School of Magical Animals on a GDC server

[Daniel Fredrickson]

Hey all,

I am curious if anyone else is running "School of Magical Animals" on an older GDC server? We ran into some problems with the image "going to mostly dark" (maybe a color indexing problem) at about the 57 minute mark on an SX2000A. It holds this way for an entire scene. It is an interop file (which I don't see much of for features these days) and throws off no errors on either the server or projector logs. I called Deluxe who was very quick to blame it on being a "known problem" with GDC Servers. I've worked with and on installing GDC Servers (SX2000A, SX2001, SX3000, SR1000) now for 10 years and have never seen anything quite like this. We are running this on a Barco DP2K23B. It's definitely not a macro issue (my first thought) since it's only on the one scene of the same feature file.

Further the same feature ran just fine when tested on both an SX3000 and SR1000U (both with DP2K23B's). I do know that the newer GDC servers use a different file system. My guess is that something is off with the mastering of the DCP, but has to do with the file structure. Does anyone have any ideas, or have you run into this? I know this isn't a super-wide release but am insanely curious.

[Harold Hallikainen]

There might be something that the JPEG decoder did not like. I heard recently of a movie that would reliably crash a particular server on a particular frame in the movie. There apparently was nothing wrong with the JPEG encoding, it's just that this particular image caused the system to crash. So, if it's a "known issue," I wonder if it's something similar. Perhaps the newer models use a different JPEG decoder. I'd also expect to see other people with the issue post here.