You can export your work from Adobe Premiere Pro as a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) and (with advance notice) check it in our digital cinema. Here’s some background.
In March 2002, Disney, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. Studios formed a joint venture, called the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI), to explore the cinema’s digital future with two goals: standards and security. How can moviemakers be assured their work is seen and heard as consistently as possible in cinemas around the world? How can the work be protected against piracy? A standard emerged that’s how movies are exhibited in cinemas to this day. Here’s a link to the current DCI spec if you ever need to refer to it.
In August 2019, Weitz Cinema became a proper digital cinema, commissioned according to the same specs as others around the world. If a distributor sends us a DCP, we can play content from it, and the moviemaker can expect that our audience is seeing and hearing it as they intended. If you make a DCP and check it in our cinema, you can send it to festivals, for instance, with the same degree of confidence.
Wraptor is one of many programs created to let moviemakers make a DCP of their work. In 2014, it was incorporated into Adobe Creative Cloud. Wraptor DCP is simply another choice when using the Export Media command in Premiere (as well as in Media Encoder) on a Mac with an Intel chipset. (If you’re using a computer with Apple’s new Silicon chipset, follow Warren Heaton’s Open Using Rosetta workaround.)
The specification that defines DCPs is so–well–specific, that there’s very little to choose in the Wraptor DCP export window. There’s one choice in Audio: Channels, Stereo (2.0) or 5.1 Surround. That depends what your mix was. (Wraptor DCP doesn’t support 7.1 Surround.)
There are only a few choices in video. Video Dimensions offers three choices: Full Container, Flat, and Scope. This is not about what size your video is; this is a question about what size container you want to put it in:
Full Container 2048 x 1080 pixels
Flat 1998 x 1080 pxs
Scope 2049 x 858 pxs
(We’ll see these pixel dimensions again in Output.) I believe it’s safest to use Full Container, because it creates the least chance of your image being inadvertently cropped or stretched when projected.
Frame rate: 24 or 25 frames per second (fps). Around here, that’s not even really a choice; it’s 24 fps. (It’s common to work in 25 fps in Europe but not the U.S.) If Premiere isn’t giving you a choice about something, such as video Codec, that’s because it’s defined in the DCI spec (JPEG2000).
One more important video choice: Scaling. I recommend Scale to fill, because it’s going to make your source video as large as it can in the DCP container without cropping or stretching it. That sounds important right? Source and Output here indicate a 1920×1080 video is going into a 2048×1080 container.
That leaves 128 extra pixels widthwise, which means a pillarboxed image with 64 pixels of black on each side, which looks like this:
There are a few more options, but follow the golden rule of video encoding: if you don’t understand what checking a box would do, leave it at its default value.
The last decision is what to put in File Name. There’s a convention for how to name DCPs. It’s important to take care and do this accurately, because a DCP’s name tells projectionists and distributors a lot about what’s inside. I built a DCP name generator that follows the naming convention you can use to practice naming DCPs. If there’s an attribute your DCP doesn’t have, leave the space for it blank. If you have any questions about how to name a DCP, please refer to the DCNC’S illustrated guide.
Here’s what another DCP looked like on the computer I used to make it:
The DCP is the folder and all its contents. If I were providing someone with this DCP, whether on hard disc or by file transfer, I would need to give them that folder and all the things in it, named just as Wraptor DCP named them, in order for that person to ingest my DCP into their digital cinema system.