How to Deliver a DCP to a Cinema or Festival

Why Can't the Cinema Just Download It?

Cinema servers are mission-critical infrastructure — when a screening fails, there are hundreds of people in a dark room who have paid for a ticket. Because of this, cinema servers are deliberately locked down, firewalled, and separated from the general internet. No projectionist is clicking on download links on these machines. A WeTransfer link, a Google Drive folder, a Filemail link — none of these can reach a cinema server directly.

Specialist electronic delivery services exist — in the UK, Lansats/Gofilex and Unique/Movetransit; in the USA, Deluxe E-Delivery — that have installed dedicated hardware and internet connections in cinemas specifically for this purpose. These services work well for releasing a film to many cinemas simultaneously, but they come with upfront costs (several hundred dollars to load your film), per-cinema fees (around $45 per venue), and lead times of at least a week. For a single screening, a USB stick is almost always faster and cheaper.

Physical Delivery — USB Drives

A USB drive remains the most practical delivery method for most independent film screenings. The ISDCF specification requires a single MBR partition formatted in EXT2 or EXT3 with an inode size of 128 — a Linux format that requires a Linux computer to create correctly. In practice, most modern cinema servers run Windows and prefer NTFS formatted drives. ExFAT — which most USB sticks come formatted as out of the packaging — is not accepted. Mac formatting is not accepted. Always reformat from scratch before copying your DCP.

How Long Does Ingest Take?

Ingest — loading the DCP into the cinema server — takes time. A feature film DCP can be 100–300 gigabytes. On a simpler single-projector system, if the server is actively showing a film, ingest slows to almost nothing — the system prioritises playback. Many cinemas leave new films ingesting overnight. On a modern TMS (Theatre Management System), ingest typically happens in two stages: loading onto the central server, then pushing to the individual screen's storage over the internal network. That internal network is not always fast.

Online Delivery for Festivals

For festival submissions, physical delivery to the cinema is usually not your problem. Most festivals work with a technical partner who compiles all DCP submissions onto a master drive for the venue. Your job is to upload your DCP correctly — usually via a portal the festival provides, or via a service like Filemail.

Do not store or transfer DCPs via Google Drive — it silently renames MXF files and breaks the package. Use a managed transfer service. We recommend Filemail, which uses UDP acceleration for significantly faster large-file transfer, tracks downloads, and imposes no file size restrictions.