital cinema world, but they must be followed. Usually when a festival rejects a DCP, it will be because it does not meet SMPTE standards. Although it’s frustrating to receive a rejection, it’s typically better than having technical issues during playback at the festival. The most recent SMPTE standard to keep in mind is RDD52.
RDD52 is a set of SMPTE standards that builds on standard 429. These standards were introduced in 2020 as a way to address theaters that use older playback systems. The RDD52 standards are meant to ensure interoperability between old and new playback systems. RDD52 does have some constraints such as only accepting DCPs in frame rates of 24, 25, and 48. You may be wondering what you should do if your film has a frame rate of 30 or 60. Fortunately, adhering to RDD52 is not always required. For most newer projection systems, DCPs can be delivered at other SMPTE standard frame rates such as 30, 50, and 60. Another alternative would be to convert the framerate of your film to 24. Although adhering to RDD52 is not always required, it is recommended since it guarantees that your DCP will be playable in over 99% of global cinemas.
Digital cinema projection systems are for the most part running a Linux operating system. This means that if your DCP is placed on a Mac or Windows formatted drive, it will likely not be recognized by the machine. There are ways to format the drive to the proper EXT2 or EXT3 formats on Mac by using command line tools. But just formatting a drive for the ext2 filesystem is not enough to create a properly formatted cinema drive. There are other specs that need to be followed during the formatting process. For instance, each drive needs to have an inode size of 128. If you're not comfortable with command line tools, DCP Transfer will format any external drive for proper cinema delivery with just a few clicks.
Captioning for cinema requires strict compliance as festivals are requiring films to be more accessible for everyone. For closed captions, things like exceeding the font file size, number of characters per line, and number of lines per caption will get your DCP rejected. You can burn your captions into your picture to avoid making SMPTE compliance issues, but this would not provide the best user experience for your entire audience. Captions in movie theaters are played on a 3rd party device that fits in your seat’s cup holder, and these can be requested on demand for any hearing impaired persons. Captions burned into your picture would require every audience member to watch with captions present, which may not be every audience member’s preference . For more information regarding captioning for cinema, please read our article on the topic here.
The ISDCF (Inter-Society Digital Cinema Forum) is a similar organization to SMPTE, and has additional standards that tend to be required by film festivals. The main standard they are known for is the digital cinema naming convention. When creating your DCP, you can’t just name the file “Filmname_DCP”. The naming convention is a series of characters that help describe what is contained in the DCP. The convention provides information to the projectionist about your DCP in short form. By reading a properly named DCP, a projectionist can instantly learn if the film is a short or a feature, the aspect ratio, is it stereo or 5.1, language, and more. Some festivals will reject your DCP if the naming is outside of this convention. This may happen even if the DCP works just fine.
We strongly suggest that you never use the Premiere Pro Wraptor plugin to make a DCP under any circumstances. Without getting into all the technical aspects and limitations of the plugin, just know that DCPs made with the Wraptor plugin have been known to have playback issues as well as ingestion issues with Digital Cinema Servers. There are many free and very low cost tools to use for DCP creation such as DCP-O-MATIC and the Kakadu plugin in DaVinci Resolve, but they have their limitations. Part of the problem with these tools is that they don’t allow nearly as much control as a professional DCP software such as Clipster or easyDCP can give you. You might be tempted to find the cheapest route for your DCP, but don’t risk technical issues that could derail your screening.
Digital Cinema Packages can be complex and require strict adherence to industry standards. These standards make it possible for your DCP to play in any theater in the world! For the average filmmaker, DCP creation can be time-consuming and cause technical challenges. At Cinematiq, help filmmakers navigate this process and deliver compliant DCPs to film festivals and movie theaters. Use our DCP estimator tool to get an instant quote for creating your DCP today!
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