The amazing thing about picture and sound is that no one understands either of them completely, even after thousands of years of study. It was only 110 years ago that Einstein proposed what seems to be the best working theory for light, and every year someone makes progress proving another piece of his ideas.
More recently, it was a long and hard 15 year transition from film to digital projection, with a lot of lessons learned. And now it seems projectors are changing again, to laser light…a completely different set of ideas. Audio also has many topics that are argued about in the professional groups. There’s always something to learn.
The point is: Don’t be feeling like you’re the only one who still has confusion in these areas. Those confusions are what we are going to work on, bit by bit, some through these Lessons, and some while doing the practical and important steps of watching and listening to the Manager’s Walk Through Series DCPs – and using the associated Checklist. <!–more–>Be certain that you let us know if we skip a step in explaining these things, if there is a lingering misunderstanding, a word not well defined – use the Comments below, or write to us on the <a href=”http://www.cinematesttools.com/index.php/contact-please/”>Contact, Please</a> page, and when we get it going, please be involved with the forum.
Let’s start. A <strong>DCP</strong> is a <strong>D</strong>igital <strong>C</strong>inema <strong>P</strong>ackage. This package holds all the frames of the movie, all the music, dialog, sound effects, all the subtitles and files for the blind/partially sighted, deaf and hard of hearing, and some extra files that tell which ones to play, and when. Most of the time, these are made so that no one can steal the valuable parts, so they might use what the security people call Encryption. They can only be opened and played by a projector with permission, and that permission comes with security keys that are sent by the studios, or the groups they put in charge (usually the distributors.)
To make all the parts work together, those parts that are described above in that one little paragraph, took 10s of 1,000s of hours of engineering time from groups like the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers (celebrating 100 years of activity this year! Congratulations SMPTE!) and more 1,000s of hours from the studios and cinematographers and sound editors and manufacturers. There is a group called the Inter-Society Digital Cinema Forum (ISDCF) which still meets every month to discuss the pain points that occur with the standards and recommended practices that these groups and equipment developed.
That DCP also contains the hopes and dreams of a director and producers who spent 10s of 1,000s of hours to build an idea that they want to transfer into the minds of your audience, using your equipment. Generally, we call this the Artist’s Intent.
With so many parts to the DCP, and so many parts to the equipment in between the DCP and the screen, there is a chance that there will be a problem, and that some of these problems will negatively flavor the Artist’s Intent. Thankfully, many of those potential problems have been discovered and made less likely. But there are some problems that can never be permanently fixed and some circumstances that make problems appear ‘just because’, and that is the point of the Checklists and their associated DCPs.
When things go wrong, we want to discover those problems early, before your customers discover them. And, we want to discover them in a way that we can logically present them to the Tech Support Staff. With good information, they can fix the problems most efficiently.
OK; we’ve covered a lot, and each bit has layers of potential questions. Thanks for reading, and please – ask questions.
Here is the link for the Managers Walk Through Series Report Form. You don’t need a password if you just prove that you are a human.
