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Cinemaslides

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Wolfgang Woehl edited this page May 20, 2013 · 64 revisions

Cinemaslides is a commandline tool to build slideshows and pack them up as digital cinema packages (DCPs). It has preview modes to check how transitions (fades, crossfades, cuts) and timings play out. If you must you can tell Cinemaslides to go 24fps-carousel-berserk and pack up your motion picture1, too. It can sign packages, build encrypted DCPs and has a KDM mode to create key delivery messages. It allows to generate a CompositionMetadataAsset (see ISDCF’s draft) and a Theater Key Retrieval item (see ISDCF’s draft).

Look at cinemaslides usage for examples and tips. See Digital Cinema Tools Distribution for a setup script to install everything required.

Cinemaslides (or rather ImageMagick, source of endless awesomeness, as well as Sound eXchange) conforms a wide range of image and audio formats to cinema specs and tries to be smart and fast.

Cinemaslides provides a basic set of transitions: Cuts, Fades and Crossfades. By the way: If you love fades make sure to watch Almodóvar’s Los abrazos rotos on film, if possible. Also, every now and then, I have to remind myself to sit down and watch the two all-time greatest of all fades.

Technically Cinemaslides is a ruby script acting as glue and organizer between a number of tools: CineCert’s/John Hurst’s reference implementation for AS-DCP file access asdcplib, ImageMagick, SoX, MPlayer, OpenJPEG / Kakadu (which is available for demonstration purposes) and bash.

Cinemaslides checks for and tells you about missing tools. It stores assets (frames that were cpu-expensive to create) in a depot and picks them up when they’re eventually needed again. Instead of copying files it links to files whenever it makes sense.

See cinemaslides usage to learn more about how to use (and abuse) it.

Thanks go out to Ronan Delacroix for discussion and patches wrt cinemaslides’ audio section. Andrae Steiner and Terrence Meiczinger offered discussion, testing and valuable suggestions. Check out Andrae’s fork and Terrence’s widely used OpenDCP, a GUI tool to build digital cinema packages from your master files.

Getting started:

  • cinemaslides --help to learn about options and parameters.
  • cinemaslides --examples to see a couple of example invocations.
  • cinemaslides -m -t dcp -k 2k -a scope -b 10 -x crossfade,1,5 -j openjpeg image1 image2 image3 ... displays a montage summary to check resizes and goes on to create a 2K Scope DCP with 10 seconds black leader/tail and crossfades for 1 second between all 5 second slides.
  • See How to use Digital Cinema Tools for more and cinemaslides usage for even more.

1 cinemaslides --type dcp -x cut,0.042 motion_sequence/ audio.wav (frame duration 1/24th of a second)

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