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AutoDCP is just a Dropbox App that a festival and a filmmaker can use, simply link it to your Dropbox account and you are ready to use it.

Workflow

  • Each filmmaker makes their own DCP
  • Festival manages filmmaker deadlines
  • Festival collects DCPs
  • Festival delivers consolidated HDD to theater

BENEFITS

  • No bottleneck from one person doing it all
  • Automated QC/compliancy checks built into each step
  • Fast, inexpensive cloud app/service 
  • Infinitely scalable

Did you know that AutoDCP can help sponsor your festival?  Not only are our festival management tools free for the festival to use but we also can offer 10% back to the festival for any DCPs made by its filmmakers using our services.   If you’d like to do so, simply sign up to our affiliate program and then set up your festival within AutoDCP.

AutoDCP’s delivery process is rather simple.  It uses both the abilities of Dropbox coupled with our own set of QC tools to insure all DCP’s delivered using it are proper DCPs.   Upon receipt of the DCP you can simply sync your Dropbox folder to an external theater compatible drive and give that drive to the projectionist for playback.   AutoDCP also includes a tool which lets you generate a “Projection Report”, this report contains everything needed by the Projectionist in order to play all your festival movies.

Festival FAQ

What does a ‘Projection Report’ look like?

This projection report provides the information a theater requires in order to play your film

Here’s how to use this report:

 

  1. Once you have cut off submissions to your festival, click the button below to download this report as a CSV
  2. Open the CSV in your favorite spreadsheet tool
  3. Sort this spreadsheet into the order you wish shows to play
  4. Give the sorted spreadsheet and your show drive you have created from your Dropbox/Apps/AutoDCP/deliverables folder to the theater

Does AutoDCP delivery the DCPs to the theater?

No.

All DCPs are delivered to the festival Dropbox folder organized in a way in which they can be copied to an external HDD for delivery to the theater.

The festival is responsible for getting the HDD to the theater.

Please note that the theater will require a HDD which is formatted either as windows NTFS, or linux ext2.   The theater can not handle HDD’s which are apple/mac formatted, or exFAT.   The HDD also must be < 2TB in size.

If you are using the Dropbox App installed on your a Microsoft Windows desktop machine, you can connect an external NTFS formatted HDD to it and set the Dropbox/Apps/AutoDCP folder to sync to it by moving your Dropbox folder location to it.   To learn more about this check out this article at Dropbox: https://help.dropbox.com/installs/move-dropbox-folder

We suggest you set up your external NTFS HDD and Dropbox in the beginning so that as DCPs are delivered from filmmakers they will sync at that time to your external HDD.   You do not want to wait until a few days before your festival starts needing to sync terrabytes of DCPs.

Do I need to require my filmmakers to use AutoDCP delivery methods?

No.   However we strongly encourage you to require that your filmmakers use our delivery tools.   It will save you much time!  If you need to take a DCP from a filmmaker which is not using our delivery tools to do it themselves you can still use our tools to QC the DCP as well as make sure it gets recorded in the projection report by following these steps.   Of course this put more burden on yourself, but this approach works just fine.  Here are the steps:

  1. Acquire the DCP however you like from the filmmaker
  2. Go follow the regular filmmaker delivery instruction as outlined here (steps 4 & 5 Festival Techops Training).   In short upload to your Dropbox/Apps/AutoDCP/dcps folder and deliver it to yourself.

This will both QC the DCP for you alerting you to any issues, as well as if it delivers will record it in the projection report which you will want for your projectionist.

Who uses AutoDCP?

To date thousands of filmmakers have used it and hundreds of festivals, it has of course been used by many of the studios in Los Angeles.  Today AutoDCP continues to work heavily with the Hollywood industry and standards groups like SMPTE volunteering and contributing to the next generation of production technologies and distribution platforms.  AutoDCP originated as an internal project to one of the Los Angeles studios, as a tool for all their efforts around the industries leading marketing event “LA Screenings” and follow on worldwide events.

How long does it take to make a DCP?

AutoDCP is a fully automated services which runs 24/7, in which each filmmakers is treated as if they are the first person to arrive, in short no jobs wait for whomever is in front of them.   Furthermore, we are likely one of the least expensive and fastest systems out there.   Once a filmmaker has uploaded their source material to their Dropbox account,  shorts are often back to the filmmaker within an hour, features completed overnight.

Looks like AutoDCP is a self service tool, how do you support it?

Great question.   Yes AutoDCP is a self service tool which you or your filmmaker can use at your convenience.   We actually expect to handle all the questions related to making a DCP, and have a support portal with ‘ticketing’ in place to handle all those questions.   If your filmmakers have questions on making a DCP, all you need to do is tell them to ask us by filling out a support ticket at https://service.autodcp.com.   We’ve worked in the Hollywood industry for years, and know LOTS about DCP’s and exhibition.   Love to help out the emerging filmmakers of the next generation.

Some of my past filmmaker DCP’s were too loud, is there anything that can be done about that?

If the filmmaker is using AutoDCP to make a DCP with our tools, our system automatically runs several tests against the filmmakers source prior to making a DCP for them.   All DCP jobs submitted by a filmmaker include a “preflight report.”   This report outlines the details of the job,, plus any problems detected.   If there are any problems the filmmaker is given an option to correct the source, or can ‘approve’ the job for processing with the reported issues.  Here’s a partial list of the warnings that AutoDCP can generate:

  • too loud (< -15 LUFS)
  • low quality source file (aka highly compressed youtube video’s vrs QT prores files…)
  • bad framing, not filling frame completely (aka letterboxing when they probably should not be letterboxing).
  • resolution and scaling concerns
  • framerate issues

I’ve had issues with my projectionist not finding the movies my filmmakers sent me in the past, how does AutoDCP help?

AutoDCP provides a projection report which includes both the information required by a projectionist to find the DCP in their TMS (theater management system), as well as the film title and director(s) name provided by the filmmaker.   This report let’s you, the filmmaker and the projectionist be able to reference and find the proper movie.   Also contained within this report for each delivery DCP is a tracking number which can correspond to filmfreeway’s [Tracking Number], or to your own tracking method, see this reference for more information.

Do I have to unzip the DCP’s?

No.   Zip files are a pain, and prone to error with large files like DCPs.  In any case zipped DCPs can’t be used by a projectionist.   AutoDCP delivers the DCP as a collection of folders ready for playback by the projectionist.  All you need to do is copy your ‘deliverables’ folder to a suitable external HDD.

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