How do you deliver a DCP to a festival?

When you're a filmmaker and what you love is making films, the format you deliver in to a festival is usually what interests you least. We're thrilled our film was selected, but the technical side of making a DCP isn't exactly the exciting part.

And yet, it's hugely important to make sure our DCP meets every technical spec. A great experience in the theater depends on it—being able to share it with our loved ones, the actors, the whole team that took part, and of course the audience. Imagine all that work thrown in the trash because of a badly made DCP—a copy with no quality control, or one that doesn't meet the standards.

Quality control is everything

When you deliver a DCP to a festival, it's essential that it goes through quality control: that all the audio is at the right level, that the sound channels are correctly mapped (if your short is stereo, it should have 2 channels; if it's 5.1, 6 channels, and so on), that if you want it in 4K the DCP is actually generated in 4K, and that the colors look exactly as you intend.

Quality control is a tremendously important step in creating a DCP, and one of the main reasons it's not really advisable to generate your own DCP on your own. Better to do it with the guidance of a serious platform like hacetudcp.com.

Physical delivery: handle with care

Some festivals will ask for the DCP physically, on a hard drive or USB stick with the film. If that's the case, you have to be very careful, because cinemas only accept a few very specific formats when it comes to formatting the drive. If they ask for it physically, check with us: we'll help by making the drive for you or giving you the instructions to do it right.

Digital delivery: integrity above all

But today almost every festival receives films and DCPs digitally, and this is where our service becomes key. We distribute through the Filemail platform, because it guarantees file integrity through an MD5 verification.

More than a few times, while on the festival side, we've received films loaded on Google Drive, Dropbox, or other platforms that don't guarantee data integrity—and it becomes a nightmare for the filmmaker and for us: if the film doesn't arrive intact, it can't be projected properly, and the DCP won't run as it should. That's why we use Filemail: to give the whole process integrity.