What a DCP costs: DIY, lab or service.

A DCP for a 95-minute feature costs somewhere between nothing and about $725 before you buy a drive, depending on who makes it and how fast you need it. A short usually lands between $150 and $310. The software to do it yourself is free.

Those numbers come from the published rate cards below, all read at the end of September 2026. Two weeks ago we covered what a DCP is. Last week was whether you need one. This week is the bill.

How DCP services price.

Most DCP houses charge by the minute of runtime, with a minimum order, a standard turnaround, and fees to go faster. Some add flat rates for common lengths. The drive is almost always extra.

Per-minute pricing is fair for the work. Encoding a feature takes many times longer than encoding a short, and so does checking it.

The published rates.

Penguin DCP. The pricing page lists 2K at $4.50 a minute on a 10-day turnaround, with a $180 minimum. Faster turnaround adds a flat fee: $50 for five days, $100 for three, $200 for 24 hours. 4K is $6.00 a minute. Media runs $25 to $50 for a flash drive, $80 for a USB 3.0 hard drive and $135 for a CRU cinema drive. One wrinkle: Penguin’s homepage says “starting at $4.75 per minute,” so the two pages disagree. Confirm before you budget.

Pure DCP. 2K is $5 a minute on a five-day turnaround, $8 for three days and $12 for one day. 4K is $8, $12 and $18 for the same windows. The site says “The $150 minimum applies to all orders regardless of film length.” Cloud delivery is included.

CineSend, through FilmFreeway. “DCP Encoding starts at $250, plus $5 per minute, with additional fees for captions, cropping, 4K encoding, and rush delivery.” The convenience is real: it’s wired into the platform many festivals already use for delivery.

Tree Falls Post. The most detailed rate card we found. 2K is $5 a minute with a $150 minimum, but there are also flat rates: $99 under 10 minutes, $175 for 10 to 30 minutes, and $385 for a feature up to 100 minutes, plus drive or upload. A CRU drive is $210. Encryption is listed too: $100 per project, covering up to 10 KDMs.

The same film, four quotes.

Here’s a 95-minute feature at 2K on each house’s standard turnaround:

• Penguin DCP. 95 × $4.50 = $427.50, plus $135 for a CRU drive = $562.50.

• Pure DCP. 95 × $5 = $475, drive not priced on the site.

• CineSend via FilmFreeway. $250 + (95 × $5) = $725, delivered digitally.

• Tree Falls Post. $385 flat, plus $210 for a CRU drive = $595.

And a 12-minute short:

• Penguin DCP. 12 × $4.50 = $54, so the $180 minimum applies.

• Pure DCP. 12 × $5 = $60, so the $150 minimum applies.

• CineSend via FilmFreeway. $250 + $60 = $310.

• Tree Falls Post. $175 flat.

For shorts, minimums decide the price. For features, turnaround and the drive do.

Doing it yourself.

DCP-o-matic is free, open-source software maintained by Carl Hetherington. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and it makes SMPTE and Interop DCPs, encrypted or not, with its own player, verifier and drive-formatting tool. Filmmaker Magazine’s festival delivery guide recommends it. Week five walks through it step by step.

The paid tools:

• DaVinci Resolve Studio can export unencrypted DCPs with its built-in encoder. The free version of Resolve watermarks DCP output.

• easyDCP from Fraunhofer is the professional standard in many post houses. easyDCP Plus lists at €164.22 a month by subscription or €3,567.62 for a permanent license. That’s priced for a facility running dozens of films a year.

DIY is free in dollars and costs something in time. On a mid-range laptop, encoding a feature to JPEG 2000 can take hours, and your first attempt is often not your last.

The costs that aren’t on the rate card.

This is where first-time budgets go wrong.

• The drive. A CRU cinema carrier is the professional standard, at $135 to $210 from the houses above. Week eleven covers when a cheaper USB drive is fine.

• Shipping. Overnight to a festival, and a return label so you get the drive back.

• Captions and subtitles. Sundance wants open and closed caption versions. Each extra version is extra work, and some houses charge for it.

• Rush fees. The fastest way to double your cost is to find out a week before the festival.

• Remakes. If you change the cut or fix a sound problem after the DCP is built, you pay again. Penguin discounts remakes 50% within 30 days, which tells you how often it happens.

• Testing. Watching your DCP in a real theater before the premiere is the best money you’ll spend. In Los Angeles, Screening Services Group’s June 2025 rate card lists screening rooms at $300 to $450 an hour on weekdays. Smaller markets are usually cheaper, and many independent theaters will let you test in an empty house if you ask.

• Encryption. Most indie films don’t need it. If a sales agent asks for it, budget for KDMs.

What we’d do on a first film.

Order early, at the standard turnaround, so you pay the base rate. Pay for a CRU drive only if the venue asks for one. Put every caption and subtitle requirement in the first order, so you aren’t paying twice. Put $100 to $400 aside for a test screening.

If you’d rather not spend nights encoding, our DCP service builds, verifies and delivers on the drive your venue wants. Send your runtime, format and deadline through the contact page and we’ll quote it. If you’d rather do it yourself, the next two posts are the manual.

Next week: prepping your master, which decides whether the DCP comes out right the first time.