As the conversion of theaters to digital infrastructures grows globally the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has released two digital cinema products designed to standardize workflows and ensure a consistent movie-going experience: the Digital Leader product for post-production and the Digital Projection Verifier product for theatres. The products both are based on the SMPTE RP 428-6-2009 recommended practice standard. “As the digital cinema rollout accelerates there is a critical need for standardized workflows ” says Barbara Lange executive director of SMPTE. “SMPTE worked with more than 300 people from multiple sectors of the industry to ensure that new these products provide high-value interoperable performance across the production-to-display chain.” The new SMPTE Digital Leader product allows post facilities to add leaders and/or footers to D-Cinema Distribution Master reels prior to encoding and encryption thereby facilitating reliable and efficient downstream digital master creation and quality assurance. The product features eight- and four-second head and foot leaders for a full quality-control check and supports a comprehensive range of aspect ratios and frame rates. It also provides 2D and 3D support where applicable. The Digital Leader product is available on a pre-loaded hard drive with TIFF and WAV files for each variant. The SMPTE DProve product addresses a key issue for digital cinema operators: the need for a simple and reliable tool to check critical parameters such as digital projector performance alignment masking and picture-sound synchronization. Like the Digital Leader product it includes all quality-control parameters and a comprehensive range of variants. It supports both the JPEG Interop and SMPTE 429-2:2009 (2010) standards to verify backward and forward compatibility with digital-cinema servers from multiple manufacturers. The DProve product also makes it easy for non-engineering personnel to check the health of their systems. Packaged on a flash-memory drive it uses standard key-based encryption to unlock its features. Theatre operators can then set it to perform one-time or looping sequences for regular confidence checks of their venues. Both new products are available directly from SMPTE: the Digital Leader and DProve products both carry a three-year license. Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers www.smpte.org