Workflow
BENEFITS
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.
This projection report provides the information a theater requires in order to play your film
Here’s how to use this report:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.