Festival unable to ingest DCP

[carl]

I sometimes wonder what the "hard part" is here - in other words, how could we make a thing where 1 click in DCP-o-matic uploads a DCP to some place X and then on the other end there is a foolproof way to download it.

How to pay for the servers is I guess the practical hurdle, but I wonder why there are still so many different ways to get this wrong.

[mhm]

https://xkcd.com/949/

[Carsten]

The question is - would we want cloud storage to allow for an async up- and download (cloud space costs money), or would a point-to-point connection be more effective. I used Resilio sync to transfer DCPs directly to a single recipient. It works very fast and saturates the available bandwidth (if configured to do so). It needs two machines active on both sides during transfer, but the transfer can be interrupted, both machines may be rebooted, etc., and the transfer resumes until everything is synced. Doing it this way is probably the fastest and safest 'internet' transfer option.

Cloud space would allow sender and receiver to follow their own schedule for upload and download. It will also allow to download a DCP multiple times by different receivers, so is more suitable for one-to-many distribution.


I guess it's not easy to offer something that caters for all needs. Also, most festivals offer their own solutions tailored to festival operations.

[carl]

From some in-depth (5-minute) research it seems like it actually might be nearly impossible to have a web site where a user clicks a button and a folder is downloaded to their computer. Everyone says "ah just use ZIP", and then here we are!

[Carsten]

There's a dozen threads about this on forums like slashcam. Everyone comes up with his own 'best' solution. From dropbox, gdrive, wetransfer, to FTPing through router portholes, or sending a USB stick with snail mail.

[carl]

It looks like downloading a folder via the browser is doomed to failure, so I guess the best dcp-o-matic-centric answer would be a tool in dcp-o-matic, or something separate - one side it goes up, the other side it goes down again, we try a little bit not to let just anybody download your DCP but if you want security, use a KDM ...

Though malicious downloads are I guess a problem if they are chargeable.

Digitalocean object storage is $0.02/GiB/month, transfer is $0.01/GiB so for a 50GiB DCP you're looking at costs of $1 to store/month and $0.50 per download. Sadly the hardest questions are probably who pays for it, how do they pay for it, and whether it costs me more to sort out the tax situation than it earns!

[carl]

Looks like somebody else is having a go.

https://en.dcptools.com/dcp-share.php

[Carsten]

That seems to be another Fraunhofer spin-off.

[carl]

I just had to get a DCP from google drive; I clicked "Download" on the folder and it gave me a ZIP file containing everything except the picture MXF, then the picture MXF separately, with the wrong name ... no wonder people have trouble.

[Kewl]

I just had to get a DCP from google drive; I clicked "Download" on the folder and it gave me a ZIP file containing everything except the picture MXF, then the picture MXF separately, with the wrong name ... no wonder people have trouble.

The exact same thing happened to me last week. A student put a DCP on Google drive and I had to get it for a show tomorrow night: the picture MXF was also separate.

Moreover, the level of troubles were multiple: that DCP was made up of an OV and a VF and the student included the whole DOM folder: that folder was twice as big as necessary! And the ICMP server didn't like the VF... Other students from that group also included the whole DOM folder.

I said to the professor responsible for that group to never again ask them to deliver DCPs.