The famous Fantasy Filmfest 2011 was powered by Digital Cinema Packages created using FinalDCP encoding solution
our simple answer to everydays demands for any filmmaker entering the big digital screens.

Within a very short time frame less than three weeks we had to produce around 35 Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) for the Fantasy Filmfest 2011, germanys probably most famous Film Festival touring through major german cities during August and September 2011.

The huge task of processing several millions of frames for so many movies in such a short time requires an extremely streamlined and efficient production pipeline. Many so called “realtime” solutions aren’t realtime at all when you look at them carefully. Some systems need you to capture, then transcode, then export, then save to disk and review. All in all, even the most well known systems will hardly spit out more than one feature film in a day, realistically.

Here is our simply and efficient networked pipeline, costing only “pieces” of other systems while giving us an uncomparable speed:

We ingested from HD CAM etc. decks using a Blackmagic Design HD-SDI capture card and directly to CineForm AVI format in Filmscan 1 mode, using CineForms simple HD Link capture tool. When required, frame rate changes etc. got applied to the movie.

We also got material from HD CAM SR which we let ingest at another studioes HD CAM SR deck into Apple ProRes4444 format (again using a Blackmagic Design card and FCP in this case).

The resulting CineForm AVIs and ProRes MOVs got thrown onto our new network Converter, the powerful backbone technology also powering FinalDCP encoding. This network transcoder allows conversion between various formats such as RED EPIC, ONE M-X, ONE, SI2K, CineForm (2D/3D), ProRes (FCP, ARRI Alexa), Quicktime, AVI, DPX-C, JPEG2000 and many more formats. It consists of the actual Converter front end application, the RenderManager application and the RenderNode clients.

You simply start the RenderNode clients on any machine you want to participate in transcoding files and thats it, no more configuration required – guaranteed! The RenderManager will automatically find the RenderNodes, as well as the Converter application will automatically find all RenderManagers.

Streamlined for bulk transcodings, we can easily get your CPUs to 100% load during conversion – often a problem with e.g. compositing apps doing bulk conversion composites.

Using a render farm with just 10 * dual i7 Nehalem quadcore CPUs at 2.66 GHz each (effectively running 80 physical cores, 160 with Hyper Threading) we got easily beyond realtime performance in JPEG2000 encoding from CineForm or ProRes. Depending in you network throughput, you can get several times realtime speed easily.

Typically we required less than 300 to 400 GByte disk space all in all from ingest to transcode to final DCP for a classical 90 minutes feature. Compared to systems that require you to given them uncompressed TIFF or DPX to eat, you save roughly 80% disk space at least – and a lot of time.

Audio (2.0 and 5.1) was stretched if necessary and all assets where brought into FinalDCP for encoding single stream reel DCPs for each movie.

The resulting DCPs played successfully throughout the entire showtime of the Fantasy Filmfest 2011 on a vast mix of player and projector system combinations along their run through theaters in germany. For us this was the last major testbed to let FinalDCP show its real power.

FinalDCP is the defacto solution for film festivals entering the digital age, by having a tool that any film producer can afford and use on her or his own PC or MAC system to create the entry for the festival. So in future festivals can easily expect even indy filmmakers to deliver valid DCPs, distributing the workload to create DCPs from the festival towards the participants. This decentralized approach brings back what was common with 35mm: Everyone is repsonsible for his own content and can easily take care of it. And festivals can concentrate on festivals and not on conversion jobs.

While you read this, the interface of FinalDCP gets filled with a lot new functionality and the network rendering gets embedded, so that you will be able to do all required steps from a video file to a working DCP as simple as clicking a button.

With the above setup we can realistically encode several feature length DCPs at less cost than a single hardware based DCP encoding system in a single day.

Stay tuned for more news shortly, as FinalDCP will be available for testing very soon.

If you are interested, please drop us an email to sales@magnamana.com and we will be contacting you as soon as FinalDCP becomes available.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them as well. We are very happy about the tremendous user feedback and interest so far and can’t wait to get it out in your hands.

Best regards & talk soon,

The FinalDCP Team