It's funny, when you read that from others, isn't it?
I will only add to those anecdotes the one where the name of a DCP was <title>_dcp, made by Premiere, and the title had the character „í“ (mark the acute accent on top).
It wreaked havoc in a Cat.745 and I couldn't figure out why the hell was it that the IMB wouldn't connect unless I would reboot both the server and the projector. Then, I noticed the irregular character that the maker used!
That Eddie (Edward A.) Murphy law fully applied.
Edit: Because the Dolby DSS media block is not the Cat.765...
Last edited by IoannisSyrogiannis on Wed Oct 23, 2024 4:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Like Carsten wrote, festivals often have their own solutions or portals. Commercial distributors (big or small) has their own channels for receiving and distributing DCP's. Post-production houses use other (very reliable) transfer services to get wip or press-screeners directly into theatres.
Left are independent screenings, self distributors and micro festivals. Not saying DCPshare is a bad initiative, but I think they really need to get the majority of festivals on-board to get some kind of traction going.
I have been bitten by ZIP once.
Transferred the DCP without zipping via WeTransfer. But as soon as you click download all files it will get zipped and that will then result in a checksum error on the receivers end.
The same happend when I zipped the DCP with WinRAR and the receiver unzipped that.
I settled with WinRAR and using RAR5 with 3% recovery data plus Blake2 hash and splitting up into 10GB parts.
That works perfectly every time. Except for once when the IT expert of a cinema downloaded the files from WeTransfer all at once, unzipped the WeTransfer ZIP and then called me to tell me I had not sent him a DCP. I had to tell him to unRAR the unzipped files too - and like a miracle it turned out to be a playable DCP...
And I am not putting the IT expert into quotes, because he really WAS their actual IT expert who had setup all their networks, servers and security.
Maybe he had a brief moment of brain fog or so.
And we still have to deal with some cinemas all over the country who have such a low download bandwidth that they require us to send in USB sticks (which you'll never get returned of course).
