DCP on Christie 4K Projector

[AZCamera]

Transcoded a ProRes 422HQ 1920x1080 file to a SMPTE 2k Flat DCP. I then went to the local theatre and we did a "live view" of the file. I was surprised to see an easyDCP watermark embedded on the projector's output.

Is it possible to export a file from DCP-o-matic without a watermark? Wikipedia stated that it is. ** The watermark only shows up at the theater. It's not present in Premiere Pro and/or DaVinci Resolve Studio timelines. **

Is there a chance that DaVinci Resolve is somehow affecting DCP-o-matic? ** EasyDCP demo is automatically included with DaVinci Resolve. **

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Thanks so much for any help! This is my first go-ahead at creating a DCP for local cinema projection. I'm certainly finding lots of difficulties along this chosen path. Again, any help would be very much appreciated.

Windows 10
Asus ROG 17.3" Quad-Core I7
NVIDIA GeForce 965m
Adobe 2015 Suite (Wraptor DCP Lite is included)
DaVinci Resolve 12.5 Beta 3 Studio (demo version of easyDCP included)
DCP-o-matic

[carl]

DCP-o-matic will not add any watermark. It sounds like you made your DCP using EasyDCP, or something with an EasyDCP plugin.

To use DCP-o-matic instead, just load your ProRes file into it and make a DCP. It will have no watermark. See the manual for details, and ask here if you have problems.

[AZCamera]

Ok. Thanks for the vote of confidence Carl!!!

[AZCamera]

Just wanted to give an overall update. I was able to have the film projected on to the Christie 4K without watermarks and without skipping frames with dcpomatic. The settings were interop and I did convert it using the prores directly.

I had quite a few issues with the projectionists at the theater! For example, they weren't really sure of what file they needed to play/load even after they just uploaded it. (3 out 3 didnt know what they loaded.) In addition, 4 out of 4 projectionists attempted to play the DCP directly off of a USB drive, which is not possible! We kept getting an "unknown error" as a result and that is why I spent about 80-100 hours using multiple DCP encoders.

... For anyone out there, make sure that a USB DCP is loaded directly into the projector...

For what it's worth, you should probably just deliver your DCP on a dx115 CRU unit as that makes it a lot simpler for the projectionists.

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On a side note, I decided to make a jpeg 2000 image sequence from DaVinci Resolve 12.5. This really speeds up the process of creating a DCP, from a rendering standpoint, with DCP omatic and OpenDCP.

I placed a 200Mb/s limitation on the sequence in DaVinci and somehow it ended up being larger than the 250 megabit per second max playback rate of the projector. Rather than spending the time converting a ProRes to DCP, I decided that I would just simply take the 250.5 megabit per second jpeg image sequence and let DCPomatic put a 150Mb/s limit on the new MXF video DCP. Unfortunately, the megabyte per second limitation does not work with a JPEG image sequence... With a tight deadline and not knowing that that is the way the program works, its tough...

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Now that the film is at the theater and ready to be projected, I want to thank DCPomatic and also to Carl for making this event happen! Thanks!

Over and out,
Levi

[Carsten]

The idea of the J2K-import is to leave the files unaltered, both compression and color-correction wise, after having used an external color transform and J2K encoding process. You can not alter the filesize/bitrate that way. You would need to re-encode in DCP-o-matic, but that would render the whole idea obsolete.

Playing DCPs from a USB ingest source? Well, most servers actually do not allow this, and, honestly, the people you describe obviously did not earn their job-title 'projectionist'. But that seems to become common nowadays...

- Carsten