The digital accessible cinema chain: Part 2 – The role of distributors

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Wednesday, 21 May 2014 10:01am

In the second part of our three-part series on accessible cinema, Media Access Australia project manager Ally Woodford looks at the role distributors play in the production of captioned and audio described movies.

Movie distributors play a central role in engaging cinema audiences in a number of ways, including the delivery of captions and audio description.

The distributor comes into play when a studio negotiates a licensing agreement with them. Sometimes the studio and distributor are vertically integrated in the one company, for example, Paramount, Warner Bros, Fox. There are many independent distributors and independent movie producers which makes for a wide range of licensing variations. For this purpose, let’s assume our movie is from a major Hollywood studio.

Once the movie has been shot and edited by the studio, its base form is handed to a distributor for final additions, importantly in this context, audio description and captioning. Other additions may include foreign language subtitles or a dubbed soundtrack in another language, dependent on the regions in which the movie will be released.

The process for producing captions and audio description for a movie does not differ considerably from other forms of content, such as DVD or TV. The same service providers supply across all media, including cinema. It is also more common these days for both audio description and captions to be produced (particularly on movies out of Hollywood) but as a rule of thumb the smaller the movie budget the less likelihood of it being accessible, and if one access feature takes budgetary precedence, it is generally captions.

When audio description and caption files are produced they are next incorporated into a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) in readiness for release.

DCPs are delivered to exhibitors either as a hard drive by courier or electronically by satellite. The industry is moving to satellite at present for faster and more secure file delivery. Once the DCPs arrive, they are ingested into the exhibitor’s digital cinema server. The content can then only be played once a decryption security key called a Key Delivery Message (KDM) has also been ingested into the server.

In our final part of this series, we will look at the exhibitor’s role in delivering accessible cinema to movie fans. 

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Tags: General, Cinema