SMPTE: Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), founded in 1916 as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or SMPTE, is a global professional association of engineers, technologists, and executives working in the media and entertainment industry. As an internationally recognized standards organization, SMPTE has published more than 800 technical standards and related documents for broadcast, filmmaking, digital cinema, audio recording, information technology (IT), and medical imaging.
The DCP, its assets and their corresponding video/audio/text based data sources are governed by a suite of SMPTE standards which regulate the constrained application specific implementation of said assets which compose the package.
In simpler terms, the SMPTE DCP is built upon the InterOp DCP but with further enhancements and explicitly defined constraints. The specification is published as a formal suite of standards by SMPTE under the 21DC Technology Committee.
The SMPTE DCP can be categorised based on the level of features used that are offered within the standard. This categorisation is denoted by an increasing letter. A, B, C etc. Given the nature of Industry adoption, the current baseline for when someone infers SMPTE DCP is ‘SMPTE DCP Bv2.1 Application Profile’ or Bv2.1 for short. The feature set of this profile is summarised in RDD 52 SMPTE DCP Bv2.1 Application Profile, which can be opbatined from IEEE here: 10.5594/SMPTE.RDD52.2020.
