DCP_o-matic player 2 previewing poor image quality

[bdubbs]

Hello! I am trying to get a DCP out for a film festival--I have a tight timeframe in kicking these out to them. I converted my MP4 in DCP-o-matic and wanted to review that the colors/image preservation look good. 2 things I noticed is that in davinci resolve 18 the blacks get much more clamped and in the dcp-o-matic player 2 it looks like there is image quality issues.

Attached is a screenshot showing what I mean.

I circled the areas of concern for this frame but it happens throughout the film.

Is this a usual bug in the play-back but looks fine on the projectors or is this something going on with my settings or whatever. I'm also wondering why it looks so different in davinci than in dcp-o-matic player 2's playback.

[bdubbs]

To follow up I tried a different image sequence and it's doing it on that file too, making me think either there is something going on with the output of from dcp-o-matic or the displayer has a hard time previewing the dark values.

[Carsten]

Hmm. I see some differences between these images, but nothing that would make me nervous (the blacks are obvious in Resolve). But - all software players on computer screens are not doing the same what a DCI projector does. Given the completely different color management of these samples, and of course the samples are limited in complexity, I think it actually looks quite good.

[bdubbs]

Thanks Carsten. So just so I can wrap my head around this (new to the whole DCP process) the DCPomatic player will preview the colors and image in the general ballpark but it wont show the full fidelity that the projector will be able to showcase? When I gamma up I see artifacts in the shadows and I just wanna make sure that doesn't translate onto the projector! thanks again

[Carsten]

The artifacts in shadow areas are usually from the MP4/h.264. Mp4/h.264 is a playback-only codec, and it's perceptive compression creates more artefacts in invisible shadow areas (which would otherwise contain much noise and reduce compression efficiency).

I think you can relax.