Digital Upload or a Hard Drive: How We Ship to a Festival

We don't have a house rule for how a film gets to a festival. We have a habit: open the festival's technical page first, and ship the way it says. The reason is simple. Two festivals can ask for opposite things, and a package that is perfect for one is a problem for the other.

That sounds obvious. It stops being obvious the week of a deadline, when the DCP is finished, the drive is already formatted, and the tech page says something else.

What we noticed

Take two festivals' published requirements side by side. The Berlinale prefers to receive DCPs and ProRes via data transfer through its Digital Cinema Portal, and accepts a hard drive as the alternative. A drive has to be Linux formatted, ext2 or ext3, and the sender bears the shipping, return freight included. If the DCP is encrypted, the DKDMs go into the portal. The page says they cannot be accepted by email.

Film Festival Cologne leans the other way. Its drive must be NTFS, SSD or CRU, sent by post with a USB 3.0 cable (or an adapter for a USB-C drive) and a note carrying the DCP details and a return address. A download link through a service such as Aspera or Filemail is the fallback, for when no other method is possible, and the festival says downloads need at least two full working days on its end. It also says it prefers unlocked DCPs.

So the same finished DCP has two different routes and two different drive formats, depending on where it is going. That is worth knowing before the drive is bought, not after it is formatted. Neither festival is wrong. Each is describing the equipment and staff it actually has.

Size matters too. A typical 4K DCP runs past 200GB, and how long an upload takes depends on the connection it leaves from. Digital doesn't mean instant. A posted drive has a transit time we can estimate. An upload has a transfer time we can only watch.

What we changed or kept

We kept the drive. Even when a portal is preferred, a correctly formatted drive is the route that doesn't depend on anyone's bandwidth, and we still format delivery drives for the projection booth, which is why we format delivery drives in ext2 unless a festival says otherwise. When a festival says NTFS, we format NTFS. The tech page wins.

What we changed was the order. We read each festival's page before we make the drive, not after, and we start any upload early enough that a slow connection is an inconvenience and not a missed deadline. A festival that needs two working days to pull a download has, in effect, moved our deadline up by two days.

The rest is unchanged. Unless a festival asks for encryption, we deliver our festival DCPs without encryption, and when one does, we ask where the keys should go before we make them. And nothing ships, by portal or by post, until we've done a theater QC before a festival cut ships. A clean upload of a DCP that stutters in the booth is still a DCP that stutters in the booth.

We also keep a second copy, made before the first leaves the building. A drive can be lost in the post, and a link can expire. It's the cheapest part of the whole delivery.

The next film's package is already on the shelf, and the first thing taped to the case is the festival's tech page, printed. It's a small habit from the film side of the studio, and it has saved more deadlines than any piece of equipment we own.