gearing up for DCP making

[toute]

Hi all!

I'm looking to get geared up for DCP creation, and wanted to ask the DCP-o-matic community for advices.

My 2014 i5 MacBook Pro just passed away, and I need a new personnal computer.
I need it to also be of use for work, mostly for audio recording and post-production, maybe some musical performances, but also for occasionnal DCP creation, and some very light administrative tasks.
I would prefer to stay on macOS, but my mind is not closed on this.
I aim portability, since it will be replacing a laptop. I don't use computers in coffee shops anymore, a portable desktop computer could also work, plus I already have all the peripherals needed.


I have a couple years experience as a cinema projectionnist, throughout which I have here and there created DCP and managed print traffic.
I used my old mbp to create some DCPs of short films for a film festival. It was ridiculously slow, like between 1&2 fps, but it was okay because there wasn't too many. The Player obvisouly couldn't playback properly, even at a quarter of the resolution: it really only looked like a slideshow.


My next gig will be more important, so I will need more performance. I don't necessarily expect real-time speed, but something more workable than spending a whole work day on a short. I guess it is a CPU matter here, isn't it? Any type of processor better than others for that?

I also wonder about DCP verification. Anything that will help me get the Player running smoothly? Am I overkilling it in wanting to watch every last frame of my DCPs? Or is it the least I have to do?
The theatre will let me run tests of every DCP, but watching them all coast-to-coast seems like so much waste of lamp life.


So I was mostly looking at the new M4 Mac Mini. The bang for buck looks incredible.
Would that be enough? Would it be better to get an older, top-of-the-line Mac Mini, like M2 Pro, or the entry-level M4?
Would I be better off with a Mac Studio or is it overkill? If a studio is needed, maybe to rent something for a month would be wiser.
Any thoughts on other makes/models alternatives?


Any information or thoughts will be greatly appreciated !

[Carsten]

I am a Mac user myself, but as far as DCP encoding goes, currently the fastest encoding is on a Ryzen 7 CPU. I recently found a few tests about very cheap small footprint Windows machines using Ryzen CPUs that are sold in the 200-300€ range.

We do not have that many benchmarks for later Mac systems, unfortunately. In general, the more cores the CPU offers, the faster the encoding.

I did the Sintel benchmark myself recently on an M3 pro MacBook Pro, it did 20fps in 2.16.91, and 29.5fps for 2.17.19. I don't know if the J2K encoding changes of 2.17.x are already in 2.18.


You could buy a decent Mac machine for the front-end work, and add a cheap Ryzen 7 Mini-PC as a network encoder later.

https://dcpomatic.com/benchmarks/input.php?id=1


You can also look up the CPU passmark performance tables - this CPU benchmark number is pretty much linear with DCP-o-matic J2K encoding performance.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html