Mastering for Digital Cinema

     Need to get your finished project screened in the cinema?

Unlike network television broadcasting, if a cinema chain is set up for digital cinema it will not have digital decks to play back your project. Instead, there will be a theater management system comprised of digital projectors, server playback systems equipped with decryption to read forensic watermarking and other security devices that are necessary to play a movie out in a digital theater.

To ingest into the cinema server the content itself must be packaged in the form of a 'DCP'- a DCI compliant, JPEG2000 file. This ensures compatible playback across a wide range of equipment worldwide at any DCI compliant theater.

Mainstream Hollywood features must comply with the specifications created by the DCI, or Digital Cinema Initiative; a consortium of 7 major movie studios and digital media facilities who’s goal is to provide a standardized way to assure that universal playback capability, image quality and security is maintained between digital cinema mastering and the theatrical distribution journey.

At the end of the digital mastering process, not to be confused with digital cinema mastering, when all of the creative manipulation is finalized, a DSM, or Digital Source Master is created. A DSM can exist as any audio and image file format, including a set of image, audio, subtitle and auxiliary data, which compiles, with the specifications of a digital cinema distribution master. A DCDM is simply an image sequence of uncompressed 12 bit TIFF files in XYZ colour space and sized to fill the proper container format for scope or flat aspect ratios. And audio is a single uncompressed 24 bit WAV file at 24fps, sampling at 48KHz. Whether a DSM or DCDM, content must be encoded and may be encrypted before it is packaged and played back. It is here that the image portion of a movie is compressed in JPEG2000 and then ready to be packaged. From the resulting encoded video and wrapped audio, a digital Cinema Package is created. The DCP is simply a set of MXF files containing the picture and sound, a set of XML files (Composition Play List and Packing List) containing information for each of the individual files which dictate the reel order for playback. Additionally, if the JPEG2000 encode was encrypted, a key is necessary to 'unlock' the movie for presentation. The purpose of encryption is to protect the digital data and prevent piracy by securing playback with a key. The key is contained within a Key Delivery Message or KDM. A KDM is generated for every DCP and is specific to each digital cinema server at every theater. The KDM's will determine and authorize who can play the movies, on which projection systems and at what times and dates. Distributing copies of the DCP to a digital cinema or several digital cinemas can involve delivery of assets via hard drive or automated download from satellite

In the cinema non mainstream product is referred to as alternative content.  With new developments in software encoding for digital cinema it is possible to create a DCP at reasonable cost. Projects can be mastered at HD1920 resolution in the original Rec709 colour space without encryption. This is useful for one off shows. Fraunhofer Easy DCP and Doremi Cineasset will convert and scale to 2K 2048X1920 resolution and convert to XYZ colour space making the project DCI compliant for playback anywhere in the world. Easy DCP  has a KDM generator and DCP playback on PC for around Euro3000. Cineasset will import and convert MPEG2 files to JPEG2000 for 3D films shot in 1920X1080 resolution for a similar price. Rendering can be 60 to 1 on a quad core at 3.0 GHz, slow but for a further Euro5000 a multi threading version for rendering farms is available. Both companies offer free downloads of these products, Cineasset is time limited while easyDCP is watermarked however a good idea of what can be achieved is possible with these restrictions.

Raptor - Mac plug in (2D only)

Cineasset
Easy DCP

Qube