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Topic: Windows 8.1 and DCP-o-Matic
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 06-30-2014 12:52 PM
Knowing that sooner or later, I'd have to learn to stop worrying and love Windows 8, etc. etc., I've installed it on a spare partition at home and have been playing around with it.
One discovery: DCP-o-Matic appears to render about 20% faster than under 7 and Ubuntu (14.04, 64-bit), and does not lock up the computer while it's doing it, either. Under 7, I basically had to leave the computer and go do something else while it was rendering, because other programs were so slow to respond that the thing was virtually unusable. Not so with Windows 8 - it's rendering a short for a show on Thursday as I'm writing now, with Firefox, Outlook and Excel being responsive and normal all the while.
So it seems that Microsoft has actually made a useful improvement in W8, in co-ordinating the processor capacity usage of different applications more effectively. It's just a pity that they had to break the front end in the process!
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Carsten Kurz
Film God
Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 07-31-2014 06:52 PM
It's probably not the ultimate workflow, but it works ok. Recent versions of iPhoto will allow you to export a slide show to a quicktime movie with useful export settings for resolution, frame rate, etc., and iPhoto renders crossfades, etc. smoothly, a lot better than e.g. PowerPoint.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt7isu_JzXE
Then just throw this quicktime movie into DCP-o-matic.
If you don't need transitions, etc., then just throw the individual image files into DCP-o-matic, arrange into desired sequence, add the audio track, and render to a DCP. Photos will usually not have a typical cinema aspect ratio, you may need to zoom or crop them if you want to fill a full flat screen, but that is possible in iPhoto as well as DCP-o-matic.
- Carsten
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Carsten Kurz
Film God
Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 08-05-2014 05:13 AM
The j2k compression is rather slow currently, basically with all free DCP converters. They use a common library which is not optimized for speed. For slide-show type content, the speed should be acceptable, though.
You can play with the number of encoding threads in Preferences-General, but usually DCP-o-matic will choose a near optimum setting anyway. You may still try to double it, depending on your computers CPU. But don't expect a tenfold boost or something.
If you do conversion often and if there is a network of computers in your cinema, you can use them as render clients for the main program. It is not too complicated to set up.
One major issue with the iPhoto workflow is: iPhoto will render out a quicktime movie at 24,25-30fps. Technically, this is not a slide show anymore, but a movie file. DCP-o-matic then has to compress every individual frame of this movie. This takes time. If you assemble the slides within DCP-o-matic, that is, add the images to DCP-o-matic one after another, DCP-o-matic will only convert the images ONCE, and then simply copy that frame for as long as it is set to be displayed. This works considerably faster than on a Quicktime movie. However, you can not use any effects, transitions, etc. as in iPhoto.
E.g. if you have a slide show converted from iPhoto with a picture that is simply displayed for 10s, DCP-o-matic needs to convert 10*24frames. If you load the same image into DCP-o-matic directly and set it to a duration of 10s, it only needs to convert 1 image and copy it 239 times. Goes in a fraction of the time needed for the Quicktime version.
The add content/timeline function of DCP-o-matic allows you to assemble multiple single images in a sequence, all with their own display time. Just that you can't have any transitions, fade to black,etc. Just hard cuts. You could, of course, at least use black images as separators.
And then of course, if you still go through iPhoto, create the Quicktime movie at 24fps, not 25 or 30fps. Picture resolution and colour depth is not relevant for encoding speed, you should always use best quality.
One important thing - due to a license issue with one of the libraries that DCP-o-matic uses, it can not load MP3 files directly as an underlying music track for slide shows or videos. You would have to convert this MP3 file to WAV, AIFF, etc. beforehand. No big deal with free tools (e.g. Audacity or iTunes).
- Carsten
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