In most cases, some adjustments would be made to DCP-o-matic's settings once the content has been added. For our simple test, however, the default values are fine, so we can go straight onto making the DCP.

Choose Make DCP from the Jobs menu. Before encoding your DCP, DCP-o-matic will run a series of checks on your film to look for things that might cause problems when playing back the DCP. If any potential problems are found, DCP-o-matic will show you a list of hints. Each hint describes what was found and gives advice on how to resolve it. If hints are found and reported, you can either Make DCP anyway (without adjusting any settings), or Go back in order to make adjustments before encoding the DCP.

If no hints were found (or you pressed Make DCP after hints were displayed), DCP-o-matic will encode your DCP. This may take some time (many hours in some cases). While the job is in progress, DCP-o-matic will update you with the progress bar in the bottom of the window, as shown in Figure 3.6, “Making the DCP”.

When it has finished, the DCP will be written into its own folder inside the film's folder. You can copy this to a projector via a USB stick, hard-drive or network connection. See Chapter 14, Generated files for details about the files that DCP-o-matic creates, and Chapter 20, Writing DCPs to disks for details of a DCP-o-matic tool which can write the DCP to an external hard-drive.

Alternatively, DCP-o-matic can upload your DCP directly to a projector or Theatre Management System (TMS) that is accessible via SCP or FTP across your network. See the section called “TMS preferences”.