Adding soundtracks or subtitles in different languages
If you have a film that is to be dubbed or subtitled in several
languages, the best approach with DCP-o-matic is as follows:
- Make a DCP with the common elements (perhaps just the video, or maybe the video and sound); this is known as the Original Version (OV).
- For each language, make a new Version File (VF) DCP which refers to the OV.
Once you have done this, you send the OV DCP to every cinema and then
the appropriate VF to each cinema depending on what language they want
to play the film in. The projectionist ingests both DCPs and then plays the VF.
The advantage of this approach is that the VF DCPs are much smaller
than the OV since they only have the language-specific parts. If you
are just changing the subtitles you can often ship the OV by normal
transport means (e.g. a hard drive or download) and send
the VF by email.
The full details of OV and VF files are discussed in the section called “Making overlay files”. The steps can be summarised as follows:
- Create a new DCP-o-matic project for the OV, as normal, adding video and perhaps sound. Make the DCP.
- Create a new DCP-o-matic project for the VF.
- Use Add folder... to add your OV DCP to the project.
- Open the Version File (VF) setup dialogue box using the Version File (VF)... option in the Tools menu.
- Tick the Video checkbox next to your existing DCP's name (you may need to select By video content for Reel type in the DCP tab).
- Check also the Audio checkbox if your OV has audio.
- Add your language-specific audio and/or subtitles and Make DCP.