During some screenings of the film 'Spider-Man: New Day', audience members and cinema operators recorded a persistent green tint on the image: dark scenes acquired a murky, 'contaminated' shade, and in halls with laser projection, the artifact appeared most pronounced. According to available technical data, the cause lies not in the film itself, but in the preparation stage of the digital distribution package (DCP) for non-IMAX halls: during the final render, a glitch occurred in the color transformation matrix coefficients, leading to incorrect display of the DCI-P3 color space on projectors. Below is an engineering breakdown of how exactly such a visual defect arises and why it manifests differently depending on the hall format.
Color space conversion and matrix recalculation error
Cinema projectors operate in the standard DCI-P3 color space with the CIE XYZ color model and a gamma of 2.6. Correct playback requires precise matrix recalculation from the master working space to the projector space using LUT compensation tables. According to the defect description, a glitch occurred in the coefficients of this matrix in the DCP package for regular halls, causing three related anomalies. First, the white point shifted: the color temperature moved away from the calibrated D65 point (6500 K) towards the green spectrum, into a range of approximately 5400–5800 K. Second, in the lower brightness range (from 0 to 5 nits), the black gradients experienced a parasitic rise in the Green channel by 12–15%, causing dark scenes to become murky and greenish. Third, an incorrect XML metafile in the package prevented Dolby and Doremi playback servers from applying the correct LUT compensation table for xenon and laser projectors, locking the error at the session level.
Differences between Laser, IMAX, and Xenon formats
The same package defect manifests differently depending on the hall's hardware base. In laser cinemas (RGB Laser), high peak brightness and extended color gamut made the artifact most noticeable: the green tint acquired a distinct, 'toxic-neon' character. In certified IMAX halls, the defect was reportedly absent: the IMAX network uses isolated proprietary IMAX DCP packages, which were mastered on a separate DMR (Digital Media Remastering) technical base, meaning they did not go through the same faulty matrix recalculation stage. On classic lamp-based projectors, the picture was perceived differently: due to the natural brightness drop of xenon lamps, the image appeared excessively dark ('crushed') and less sharp, which partially masked but did not eliminate the color shift.
What this means for the viewer and the distributor
For the viewer, the practical conclusion is that picture quality for the same film can vary significantly from hall to hall depending on the projection format and the correctness of the applied DCP package. For the distributor and cinema chains, the incident became a telling example of the vulnerability of modern digital film distribution pipelines: an error at the matrix recalculation and XML metafile validation stage spreads to all sessions using that package and is not compensated for by on-site settings. The typical reaction in such cases is to rebuild and revalidate the DCP package, as well as temporarily transfer screenings to halls with correct mastering (including IMAX) until the pipeline-level glitch is resolved.
How the DCP pipeline is structured and where the glitch occurs
A Digital Cinema Package (DCP) is a container with video, audio, and utility XML files describing playback parameters, including color space and LUT tables. The pipeline includes mastering, color space recalculation for target equipment, packaging, and validation. It is precisely at the stage of DCI-P3 matrix recalculation and metafile generation that, according to the incident description, an error was made: incorrect matrix coefficients and an invalid XML prevented Dolby and Doremi servers from applying the necessary compensation. Since IMAX mastering used a separate DMR technical base, its packages were unaffected. This explains why the defect is 'package-based' rather than 'film-based' and why it disappears in halls using a different master.
