Digital Cinema Package

[Sunish Issac]

Another lurker here, a cine exhibitor at a remote place in India. Professionally I'm an electronics engineer with software and embedded system experience.

For a long time, to be precise, since May 2009 I've been looking at developing an end to end open source system from creating DCPs to exhibiting via an open server hardware. It all happened when my choice was limited to Qube and UFO, who's monopolized the indian film distribution/exhibition system I plan to set up a website with my ideas and would appreciate help from like minded people out here.
Has anyone built a server from scratch and is there any reference design ?

[Pavel Klepinin]

Hello everybody.
I've been silently lurking this thread for a while, trying to learn my way in the world of DCP creation.
I happen to work in the digital cinema support field, so I have the opportunity to test the content on various server systems. To make a long story short, I succesfully created a small test clip, using open cinema tools, and starting from a set of 32bit TIFF files generated for me by a friend with After Effects (using color space XYZ). The DCP is perfectly working, but the strange thing is it seems the color depth of the frames has been reduced to 8bit during the wrapping to MXF. I say this because:
a) the same TIFFs were used with Fraunhofer EasyDCP creator and the video colors displayed correctly
b) I inspected the J2K files (created with image_to_j2k) with OPJViewer, and they seem to be ok.
I checked the options in asdcp_test, but I couldn't find anything related to color depth...

Any hints?

P.S.: Sorry for having hijacked the thread, but I thought this problem was related to the argument, and I've been following you for a while...

Maybe you can post a single 32-Bit's TIFF somewhere so we can "try in at home"?

using color space XYZ

You mean X'Y'Z' space, do you?

[Sebastiano Melmoth]

Hi Pavel and Wolfgang. I was a bit in a hurry, and reading my post again I see I've been pretty unclear :)
Of course with 32bit Tiff I was meaning 32 bit per channel (float) source, or a 24bpp tiff... And the color space is DCDM X'Y'Z'. Hope it is more clear now.

The funny thing is the source tiff were the same, but the video made with EasyDCP is perfect, the one made with opencinema tools suffers of a form of banding... Even if the colors are mainly similar between the two.

Here you can download three source frames of the clip. It is a very simple animation of a blurred text, with a very bright (>1 RGB value) color.


Thank you both for your support.

Sebastiano

[Pavel Klepinin]

Hi Pavel and Wolfgang. I was a bit in a hurry, and reading my post again I see I've been pretty unclear :)
Of course with 32bit Tiff I was meaning 32 bit per channel (float) source, or a 24bpp tiff... And the color space is DCDM X'Y'Z'. Hope it is more clear now.

The funny thing is the source tiff were the same, but the video made with EasyDCP is perfect, the one made with opencinema tools suffers of a form of banding... Even if the colors are mainly similar between the two.

Here you can download three source frames of the clip. It is a very simple animation of a blurred text, with a very bright (>1 RGB value) color.


Thank you both for your support.

Sebastiano

Here is DCP project from your tifs i compiled by OpenCinema Tools with my bat-file. I can't really test on DCP server in a few days, but EasyDCP player shows the right colors and right colordepth. As for my monitor and eyes :)

2 Sunish Issac.

I have a question.
What is the main goal of your project?
To built a server (linux computer) that can convert film to DCP project or to play DCP projects?
If it's a converter it should convert realtime or what conversion time would be accepable?

[Sebastiano Melmoth]

Thank you Pavel.
My movie, when viewed with EasyDCP Player, looks identical to yours, so in the end we used the same process to create it.
When viewed at the cinema it looks wrong. On the other side, the project assembled with EasyDCP creator looks bad in EasyDCP player, but displays correctly at the cinema (doremi DCP20000+barco DP2000). I'm confused.

This project is just for learning purpose, geared at a better knowledge of the tecnology involved. But I must say I also need to create some DCP every now and then, so if I cannot develop a consistent workflow with open tools (which I'd prefer), I'll have to switch to EasyDCP creator. I even tried Doremi cineasset, but it's really slow compared to fraunhofer software, and crashes a lot. At least in my quick tests.

[Sebastiano Melmoth]

Just a small note. I noticed the file created by EasyDCP is smaller than the one created by opencinema tools, of course always starting from the same set of tiffs. Maybe it uses a better solution for the compression to j2c (it's even much faster...).

[Love]

Hi Wolfgang
U describe the use of opencinema tools to creating DCP.
I have some quesyion in them
1.How to use Open cinema tools for MXF interop (MPEG DCP)
2.Size of JPEG DCP is much higher in the compare of Easy DCP Or Doremi cine asset Package
3. Can we reduce the size of MXF which we create from "asdcp-test".
Thanks
Love

[Pavel Klepinin]

Check Wolfgang's http://wiki.github.com/wolfgangw/digital_cinema_tools/ for a very usefull information.

[ArtReaktor]

Hello everybody!
I'm working at theatre chain in Kiev, Ukraine.
Thanks to Wolfgang and Pavel I have compiled my firs DCP! I tested it on CHRISTIE digital projector with success.
But second reel is a big problem. It's 4 minutes chocolate commercial.
I'm using Pavel's pipeline. It works just fine, EasyDCP player play it correctly, but CHRISTIE projector doesn't accept reel. Any suggestions?

[ArtReaktor]

Also I discovered that ImageMagic comand line should contain -type truecolor before output image name.
If your movie contains any completely black frame ImageMagic produce 1-component *.tif. After j2c conversion asdcp-test brings error: unexpected number of components 1 with this file. So, your command line should looks like:

convert "img.ppm" -alpha Off -depth 12 -gamma 0.454545 -recolor "0.4124564 0.3575761 0.1804375 0.2126729 0.7151522 0.0721750 0.0193339 0.1191920 0.9503041" -gamma 2.6 -type truecolor "img.tif"

Other question is how to obtain j2c-sequence with After Effects and J2K plug-in (http://www.fnordware.com/j2k/)
When I trying render j2c-sequence After Effects just stops after first frame. It produce 0 Kb file.