Color change in DCP?

[Robert Hardage]

Hi,

Just saw."Bullet Train" at a local thater (not ours). Most of the movie looked great. A minute or so before the credits there was an abrupt shift -- screen went black then evyrthing that followed was in heavily saturated magenta-cyan (like half of a 3D image -- I think, but I have almost no experience with 3d -- in our own thater I've seen something similar to this playing 2d content in a 3d setting.) . Theater manager said they had had several screenings with no complaints, then did have complaints at the same point in the movie at the last two screenings. I'm curious what could possibly cause a rpoblem like that?? It looked very much as if someone changed the projector setting midway through playback -- but that obviously wasn't the case. Faulty DCP? -- but it wouldn't ingest in the first place I would think.... I don't know what server/ projector they have. If it were my own theater I would have more details (and would also be more worried). Just curious/ would like to understand for future reference what might be going on -- if anyone has any ideas. (Also pretty sure its not intentional by the filmmaker!)

Thanks!
Robert

[Carsten Kurz]

Maybe a forgotten or misplaced projector format cue in the playlist.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Sounds almost like the projector switched from RGB to YUV color space. Rendering RBG content in YUV (without doing a proper conversion) will wildly shift colors around and will often give it a polarized look.

[Dave Macaulay]

Odd timing but possibly the credit cue, usually bringing the lights up, went weird or the wrong cue was attached? Changing to 3D would give really screwy colours with an older SDI system. I don't normally see any other cues that would change colour space but stay on SDI input. With an internal server that would be strange, the ones we have used output xyz to the projector and do the alt content conversion from rec709 or whatever to xyz.
But if it's consistent only on that SPL then the problem is in the SPL.

[Robert Hardage]

Thank you for your answers -- intriguing. It sounds like the most plausible explanation is that the wrong cue was attached to the credit start time code (hopefully my theater will play it and I'll get a peak at whether that time corresponds to when I saw the problem). Indeed, the lights stayed down, which is abnormal for that theatre -- and they didn't come up at the crawl, either.