Adding soundtracks or subtitles in different languages

Adding soundtracks or subtitles in different languages
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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 high-speed 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.
Select the video tab and tick Use this DCP's video as OV and make VF (you may need to select By video content for Reel type in the DCP tab).
Do the same in the Audio tab if your OV has audio.
Add your language-specific audio and/or subtitles and Make DCP.