Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Today I'm gonna walk you through how to export a DCP from Premiere Pro and Media
Encoder 2014 from Adobe. Adobe released a new update for all of their creative
cloud applications last week, and one of the new features is exporting a digital
cinema package. Now if you've been mostly a streaming media producer, you may not
be familiar with this format as a producer but you are definitely familiar
with it as a consumer. If you've ever gone to the theater in the last few
years and been in a digital cinema, you are looking at a DCP. A DCP is not
necessarily one file. It's actually a group of files that is created by the
post-production house or a specialty house that is that has a niche creating
DCP files of people's films, short films or Hollywood big budget blockbusters
whatever the case is. If it needs to go in a cinema that's digital, you have to
have a DCP. So creating a DCP has been sort of a black art over the last few
years. A lot of people don't really understand it. They don't know how to do
it. It's not been a very simple process unless you had very expensive,
specialized software or you paid a lot of money to someone else who had the
capabilities to create these for you. Some people have taken to programming
them themselves and using a terminal to create all the necessary files, XML and
MXF files. But Adobe and has teamed up with a company called Quvis that makes a
piece of software called Wraptor. And Wraptor has been in the market for a
number of years and has been used quite a bit by a lot of the big Hollywood
firms to create their DCP files for their for their big-budget films. In
researching DCP, I read that some Hollywood budgets will allow up to
$20,000 just to create the DCP when they're ready to export. And that may not
be a big portion of their budget, but it gives you an idea of how important this
aspect of the final output of your production is when you're trying to put
something on a big screen like that. You may be wondering
as a streaming media producer, why you would want to create a DCP in the first
place. One of the reasons could be you want your content to be able to be on as
many screens as possible. Of course we've had this with first televisions and now
mobile devices. And of course theaters have been around for a while, but
traditionally you haven't been creating streaming content for theater screens
very often. But in this case, you have the capabilities. Let's say you have a
corporate event where there's some large audiences that are gonna need to go to
one place, maybe a local theater to view something that was pre-recorded at the
headquarters building. Or it could be you have something like I have which is this
live concert footage that was recorded and then it was a big hit and they want
to show it into theatres around a certain, maybe a big metro area or around
different cities. So you can now create content that will be compatible with all
these different digital cinema systems and display it the way you intend it to.
So Adobe and Quvis have teamed up to build the Wraptor plug in directly into
Media Encoder. And it's a very simple process, so I'm gonna walk you through it.
I don't need to spend a lot of time showing you this timeline, because the
timeline doesn't matter a whole lot since you're only talking about
exporting a final output file. I have a multicam sequence that I did. This
footage was provided by Viewfinders TV and a friend of mine Greg Howlett who
you see there at the keyboard. This is a concert he did a few years ago. There are
three cameras. They're all at 1280 by 720. And it is a progressive framerate. And I'm
going to export my timeline, just like I normally would. It brings up our export
window that you're used to seeing. But now under format when you drop that down
at the very bottom you'll see Wraptor DCP as an option available that was not
there before. And then under video, there are three
different formats that are standards for theaters. And this will depend on the
theater and the system that they have: what resolution or aspect ratio they're
using. For the three different formats you're going to get different cropping
as you can see. Scope being very wide, and you'll lose a lot of vertical space. But
I'm gonna go with flat just for the sake of this demonstration
because that's the closest to the same aspect ratio as what I have. The codec will
be JPEG 2000 and then the framerate is the same. Field order is the same. The
bitrate right now is set to 250, but you can change that if you need to. The audio:
I do not have a 5.1 soundtrack. I only have stereo, so that's what I'm gonna
choose. Everything else is in the background. You don't need to set it any
other options. I'm gonna make sure my output is going where I want it, and
that's where I want it to go. So I'm gonna tell it to queue and let Media encoder
launch. And it's ready to go. Hit play. All in all this is a 4 minute timeline that
is going to take about 20 minutes or so to encode. So that'll give you an idea
of the time involved in creating this format. And I won't bore you by sitting
here and making you watch the whole 20 minutes of this encode, so I will fast
forward in time and come back in just a moment. And once your encoding is
completed you can take it to the theater and have them check it there or a much
simpler route would be to download one of a number of different DCP players
that are available for Mac and PC. One of the ones that worked for me was Easy DCP.
And as you can tell, it is a demo version so this is your free trial that you get
to play around with. The trial fortunately is not a limited by time or
anything it just only allows you to look at the first 15 seconds. So this is the
one we just encoded right here. If you look in the folder you'll see a number
of different files. They all serve different purposes in making the DCP
work, but your audio and your video file are the ones you're most concerned with
because you want to make sure everything plays correctly. So you choose that
folder, and it's going to see what it needs. In there it's going to ask you if
you want to play one, or if there were multiple different tracks in there, it
would allow you to choose several different ones. So we've got the
same framerate we asked for. There's the resolution. I am doing a color
transformation to make sure that it's displaying like what we're expecting.
So let's see how it plays. [MUSIC]
Everything seems to be nice and smooth. So the last thing we want to
check is to see how the color renders. So I'm going to side by side our original
here try to get approximately the same location in the timeline maybe somewhere
around there. And we can sort of look at both together. So our color rendering is
quite accurate compared to what we have. In our nonlinear editor, everything looks
good here. I can tell you that the the audio is fine. I checked it. It is stereo.
Now one little caveat I have to add in here is that I'm running a slightly
modified version of Adobe Media Encoder. The GM, the gold master, that shipped on
Wednesday of last week or Thursday depending on when when the update showed
up for you in your Creative Cloud shipped with a sort of a flawed plugin
for the Wraptor DCP encoder that's built in. When I talked with Adobe and Quvis
about this issue, they assured me that the patch is there. It's available. The
2014 updates had already passed by the time they had this plug-in ready. sSo they
shipped it to me. I just added it into my media
encoders contents, and then it used that new version and it fixed the issue that
I was having before. The color rendering and compression of some of the blocks
did not look right. There were some strange things going on, but hopefully
you won't have to wait for very long for this to be patched. But I can tell you
that it is fixed. What you're looking at right now is what it will
look like as soon as they do issue that patch. So that's creating a DCP with
Adobe Media Encoder and Adobe Premiere Pro 2014. It's very easy. It may not
really apply to you, but if it does you'll be glad to have it.