At this lens searcher website from Sony you can see that projectors and masking is programmed with a minimum of Scope and Flat presets and that theatres are either constant height or constant width:

http://assets.sonybiz.net/Web/DCinema/10-02-17%20DCinema%20Lens%20Finder/TheatreLensSearcher/information.html

You can also see that some cinemas have both side and top masking. A constant height theatre could also have top masking so theoretically a 2:1 ratio film in a Flat container could be masked. Presets for masking 1.33:1 and 1.777:1 is common. 2048 x 1080 will not fit any of the presets. A custom preset could be made in a common height theatre if you program the side masking to go a little further than flat and remove the option to mask away pixels beyond 1998 in the projector. In a constant width theatre the custom preset could be programmed to use the same zoom as the scope preset, remove the masking of pixels beyond 858 in the projector and make a custom top masking.

Regarding the scope, no. 2048×858 is approximately 2.39 (2.387), and the original film was 2.35; the decision was made to not crop more off the top and bottom to make it 2.39. This has nothing to do with any theater; this was a decision made by the filmmaker.

I don’t understand either the rationale or the description in the DCP documentation regarding the fact that anything from 1998 to 2048 is cropped. Is this how DCPs are, and the documentation is incomplete, or is this just your personal experience with the theaters in which you’ve projected? The only reason I’m harping on this is because I can’t find any other source of information which states unequivocally that 2048×1080 is always cropped.

I suppose in order to do things properly, I’ll have to make a test pattern so I can see what gets cut off where and bring it with me to each theater… Can’t we ever have ANY standard which is consistent?

It seems you have been to a constant width theatre were Scope is much smaller than
Flat. This is a terrible solution. But the common width theatre could also just have presets
for Scope and Flat. Those should always be your targets.

Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but you seem to be implying that the pixels beyond 1998 aren’t used or shouldn’t be used. I was under the impression that one could just treat a 2k DCP projection as 2048×1080 square pixels and either pillar or letterbox as needed:

2:1 would be 2048×1080 with 28 lines of letterboxing on the the top and bottom;
1.85 would be 1998×1080 with 25 pixels of pillarboxing on the left and right;
1.77 would be 1920×1080 with 64 pixels of pillarboxing on the left and right.

Why would, as you said above (“If all the 2048×1024 information is vital scale to a 1998×1080 container”…) anyone want to scale down to 1998 from 2048, then increase the letterboxing as opposed to just creating a 2048×1080 letterboxed 2:1?

I ask because I’ve recently just created exactly that – a 2048×1080 DCP letterboxed from a 2048×1024 source.

I’ve also created a 2.35 aspect 2048×870 DCP which I’ve letterboxed into a 2048×1080 because the creator didn’t want it cropped to 2.39 (2048×858); the theater where it was projected simply masked it without masking all the way to 2.39, so I wonder if I’m missing something when I interpret what you write to imply that one should prefer 1998×1080 containers and one shouldn’t letterbox if at all possible.

Thanks!

I have a question. If I have a 1920 x 1080 movie in 1.85:1 and I export it to a tiff sequence in 1998 x 1080, do I have to zoom the picture as well or should I add some black padding in left and right side to prevent the the image from being stretched vertically?

Best,
Peter

I just ran my first test with easyDCP and ended up with something that looked like a DCP. Now I’ll do the trailer I’ve been working on and tomorrow I’ll take it to a cinema and see if it works.

Thanks again, guys. This is a great thing to be able to do.

Craig

[hal-mbp2oo8:~/desktop/1] craigcobb% find . -iname “*.dpx” -exec echo mogrify -format dpx “{}” \;
mogrify -format dpx ./Altshotscolortest_g1.0000000.dpx
mogrify -format dpx ./Altshotscolortest_g1.0000001.dpx
…

But when I ran the actual string to mogrify the files (double-checking for simple quotes), I get this:

[hal-mbp2oo8:~/desktop/1] craigcobb% find . -iname “*.dpx” -exec mogrify -format dpx “{}” \;
find: mogrify: No such file or directory
find: mogrify: No such file or directory
…

Any ideas? I double-checked that imagemagick was installed, and it appears that everything is there. The “echo” command is a “dry run” and wouldn’t have worked if something was wrong, no?

You guys are my heros.

Craig

the command was a quick hack, based on a different more complicated script, and was whipped up in a second while we were working on converting a demo in time for a screening.

It is a bit easier to debug if you rewrite it like this:

find . -iname “*.dpx” -exec mogrify -format dpx “{}” \;

Note also that OS X rewrites regular quotes (like you get from shift-2 on most keyboards/setups” to pretty typographic quotes when you copy-paste text.

To try to figure out what’s wrong, start out by trying to just run the mogrify-command by hand:

mogrify

If that works, try to see if find, finds your files:

find . -iname “*.dpx”

If that also works, echo can help with debugging the command line:

find . -iname “*.dpx” -exec echo mogrify -format dpx “{}” \;
#Note the above command does nothing with the files, it just lists the
#commands find would run on the files that match the pattern.

Hope that helps.

-Eirik