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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Digital Cinema Package

On my PC system Redcine sucks too while exporting DPX sequences. I found another way : using After Effects and the Red importer plugin (downloadable at red.com/support). You can create batch exports of 10 bits DPX at full resolution. Quite slow. Sure there might be problems of time code, etc.. (I haven't tested all the details, I'm so desperate to be on PC as Red releases most of the useful apps on Mac).
 
FYI, there is a new version of EasyDCP called EasyDCP+ (still in Beta, you can email and ask for a test license, same deal with the logo top-left corner) which also does stereo 3D packaging, and KDM generation & encryption of the DCP.
I'm testing that at the moment for RealD 3D playback.... seems to work fine.... for the most part (no pun on Mike's name intended).

Also, Doremi have a software package called CineAsset, more open to "fiddle" with your images, but I seem to be having some colour weirdness at the Cinema with it... maybe attributable to Mike's comment about the P3 colour space... since I was feeding it Rec709 material.

DVS Clipster seems to be the bees-knees (had a demo last week) for serious DCP generation and playback for QC... quite $$ though.
Hmmm, and a lot of similarity between the hardware card and a little red-rocket...:rolleyes:
 
Chris Swinbanks said:
FYI, there is a new version of EasyDCP called EasyDCP+ (still in Beta, you can email and ask for a test license, same deal with the logo top-left corner) which also does stereo 3D packaging, and KDM generation & encryption of the DCP.
I'm testing that at the moment for RealD 3D playback.... seems to work fine.... for the most part (no pun on Mike's name intended).

Also, Doremi have a software package called CineAsset, more open to "fiddle" with your images, but I seem to be having some colour weirdness at the Cinema with it... maybe attributable to Mike's comment about the P3 colour space... since I was feeding it Rec709 material.

DVS Clipster seems to be the bees-knees (had a demo last week) for serious DCP generation and playback for QC... quite $$ though.
Hmmm, and a lot of similarity between the hardware card and a little red-rocket...:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Dang, CineAsset is pretty sweet! It lets you bypass like 95% of what my tutorial drags you through for pre-processing! I'll have to test out a new DCP on that to see those color issues you mentioned.
 
Hi, I've been experimenting with the demo versions of EasyDCP (which by the way is $2000 EURO-- or almost $3000!) and Wraptor ($700 but with no support). Taking the same TIFF/DPX sequence, the DCP created by EasyDCP looks great on the digital projector in my local theater. But the Wraptor DCP from the exact same sequence (via Final Cut Pro) looks dark and color shifted. I've tried many different settings with no success. I can output a Quictime file or DVD and it looks great-- but not from Wraptor.

So it seems that EasyDCP works perfects with files set up for normal HD computer Gamma, and maybe Wraptor expects something different. Or I am doing something totally wrong with Wraptor and its settings.

Has anyone successfully used Wraptor and could they share their basic settings? What Apple OS do you use, what version of FCP and compressor? And what type of file have you converted? I have a film that needs a DCP for a festival, and I can afford the $700 Wraptor license but not the $3000 EasyDCP program.

Any advice/help would be greatly appreciated!
 
Open Cinema Tools is basically for developers at this point. You would need engineering-level skills to to the YUV/RGB to XYZ color conversion, MXF wrapping, etc. This is not a program you can run on Windows or a Mac, feed in your image sequence and get out a DCP.

Hopefully someone will take these tools and make a program that filmmakers can use. Making DCPs should be as easy as making a DVD.
 
Leerafel said:
Dang, CineAsset is pretty sweet! It lets you bypass like 95% of what my tutorial drags you through for pre-processing! I'll have to test out a new DCP on that to see those color issues you mentioned.
Click to expand...

Have you been able to test your DCP at a Studio or Theater ?
 
Jim Geduldick said:
Have you been able to test your DCP at a Studio or Theater ?
Click to expand...

I've only been able to test my DCP made by EasyDCP in the cinema, but I am still fiddling around with CineAsset, and have not yet created a test package.

Here is an update on EasyDCP with Vista x64 - I have continued to encounter various problems running EasyDCP in Vista 64, even after changing its compatability to Win 98, which seemed to fix a lot of problems. I was unable to import audio, and thus, unable to make a complete DCP.

I contacted Fraunhofer, and they sent me a newer, although unpublished version to toy with (v1.2.2) and it seems to work fine on my 64 bit system without requiring any special treatment. Either wait for that newer version to be published, or contact Fraunhofer to get the Vista compatible version.
 
One thing that should be considered it the aspect ratio. Digital cinema projectors have a resolution of 2048x1080, but you shouldn't encode your film at that aspect ratio or it will crop parts in the theater.

Basic resolutions for digital cinema are still based on flat and scope like film. Flat is 1998x1080 and scope is 2048x858. DCI projectors/servers are set up to handle this.

I also just want to throw it out there that I've been doing digital cinema mastering for about a year and a half now. I work with a QubeMaster Pro encoding system, Qube DCI server, and a Christie DCI projector. I can say that even with the right equipment, there are still little things that aren't exactly straight forward and can cause problems if you're not careful.

So if any of you guys need some help with a project let me know and I'll work out a good rate.

-Russ
 
Making a DCP with opencinematools

Making a DCP with opencinematools

Adil Lahoulou said:
has anyone tested the open source dcp maker?

http://code.google.com/p/opencinematools/downloads/list
Click to expand...

