>To me, it sounds like both of these can be replaced with a $2,000 laptop.
Presumably the cost comes from the fact it has to be a secure toolchain from studio to projection. If it was just a random laptop then the full res copy could be syphoned off by a rogue employee.
Not defending the prices, just saying the studios have a strangle hold on that industry so you can't just solve problems in a simple cheap way.
It’s good business considering that a DCP leak of a movie the first day in the theater could be catastrophic.
Heck, a leak of any DCP is bad for the movie studio. DCPs are the highest quality available version of a film the public will ever see. They are better than 4K Blu-Ray in every respect; fantastic news if you are a pirate who wants to re-compress it into some cheap discs for Malaysia. It’s also fantastic news if you are a shady local movie theater wanting to skip royalty payments - what studio executive is going to notice?
(Also, before anyone says “just go after the pirates then,” many pirates are from countries like Russia who don’t give a darn. If a pirate is hosting your movie on Russian bulletproof hosting with a Russian domain, you are basically SOL as a movie studio. All you can do is ask for DNS blocking in countries where that's legal; and hope that you can identify the pirates and wait until they make the mistake of stepping on a US Ally's soil if they ever do.)
Presumably the cost comes from the fact it has to be a secure toolchain from studio to projection. If it was just a random laptop then the full res copy could be syphoned off by a rogue employee.
Not defending the prices, just saying the studios have a strangle hold on that industry so you can't just solve problems in a simple cheap way.