SMPTE Test Materials

SMPTE offers a range of test materials from 35mm film to 4K image sequences. All are available in the SMPTE Store

Digital Leader and DPROVE

These products are both derived from SMPTE RP 428-6:2009.

DPROVE is an acronym for Digital PROjection VErifier, a set of D-Cinema Packages (DCPs) primarily intended for use in theaters as a check of digital projector performance, alignment, and picture-sound synchronization.

The Digital Leader is intended primarily for use by post production facilities and allows the addition of leaders and/or footers to D-Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM) reels, prior to encoding and encryption, for use in quality check.

SMPTE recently announced that Ymagis Group, the European specialist in digital technologies for the cinema industry, has used the next generation of SMPTE’s Digital PROjection VErifier (DPROVE2) to simplify and accelerate adoption of the SMPTE Digital Cinema Package (SMPTE-DCP). DPROVE2 allows exhibitors to test their digital cinema systems’ functionality. The software represents SMPTE’s increased emphasis on creating test materials for the cinema industry. The Society is planning additional test materials to support further evaluation and refinement of installed digital cinema systems, such as a new pink noise DCP for sound calibration. Developed primarily to check for digital projector performance, alignment, and picture-sound synchronization in theaters, DPROVE is derived from the 2009 D-Cinema Digital Leader (SMPTE RP 428-6).

• The RP 428-6 sequences include traditional countdown numerals in front of a “clock arm” that rotates, with the position incremented on each frame.
• The background image contains a large number of elements to aid in verifying projection performance and alignment.
• These features include center and crop markers, focus stars, gradients for detecting contouring, gamma check, black and white references, precision color patches (saturated and desaturated), human faces for flesh tones, and left-right indicators for stereo (3D) imagery.

Though it no longer supports Interop DCP, the new DPROVE2 builds on the original DPROVE by supporting SMPTE-DCP with enhanced capabilities for sound channel IDs and routing, accessibility features such as closed-captioning/subtitling, 3D subtitles/captions, and improved picture-sound synchronization. DPROVE2 is an encrypted DCP that emulates actual movie playback as closely as possible. SMPTE will make a distribution Key Delivery Message (KDM) for DPROVE2 available to any exhibition group or chain interested in verifying its cinemas’ SMPTE-DCP readiness.

Exhibitor groups or chains that are interested in receiving DPROVE2 and a distribution KDM, please click here.

For details on the orignal DPROVE and Digital Leaderboth products see the Flyer and Order Form.