It wasn’t so long ago that deliverables — the final copies of a movie that are distributed to theaters — were synonymous with film prints. Then digital cinema came along, and more recently, 3D.

Now theatrical deliverables are a combination of film prints and digital media with various technical specifications. For international day-and-date releases (as far as tentpoles are concerned) the process of creating, managing and distributing these versions is astonishingly complex, and even more so when it comes to 3D releases like the monster May opener from DreamWorks Animation, “Shrek Forever After.”

Read the whole story here.