For those who don’t know: DCP’s (Digital Cinema Package) are for the film industry what flash memory cards are for photography. Kodak went bust (almost) because nobody uses film in photo cameras anymore. Everybody shoots on memory cards. But not only Kodak suffers from the collapsing film industry. The laboratories that used to thrive on film development and print on 35mm film for cinema are suffering heavily too. The alternative for 35mm print as a host for images has become the DCP. For the labs this remained one of the few remaining ways to make some profit. The DCP’s seemed complex to make, developed by technical nerds a progress kept secret, or at least to complicated, from filmmakers. Until a while ago.
When we were mixing the sound for Chase with Jeroen Nadorp at Kommer’s Studios in The Hague, Jeroen told me he stumbled upon OpenDCP. An open source piece of software that brings home baking DCP’s to the less fortunate, independent filmmaker.The first test didn’t bring what they should, image was great, sound became an awful shrieking whistle. It came out that DCP servers (apparatus that playbacks your DCP) don’t accept 16-bit sound files, only 24-bits. That was good knowledge, but after the first test, done in a cinema in Paris with a bunch of absolutely uninterested and rude technicians, we didn’t have a cinema to test again. To run a DCP you still need expansive software or a cinema. Since I don’t have both we had to find an alternative.
We contacted the Clermont-Ferrand film festival and by chance they knew a place. The village of Gannat had the honor to be the first completely digitally equipped cinema in the Auvergne. Quite an achievement for a town with only 6000 inhabitants. Richard Morier runs the place and was more than happy to help. Since a week I have access to a cinema with all the equipment you can wish, I can use it every tuesday and thursday to test DCP’s. So this week I could finally see Chase as it was meant to be. With the help of Jos Herni (Linux, Tweet and OpenSource addict ;-) I managed to put the whole film on a USB-stick, stuck it in the server and, voila. 13 minutes of triangles with sound and image as they were meant to be. All on a device smaller than my, already tiny, index finger.
Fijn, dat er voor elk technisch probleem – mensen zijn om t ook weer op te lossen. Eigenlijk had de nagel wel een beetje meer op een driehoekje mogen lijken :)