Cinema should start with play.
Studio releases have professional mastering houses standing behind them. Festivals and the filmmakers they program deserve the same technical confidence, and today they mostly discover problems live, at the worst possible moment. We'd rather be the boring infrastructure that makes a screening uneventful.
Why this exists
Every festival season, programmers watch the same problem repeat: a filmmaker submits a DCP that looks fine, and it doesn't play right until the lights go down. Festival staff aren't compliance engineers, and they shouldn't have to be. At the same time, most filmmakers can't justify the cost of a full-service DCP mastering house just to find out if their package is technically sound.
We built DCP Gateway to be the layer that catches this early: fast enough that checking is not a decision anyone agonizes over, and reliable enough for a festival to build its submission pipeline around.
Where we're based
New Orleans, LA, and built to work entirely virtually. There's no physical drive handling, no courier costs. Filmmakers and festivals anywhere can use DCP Gateway the same way someone down the block would.
Early, and telling you that on purpose.
DCP Gateway is currently in build mode. We're not yet running the automated validation portal shown on this site; we're finalizing it with our first pilot festivals. If you run a festival, or you make films and submit them, and you want to be part of shaping this, we want to hear from you.
Reach out