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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Dolby / Doremi DCP Compatibility Gotcha
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
![](http://www.film-tech.com/ubbmembers/534a.jpg)
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 09-19-2014 11:58 AM
I thought I'd write this up here as a heads up for any others encountering the same issue. Apologies if it's been covered before.
My organization has three auditoria in total. Two of them have Dolby DSS200s. Until earlier this week, the third had no DCP server at all, but we're currently in the process of installing a Doremi DCP2000.
For testing purposes I tried to ingest a few DCPs that I had saved by copying them from the DSS200 directly to a USB hard drive or stick (by pressing left arrow in the local content tab). Until now, my normal workflow has been that I've been creating various DCPs at home, usually from ProRes files supplied by festival entrants, local advertisers, that sort of thing, using either Adobe Premiere or DCP-o-Matic, then taking them into work on a stick and ingesting them into one of the Dolby servers. When the shows are done, I then copy them back from the server onto a hard drive that then sits on a shelf in the booth, if I think it's likely that they'll be needed again (which usually means trailers for classic movies that smaller distributors tend to supply as .mov or .mp4 files).
So I tried ingesting some of these into the Doremi yesterday, and it wouldn't see them - "no content to ingest" when I stuck the drive in. To start with I thought it was a problem with the volume format, but I tried NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, ext2 and ext3, all with the same result: "no content to ingest".
Eventually we contacted Doremi technical support, and it seems that the problem is as follows. When you copy something from a Dolby DSS200 to an external volume, it does not copy the .pkl file from the DCP folder along with everything else. The Dolby server does not need the .pkl file to play the DCP, and therefore ignores it (I'm guessing that it doesn't even copy it in during the ingest process). The Doremi software, however, does need the .pkl, and without it will not recognize the presence of, ingest or play the DCP.
So the bottom line is that if you save a DCP by copying it from a Dolby server onto an external hard or flash drive, you will not then be able to ingest the copy into a Doremi. The only workaround I can think of for this is to copy the DCP folder directly from the supplied media onto your archive drive, using a computer running an operating system that can read all the volume formats you may have to deal with (FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, ext2, ext3, HFS and HFS+), e.g. Ubuntu.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
![](http://www.film-tech.com/ubbmembers/534a.jpg)
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 09-19-2014 07:55 PM
We're using the Doremi for the simple and very welcome reason that it was donated to us!
Ingest via FTP is not something we're doing as yet in any of our houses. Networking the servers such that this can be done (both ingesting DCPs and keys from outside, and moving DCPs between servers) is on our medium-term radar, but we're not there yet.
The reason I've been using the export from DSS200 route is simplicity of workflow. The DCPs of trailers, shorts, conversions from BDs (with the absolute permission of rights owners and for legitimately booked shows, I hasten to add), etc. etc. is something I do at home, and then take the DCPs in, usually on large thumb drives (64GB or 128GB ones). As soon as it's ingested and verified, I regard the thumb drives as recyclable, because the DCPs are on a RAID from that point on, and therefore cannot be lost in a single hard drive failure.
So at the end of the show, we decide if there's a reasonable chance that we'll ever need to play it again. If no, delete; if yes, plug one of our archive hard drives in and copy it off. These drives live in the booth and never go home. So in order to copy the DCPs onto the archive drives without them going through the DSS200 and being stripped of their PKL files in the process, I'd need to use a separate computer do to the copying. I can - and in future will - do this, but it just makes the process a little more convoluted.
Thanks for everyone's comments.
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