A film festival has asked to provide the video to screen in a cinema-specific format (DCP), "created using a reliable tool e.g., DCP-o-matic".
Deadline: two days 😱
My first thought: great, I'm going to spend two days wrestling with Wine and some barely working "industry standard" tooling, am I?
But looking closer, it turned out:
- DCP is a stream of JPEG2000 frames in MXF container and some XML metadata 🤔
- the cinema expects a ext2-formatted drive 😮
- DCP-o-matic is GPLv2+ and multiplatform 🤩
However, DCP-o-matic had troubles with our slightly unusual source material (variable frame rate stop-motion). The video was blinking.
So I looked into its source code and it turned out that hacking it into duplicating missing frames instead of injecting black ones was a matter of a single line change.
Now try fixing a thing like that when your Adobe suite is acting up 😂
One more thing to note is that DCP-o-matic's Encode Server just worked flawlessly - you simply launch it on another computer in the network and it automatically participates in ongoing encoding. Turns out that Steam Deck is the most powerful PC we own, as its participation has sped the process up considerably 😆
