Anyway to select SMPTE A to avoid metadata issues?

Anything and everything to do with DCP-o-matic.
Carsten
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Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2014 9:11 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Anyway to select SMPTE A to avoid metadata issues?

Post by Carsten »

I don't think it's a good idea to enable all sorts of non-standard options in the GUI. I understand why some people may want that functionality, but we risk that this is getting out of control. We will see hints to enable SMPTE 2.0 in order to pass EasyDCP checks, then later we will probably notice that more recent versions of EasyDCP will reject that same format enforcing RDD52. And soon we are at the point again that 'DCP-o-matic is not creating compliant DCPs'. We can't control all these issues, like e.g. finding out which version of EasyDCP a specific distributor uses, and how to react to it.

And I don't think putting those options into advanced settings will help.

I wish we had a special, hidden version for 'power users'. My preferred solution would be to hide all these options in the GUI, and make them only accessible by editing the preferences file manually (there are already a couple of switches in the settings file that can only be changed that way).

Then at least we can be sure that these options are not set accidentally, and that, if someone REALLY needs them, he'd be willing and able to edit them that way.
carl
Site Admin
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Joined: Thu Nov 14, 2013 2:53 pm

Re: Anyway to select SMPTE A to avoid metadata issues?

Post by carl »

It's a difficult area. We're doing some tests now against EasyDCP 4.1.2 so hopefully that should clarify things a bit. Maybe the Bv2.0 option can go away again...

I'm hoping to work out whether it's even possible to make DoM reasonably "foolproof" against all "QC" software that is being used in the field. If not, I guess that's the time to decide whether to offer users the options they might need to appease whatever a distributor demands, or whether rather to try to empower them to ask questions about what software is being used, and to point out when it is flawed.
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