Hi Adil, I've been experimenting with this and the related tools for a while now. Be aware that "DCP Maker" is merely a frontend for openjpeg's JPEG2000 implementation (http://www.openjpeg.org/), asdcplib (http://www.cinecert.com/asdcplib/) and 3 tiny tools to write the xml for cpl, pkl, volindex and assetmap. "opencinematools" is these 3 tiny tools and the gui, basically.

It works, too. No colorspace conversion etc. though. You need to get white reference, gamma and XYZ conversion right beforehand. Which has been a bumpy road :) Plus it crawls into a corner and silently dies if some of your assets are not exactly right. So there.

My toolchain lives on a linux box and I use ImageMagick's convert to adjust size, bit-depth and colorspace (Bruce Lindbloom's http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.html is a great resource for color stuff. RGB<->XYZ matrices on http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.html?Eqn_RGB_XYZ_Matrix.html).

The commercial packages (Doremi etc.) play in a different league wrt stability, user-friendliness and options. Initially being appalled at their price tags (and what post-houses charge for DCP mastering) I now think it's pretty much justified. Reliability has a price. A good QC setup has a price. No-hassle delivery has a price.
But still: If you dig into it, build some contacts with your local digital theaters too, you can use opencinematools for free. No watermarking, no length-restriction. Hey, even support some starving indie who will never ever be able to afford current prices.

I've been wondering: Is DCI/DCP a good enough platform for stuff? I have a hunch that playback servers will include more and more formats. Obviously Red's Red Ray is a useful idea. People are building all kinds of playback boxes. But some say that in all of film distribution's history players sat down, smoked a pipe and said "We'll all use this now" and that's how it grew to be a global distribution business. Which is pretty remarkable, when you think about it.

Wolfgang Woehl

ps: I don't have the faintest idea how my daughter's pig puppet's name happened to become my reduser name. Would someone red to rock care to fix this? :piggy: Much obliged.
 
As to easy DCP/MMOST you can feed it with jpg2000, but then you'll need to have graded for DCP, because no color/gamma convertion will be done... according to the manual.

Wraptor works ok, but you'll need an "old" FCS installation for it to work.

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=34776
 
2tina, I was very interested in your post about open cinema tools. It's a great tool for DCP, at least it works :) So, we could use it for making 3D DCP. And it worked, but without any right color. I think it was the RGB->XYZ problem. Tools we used to make tiff files couldn't make real colorspace translation. Could you please show us the right way on this "bumpy road" :). Another words could you tell me the options you used for ImageMagick conversion ("I use ImageMagick's convert to adjust size, bit-depth and colorspace")?
 
Hi Pavel, a bash one-liner I'm using to convert sRGB tiffs to XYZ, drop the original's alpha channel, scale and set bit depth to 12:

for f in *tif; do
convert $f -alpha Off -resize 2048x1080 -recolor "
0.4124564 0.3575761 0.1804375
0.2126729 0.7151522 0.0721750
0.0193339 0.1191920 0.9503041" -depth 12 ../tiffs-xyz-scaled/$f;
done

Wolfgang Woehl
 
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2Wolfgang Woehl, Danke schön!
It works, and it works perfect. I'd also want to add that if anyone would use these tools. Never use adobe products for generating or converting tiff's. It adds specifics tags in tiff, that couldn't been recognized by other programs (e.g. image_to_j2k). Also this file image_to_j2k you should take from the original OpenJPEG200 package, the opencinematools' file contains a tiff related error (at least now 2009-12-19 version 1.1.2). Looks like we've mentioned all the rocks on this "bumpy road". Questions are welcomed. This information is based on experiments with Dolby DSS-200 server. I hope it's also right for other servers, but i don't realy know
And the first question is mine. What about generating content. We used 3D max's tiff sequence, generated by 2 cameras. But we couldn't manage flying outside effect. I mean an effect when some object is hanging in the middle of the cinema hall. Can anyone give me advice, information or, i, don't know, book, tips and tricks of stereoscopic content :)? Or if you generate live content with 2-cameras equipment (that's more probable, see forum name :) ). What equipment can i use for stereoscopic shooting on semi-pro level?
 
Pavel,

Wrt Adobe/Tiffs: In general I'd say Adobe knows pretty much all there is to know about TIFF so it's quite likely openjpeg2000 that is to blame here. Which tiff tags did your image_to_j2k choke on? You can probably always use ImageMagick tools to align your files with image_to_j2k's expectations.

Wrt server compliance: Go upload a small DCP somewhere -- I can test on XDC Cinestore Solo G3 and Doremi DCP-2000. And yes, you could return the favor, no Dolby servers here :)
 
2Wolfgang,

Adobe/Tiff:
I made a mistake it was not an error, but а warning. But I use Windows, so i couldn't suspend this message, I had to push "ok" 2 times on every single frame!!!! For every eye!!!!
This warning is
"Unknown field with tag 700 (0x2bc) ignored" and
"Unknown field with tag 34665 (0x8769) ignored."
This warning appears on hardly every opensource graphics forum (ImageMagick, LibTiff and so on). Unfortunately i've lost the right link, but someone sad that these tags contain adobe property information, so they can't be treat by opensource or something like that.

DC Servers:
Sure, I can test your projects. Upload it. If its not very big.
As about our projects, now we have no good projects. We tested it on 2 3DMax-generated images, copied 50 times :) So, we've got 2 seconds of still stereoscopic image :) But we are going to convert our logo jingle into stereo 3D, so i will send it.
 
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