The DCP Naming Convention

Why the Naming Convention Exists

Imagine you are a festival technical director. It is midnight before an early morning programme. You have forty short films to ingest and one of the DCPs on the drive is called TBITC. Is that The Boy in the Clouds? Is it a trailer? Is it Flat or Scope? 5.1 or stereo? You have no idea. This happens constantly. It is almost always a DCP made in DCP-o-Matic with the naming filled in carelessly.

The ISDCF naming convention puts critical technical information immediately after the title, in a fixed order, using standardised abbreviations — separated by underscores, no spaces, no special characters.

What a Correct Name Looks Like

Here is an example from The Post Factory:

BoyInTheClouds_SHR-1_F_EN-XX_INT_51_2K_PFU_20260101_IOP_OV

Breaking that down: BoyInTheClouds is the full title, no abbreviations. SHR-1 is short film, version 1. F is Flat container. EN-XX is English, no territory subtitle. INT is international, unrated. 51 is 5.1 audio. 2K is resolution. PFU is The Post Factory UK's facility code. 20260101 is the date of mastering. IOP is the Interop standard. OV is Original Version.

The Fields That Matter Most

At minimum: the full title spelled out (not abbreviated, no acronyms), content type (FTR for feature, SHR for short, TLR for trailer), aspect ratio (F or S), audio (51 or 20 for stereo), resolution (2K or 4K), and date in YYYYMMDD format. If you ever revise a DCP, update the date — two DCPs with identical names cause real operational problems.

SMPTE Metadata

Modern SMPTE DCPs carry a second title field: FullContentTitleText — the actual human-readable title of the film, "The Boy in the Clouds" rather than the naming convention string. Cinema servers that support this field can display the full title to operators. At The Post Factory, we populate both fields correctly on every SMPTE DCP we make. Not every facility does.