From your description, I understand that the MXF file in the video folder is synced, but not the identical copy/hard link in the actual DCP folder. True, this will prevent a successful ingest at the remote site, as the DCP is incomplete. This is, however, not a fault in DCP-o-matic, but an issue with the Gdrive software - it seems to ignore hard links. The easiest way to fix this is to manually delete the video.mxf in the video folder once the DCP has been created. This should leave the previous hard linked sibling in the DCP folder as a fully autonomous file. Still not sure how and when GDRive will react to that change if it is running during the DCP creation, but, that would be the first thing to try.

Of course, another way is to simply copy just the DCP folder to a GDrive folder, and not create the full DCP-o-matic project folder immediately within the GDrive folder. A second option that could possibly save transfer time is to ZIP the DCP folder. While J2K usually can not be compressed by ZIP efficiently, very often audio tracks contain loads of silence and sometimes jusr deflating empty audio tracks will achieve noticeable compression ratios.

If the DCPs created are small, another option would be to setup an FTP server (e.g. filezilla) on the remote PC, as DCP-o-matic has a function to automatically upload DCPs to an FTP server once conversion is complete. FTP upload and folder sync are two different procedures, but at least for short DCPs/small transmission sizes, there shouldn't be much difference in user experience. I understand folder sync nowadays is usually easier to setup than FTP through a router into a cinema.

We have seen strange issues when projects are created on Microsoft OneDrive folders as well. I wouldn't rule out folder sync for DCP upload in general, but one has to be prepared to run into issues and find ways to circumnavigate them.

Dear Carl,

Our customer Mrs. Deickert is working with your wonderful tool to create frequently DCPs for her cinema.

We created a remote working solution for, the Sony Server is connected to a small PC with is continuosly connected to the Internet. First we tried Apple iCloud synchronization to bring the DCP files from her Macbook Pro to the Windows PC, now we switched to GDrive.

Currently we face the issues that the GDrive sync app does not sync two files which are technically identical but have a different naming. I speak about both the j2c and the file in the movie folder. I do not know why during the export you save the video file with two diffenent names. Is there a way to disable the second video export in the movie folder? As GDrive is skipping the j2c movie file, the server does not allow to ingest the DCP in a correct way. Do you have any idea?

Thank you and best regards from Munich

René

__________________________________________________

René Wagner, M.Sc.

Specialist for Virtual Reality, Multimedia, High-Res Projection and Digital Cinema systems

Tel: +49 89 958 23 324		Videocation GmbH
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