That’s great news!

Now, help us deliver your DCP to our partner festival with the best chance for it to play flawlessly!

The festival, the audience, and the theater count on a professionally made DCP.

Follow the guidelines below and have an incredible screening!

A Professional Service Created the DCP

This makes it easy for us to curate, QC, and deliver your DCP to help you have a fantastic festival screening experience.

We curate DCPs as a no-charge service to partner festivals and their participants as long as your DCP is ready to go.

We will download and ingest your DCP into our system to ensure your movie is good to go.

Most of the time we can tell very quickly, who made the DCP and how it was made.

You’re ready to submit a Self-Made DCP

You, or your colorist, or editor, or someone with access to software made it.

We curate DCPs as a no-charge service to partner festivals and their participants as long as your DCP is ready to go.

This is a fantastic way to save a few dollars, but understand a post-production specialist is not necessarily a DCP specialist.

If a DCP is amateurishly made and does not follow guidelines laid out by the Digital Cinema Initiative, you risk incompatibility with the theatre, a stressful experience for yourself, a dissatisfied audience, and you might cost the festival thousands of dollars of theater time.

You get ONE SHOT at this.
If your DCP fails our quality control process for any reason, you will have to deliver it to the theater yourself on an EXT2 Linux USB Drive or pay a $50 service fee each time re-delivery is required.

You made a DCP through Adobe Wraptor?

Unfortunately, this plugin has a flawed performance history.

Many festivals and theatres simply do not accept Wraptor DCPs at all, and we no longer accept them either.

The exhibition systems in use at this festival are known to be incompatible with DCPs made using the Quvis Wraptor Plugin for Adobe products. DCPs found to be created using this software will be summarily rejected.

Do we charge for our curation service?

We curate DCPs for partner festivals at no charge to the festival or the filmmaker as long as a DCP is ready to go, received by required deadlines, and does not require re-delivery.

This is a time-consuming process. Errors and re-delivery cost time and money.

SERVICE FEE (Replacement/Re-Delivery) – $50 
If, for any reason, your DCP fails our QC process, needs to be replaced, does not play, or needs to be re-delivered to us or the theater, there will be a $50 service fee for each instance thereafter. Otherwise, you will be responsible for delivering it to the theater/festival on your own (it must be on a Linux EXT2 formatted hard drive).  

Service Fees will be charged in the following circumstances:

• Late delivery (within 7 days of the festival start, not just your screening);
• Replacement DCP (You submit a new DCP for any reason)
• Re-delivery required
• Sending us physical media

VALIDATION SERVICE – $40
When you supply a DCP to the festival, we give it a basic QC ensuring it will ingest and play on our end. If you would like a more thorough and in-depth quality control check, our validation service is worth considering. We will run your DCP through a detailed validation process and inspection, letting you know if there are any warnings or errors to be concerned with, how your DCP was made, the technical specs, and whether or not is likely to playback in DCI compliant theaters (most movie theaters). We will then send you a report with the information. If re-delivery is required, we will not charge you for the next re-delivery and we will even run the validation again.

Avoid Common Problems!

Any of these issues below will require you to deliver a DCP on your own to the theater or will require a Service Fee to re-deliver to us.

AVOID INSTANT REJECTION:

ZIPPED/COMPRESSED DCPs
Large video files are notorious for becoming corrupted when compressed. Downloading and extraction takes time. If your submission is compressed, we will automatically reject it.

QUVIS WRAPTOR FOR ADOBE DCP
The exhibition systems in use at this festival are known to be incompatible with DCPs made using the Quvis Wraptor Plugin for Adobe products. DCPs found to be created using this software will be summarily rejected.

Maybe your DCP is the exception to the rule; however, we will not be able to deliver it on your behalf in either of the above instances.

MISSING, CHANGED, RENAMED FILES
Your DCP package must be complete. A DCP is a series of files in a folder that all work together. You cannot make changes to your DCP after it has been created. You cannot replace or change files without creating a new DCP.

NAME YOUR DCP CORRECTLY:

NAMING CONVENTIONS
Your project should follow Digital Cinema Initiative naming conventions. DO NOT USE acronyms, different names, or version numbers. Use the NAME OF YOUR MOVIE! While we will not reject yoru movie for improper naming, not only does it make it difficult for a projectionist to find/play your movie, many theaters will reject movies that are not named properly. Correct naming will follow this format: MovieTitle_FTR_F_EN_XX_INT_51_2k_NULL_20211230_E_SMPTE_OV

SOFTWARE CONSIDERATIONS:

easyDCP
This software is costly, but it is the gold standard. If you are using this, make sure you do your due diligence to deliver the best possible DCP you can. If you use a free or trial version, it will likely leave a watermark over your movie, which many filmmakers only discover too late.

Blackmagic Davinci Resolve Plugin
We don’t use this here, but we receive many DCPs that are created this way. Many work without issue, and others are problematic. Again, do your due diligence in the process. Those that fail typically do so for not following DCI standards.

DCP-O-Matic
Similar to Resolve, many DCPs made with this software work without issue. Again, do your due diligence in the process. Those that fail typically do so for not following DCI standards.  If you are using DCP-O-Matic or other similar software DO NOT INCLUDE every file. Only include the folder with a name similar to MovieName_FTR_F_EN-XX_INT_51_2K_NULL_20220727_E_SMPTE_OV (it will typically have six files).

Open DCP
This is free software that does not appear to have been supported since 2014. In our experience, we have not seen many DCPs with this software actually work in theaters. 

We accept uploads to our high-speed server and specific downloadable links.

UPLOAD TO OUR FILE SERVER
If your DCP is ready to go, you can UPLOAD IT HERE (this is the preferred delivery method).

Uploading to our server maintains the structural integrity of the DCP folder and files and is the most reliable.

SHARE A LINK
We prefer uploads to our server. We will only accept the following links when you fill out the submission form:

• Dropbox Links
• Aspera / Signiant Links
• Filemail Links
• All other links will be summarily rejected. 

Why? The above formats do not automatically compress files, do not cause corruption errors, allow a single download to maintain structure, and do not tend to have expiration dates. Therefore we will reject all links from services such as Google Drive, Hightail, WeTransfer, OneDrive

SEND US PHYSICAL COPIES
There will be a $50 service fee if you require us to handle a physical delivery. We prefer digital delivery, but if this is not an option, the following guidelines apply:

• A $50 Service Fee will apply
• We will only accept mailed deliveries.
• We do not accept drop-off deliveries.
• We do not return physical media.

SEND THE FESTIVAL A LINUX DRIVE
You can also arrange for delivery directly with the festival. Keep in mind, to be compatible with most theaters, your drive MUST be Linux EXT2 formatted or it likely will not be accepted by the cinema system.