How to deliver your film on a drive

Introduction

Below are instructions on how to deliver your film to us. Please read them carefully and please follow them to the letter.

There hundreds of films in the festivals we handle and as you can probably appreciate, when we're receiving many hard drives every day, we need to be systematic to ensure nothing gets misplaced.

Largely, we'll be using a database system to track the process of preparing everything for the festival. You need to start the process of delivering your film by filling in a form on this website, and you may receive emails from a computer system giving you updates, rather than emailing or calling us.

I'm sorry that this is rather impersonal, and sometimes it may seem rather pedantic. It's just the only way we can efficiently manage this volume of films.

Ultimately, our aim is to get all of your films to screen looking as brilliant as they possibly can. Please help us to do this.

Delivering by post

Preparing your drive/USB stick

The drive can be any format - Mac, Windows or Linux.

Please try to give us a drive where it's clear where your film is! A drive with nothing else on it is ideal, but if you need to leave other files on the drive, please hide them away in a folder called "other".

Please put your film files (DCP and/or video file) in the root of the drive (i.e. not inside a folder).

If you have more than one film screening at the festival, you can put them all on the same drive together.

Naming the files

Please ensure the files are clearly named with the name of your film.

Labelling the drive/USB stick

Please stick a label on the drive/USB stick and write on it:

The title(s) of the film(s) on the drive
Whether the drive contains DCPs and/or Video Files (and which for each film)
Your name
Your email address

Formatting the drive

If your files are larger than 4GB, your USB stick may refuse to take them saying the the files are too big.

The reason is most likely that the USB stick is the wrong format. By default, USB sticks tend to come formatted FAT32, which means it won't take any single file over 4GB.

The solution is simple - reformat the drive!

On a Mac

Go to Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility
Select the USB stick on the list of drives on the left
Go to the Erase tab
Choose format Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Click Erase... button

Hey presto! You should now be able to copy large files onto the USB stick no problem.

NB: doing this will wipe the stick entirely. So if you have files on it that you need, copy them to another drive first. And be careful to choose the right drive to format - don't format your computer's internal drive instead of the stick by accident!

On Windows

If you're on Windows, there's a similar process. You want to format it as NTFS.

There are instructions here

If they don't work, Google "Format drive NTFS" and you should find instructions.

Will I get my drive back?

Yes! But not until after the festival is over.

If you want it back, you'll be given the opportunity to fill out a form with the address you want it sent back to.

Please do not send us a drive that has other files on it which you will need in the meantime.

Where do I send it to?

You should have received a login for this website by email. If you login, you can fill out a short form with details about your film. The system will then give you an address to send your drive to.

If you haven't received a login email, contact us.

Can I come round with a drive and you copy the files off it?

I'm sorry, but you need to leave your drive with us.

We have a large amount of drives and files arriving, and we deal with them in the order they arrive. We often also need to keep drives as a backup copy until the festival is over. You'll get your drive back after the festival.

Problems?

If you have any problems, contact us.

Thank you!