Tutorial: Exporting for Digital Cinema with Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder CC 2014
A key concern for any producer is to ensure that the work you produce will play back on as many platforms (online, mobile, broadcast) as possible. Until recently, delivering content in digital cinema environments was the exclusive province of high-end facilities with specialized equipment. But with the release of Adobe Media Encoder CC 2014 and its Wraptor DCP plug-in, DCP has become just another export option, putting digital cinema delivery well within the reach of any Adobe CC user. Here's how you can add it to your offerings when your clients or projects demand it.
Testing Your DCP Output
Once your encoding is complete, you have two options for testing your output: One is to take it to a theater and have the digital projectionists check it there. The other, more simple route is to download one of a number of digital cinema players that are available for Mac and PC. One that's worked for me is easyDCP, which is available in a free trial version. The free trial is limited in that it allows you to watch only the first 15 seconds of your DCP file.
Figure 7 (below) shows the DCP I just encoded. The folder includes a number of different files. They all serve different purposes in making the DCP work, but your audio and video file (both with .mxf extensions) are the ones you're most concerned with, because you want to make sure everything plays correctly.
Figure 7. The files that comprise the DCP. Click the image to see it at full size.
Click Choose to choose that DCP folder, and easyDCP Player (or whatever player application you choose) will see what it needs to play the DCP. easyDCP will ask you if you want to play one or multiple tracks. If you had multiple tracks (which we don't, in this example), it would allow you to choose several. As you can see in th easyDCP Player window in Figure 8 (below), we've got the same resolution and frame rate we set in Premiere Pro's Export Settings window. You can see it play back at the 6:49 mark in the tutorial video below.
Figure 9. Our playback settings in easyDCP Player match our export settings from Premiere Pro/Adobe Media Encoder. Click the image to see it at full size.
Playback is nice and smooth, so the last thing we want to check is how the color renders. The best way to do this is to place the original in the Premiere Pro Program Monitor side by side with the DCP output at the same time stamp in the easyDCP Player and compare the two images. Figure 10 (below) shows that the color rendering in the DCP is quite accurate compared to the source footage. Finally, I checked the audio, and can report that it was encoded as stereo, again matching the selections we made in the Premiere Pro Export Settings.
Figure 10. Comparing the color rendering in the DCP output (bottom, in easyDCP Player) with the source footage (top, in the Premiere Pro Program Monitor).
One Caveat
One caveat I should add is that I'm running a slightly modified version of Adobe Media Encoder. The Gold Master that shipped last week came with a flawed plug-in for the Wraptor plug-in. When I talked with Adobe and Quvis about this issue, they assured me that the patch that corrects the issue, though it was not available in last week's CC 2014 updates, is available now. They send it to me, I added it into my Media Encoder's content, and it fixed the issue that I was having before. There were some strange things going on with the color rendering and compression of the original CC 2014 version of AME, but they were fixed in the patch, and I can assure you that your results will look as accurate as mine when they do issue that patch.
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