AUTODCP AND LA SCREENINGS—A CASE HISTORY
When you hear DCP, you don’t usually think of TV.
DCP stands for Digital CINEMA Package, after all. But, the engineers and designers at AutoDCP.com thought
outside of the box-office and into the TV box to devise a brand-new way to deliver one of the studio’s most
important weeks of the year—LA Screenings.
Up until now, LA Screenings have largely been a tape-based affair. Projectionists, event producers and post
production specialists spent the weeks before the event practically living at the studio—waiting up for couriers
to deliver tapes, sorting, cataloging, making backups and lining things up 
for the big day. And on the big day,
while things looked smooth from the velvet seats, things were often a bit more frantic in the projection room
above—as projectionists executed a carefully choreographed ballet of tapes, levels, lighting cues and more.
The one previous attempt to take tape out of the LA Screenings equation was a (now infamous) disaster. Files were
loaded into systems designed for editing and sorting of AV assets, rather than the smooth playback of hundreds
of digital assets in a bulletproof performance environment. The show stuttered. The press was less than kind.
Heads rolled.
AutoDCP enabled the first successful, secure, file-based delivery of all assets of the studio’s 2015 LA Screenings and subsequently, screenings around the world.
So it was with some trepidation that the Television team listened to the AutoDCP team talk about DCP-based
LA Screening delivery. But with AutoDCP things were decidedly different. Assets were funneled digitally from their
locations all over the world. Suddenly, nobody had to stay up late to wait for the courier. The files were
delivered at incredible speed utilizing the studio’s Aspera account directly to AutoDCP’s secure, scalable, cloud-
based encoding system, converted to DCPs, KDMs were added for additional security, and the DCPs were then
delivered directly to the hands of the projectionist—sometimes within minutes of when the original files were
delivered for processing.
AutoDCP was used to deliver all choreographed elements of the studio’s LA Screenings—from EPKs, to announcements,
to trailers to the actual shows themselves.
Final assets were assembled into secure and simple playlists. The projectionists lined everything up. And on the
big day, there was no more tape ballet. Just a simple, straightforward playlist that was handled flawlessly by the
happy and somewhat better rested projection team.
While a happy production and projection team is a wonderful thing. It’s far from the only advantages seen with
AutoDCP. Thousands of individual elements no longer had to be couriered or shipped either within the US or
around the world. The savings were tremendous. The content moved only in an encrypted form that could not
be copied or shared. And since everything was done via AutoDCP’s infinitely scalable cloud-based system,
nobody had to feel the crunch.
“The schedule for LA Screenings was extremely tight. The entire LA Screenings delivery window was less than 10 days.
Editorial was delivering multiple last-minute versions of the content right up to the last day. AutoDCP’s scalable
system allowed us to deliver all of this content within hours of receiving it.”—Brian Quandt, CTO AutoDCP.com
But AutoDCP wasn’t done the day after the prime rib was ingested and the US LA Screenings ended. Television
continues to use AutoDCP to deliver DCPs to other parts of the world and for other purposes.
To date, over 200 DCPs comprising nearly 40 hours of material have been developed for the studio by AutoDCP—
with over 1,000 KDMs generated. 80 percent of this content was delivered during the week of the US LA Screenings.
And the creative team at AutoDCP is not willing to stop there. They continue to explore other ways to use
AutoDCP to make things just a little more secure, just a little more streamlined, quite a bit less expensive and a
whole lot easier. The AutoDCP team looks forward to continued happy collaboration with the entire studio
team.
