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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 :)

Duplicating DCPs

Paul Lee

Paul Lee

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Hi all, this has been talked about a bit in past forums but thought I'd start fresh. We will be doing a multi city roll out of a film and would like to duplicate DCPs ourselves. The "Master" DCP is being made by a reputable post house in LA and will be solid. Having sourced the various caddies and cases already, we could duplicate one at a time via a Mac with Paragon (the DCP target drives will already be Ext3 formatted), or we could look at a stand alone 1:1 or 1:5 type HDD duplicator. Anyone have luck with these workflows? Thanks ahead tons!
 
You don't even need to buy a PC. I have booted a Mac into Ubuntu from a USB stick, then made DCP copies with that.

In my experience Paragon can be painfully slow.
 
You can do it in OSX, but you will need to use some unix tools, like e2fsprogs to format the disk to EXT3 with a 128 inode.
You can use Paragon to then mount the disk in OSX for the copy. Don't use Paragon for the formatting of the disk since it only uses a default inode size. Only use it for mounting.

Best common practices for formatting a DCP drive:
http://www.knuterikevensen.com/?p=437
 
All great info here! The target drives will already be formatted in the correct Ext3 so we will not need to format with Paragon.

Any experience with stand alone duplicators?
 
Chris Henze said:
+1 for setting up a Linux computer. I tried to make DCP's on a PC and they didn't read on some systems.
Click to expand...

I've seen that happen here and there and also trying to do it from OS X. Usually it's a partitioning error and fairly easy to fix within Windows, not so easy to fix from OS X. But yeah, I would recommend setting up Linux to handle this and avoid a lot of the other hassle. Create a Linux partition or bootable disk to use. Ubuntu is great for most uses and perfect for this. And it's probably the best, and certainly the easiest, of the free distributions.

Stand-alone duplicators work fine -- be sure to wipe your target drives completely before copying to them. This means removing all partitioning info and such. Although unless you want to get into the business of duplicating drives all the time, why spend the money on a stand-alone duplication system?

No matter how you go about it, be sure to test your copies (to the best of your ability) before sending them out.
 
Hi Jeff- I've seen stand alone duplicators that don't cost much. We may need to make 10-15 or more copies and it seems cost effective in that number.
 
At 15 drives, cost-effective to me would be downloading and installing Ubuntu (free) onto it's own partition or an external USB stick or drive (got spares).... ;)

I haven't priced duplicators in while, so not sure what's out there now. Be sure if you go that route you will get one that can properly duplicate the necessary block layout and everything you need. Last time I looked at duplicators, many fell short in this. It wasn't a problem with the last one I had as what we needed was supported -- replicating Windows PC HDDs when we were shipping out a dozen or more workstations in a week.

Either way, a duplicator or simply swapping the drives around via a SATA dock connected to your Mac or PC running Linux are both valid solutions. I'd go with the latter myself since this is a relatively few drives and then you also have complete control and the ability to address problems that may come up.
 
OK, OK, you guys are presenting me with a good argument for the Linux root! :emote_hippie: The fun thing is that I will be testing all of this in the coming weeks, including playback at a major cinema chain.
 
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