Let me guess, you did a film festival last year and it was a total mess? The DCPs worked about half the time, some were missing, nobody could tell what DCP went with which film, some filmmakers sent in MP4s, and in the end you said never again. Yep, we’ve heard that before and usually right before we get hired.
Accepting DCPs for a festival is not for the faint of heart. You need to spot-check playback on all of them, as well as checking for technical errors— then you have to know which errors to worry about and which to ignore. Most computers don’t even play DCPs and if they do, not very well. You also need a way to deliver the DCPs to the theater, usually on an old version of a Linux drive. Definitely don’t try this at home!
Over the past ten years, we’ve handled print traffic for festivals both large and small. We can be pretty ornery about which DCPs we accept and which we fail, but our success rate for theater deliveries is near 100%, so we kinda know what we’re doing. We’ve even been called in a day before a festival to save the day, so nothing really scares us.
If you need help with a festival, don’t be afraid to contact us.