Although, yes, I am too young to remember what you are talking about, I think you are being a little extreme. I would tend to agree with that woman, but that's just my opinion. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, right? If someone complained about my preshow programming (not that I'm the one who makes the programming choices, it's all corporate), I certainly wouldn't ban that person from my theater.

Some of those TV commercials printed on 35mm look absolutely awful. Dreadfully bad. What are they thinking?? I guess all they care about is the number of "impressions" the ad makes, favorable or not.

The answer is clear. They perceive a market in showing their advertising in theatres, and have found a cost-effective way to do it; and they probably choose the cheapest. Why pay thousands of dollars a minute for last film recording when you can get a 16mm transfer with a kinescope (O($60)/minute), and then blow it up to 35mm ($0.30/foot)?

While discriminating individuals will notice, a) The average moviegoer just isnt' discriminating. Sad, but true. b) Just because the quality looks low doesn't mean that the advertising won't be effective. This very thread summons in my head that stupid Sony VAIO theme from the 35mm ad with the people jumping into the sky....

I plattered up the ECO shorts and watched them all last night. I think they're nice and tasteful, but unfortunately they don't have quite the "hook" of a good short (no real exciting drama or comic humor, etc.). I'd grade them a 6 on a 1-10 scale. But they're certainly good enough to show and we'll throw them in when we have some free spots.

Frank, I agree with you that we are bombarding our customers with tasteless garbage before our presentations these days, but adding newsreels, cartoons, short subjects and whatever else we can add is just too much. I agree with the woman. While things like that were commonplace a long, long time ago and would still be a pleasant addition to a reportory type of theater, in today's times I agree that they are inappropriate for a commercial movie theater.

These days I send all of my video-to-film jobs to Cinema Concepts in Atlanta. They're primarily an animation house (policy trailers) so they're really set up to work in very high resolutions. I've been very happy with the results. They've even re-done some of the older promos we used to run and so there's some basis for comparison.

I can safely say that the techs and the lab will help or hurt.

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And, hey! Let's be careful out there.

The best-quality TV commercial shown in theaters I can recall recently is the Mountain Dew one with the alien spaceship being piloted by the Dew-drinkers ("I told you not to let them drive"). That one looked and sounded pretty good. Many other commercials really look and sound awful though...

I agree with Brad's comments about commercial theaters and pre-show programming. At a first-run theater, I want (even enjoy) a few trailers and hopefully a sound snipe (though around here they rarely do sound snipes any more), then move on into the feature.

Memo to self: In the future, when asking a rhetorical question in a public forum, be sure to provide your own response to said question.

In fact, we are GLAD they put crappy looking slides on the screen and play that track with the "DJ" babbling incessantly in attempt at humor. We are glad their concessionares are rude or simply have that glazed eye look, like deer caught in headlights. We are glad they put low res video ads before their main feature -- sets a tone as to the kind of attention to detail the theatre ascribes to. We are glad they let patrons walk in to see a naked screen staring back at them --it allows us to be impressive with our Grand Curtain.

And Ken L., just for the record, of course we didn't ban her from the theatre (we certainly couldn't afford THAT lawsuit); naturally it was said it tongue-in-cheek, but I agree with you -- for those who are not particularlly taken with our style of presentation, we are not about to alienate them as customers and we do give three times for all our shows: the time the doors open and the Preshow music program starts (they get to drop suggestions in a box in the lobby as to what music they would like to hear programmed on our 6 Channel Total Surround MegaSound [tm] system) -- the start-time of what we call the "Cartoon and Attraction Reel" AND finally, the start-time of the actual feature. Patrons are free to come in whenever they wish.

And I have a little confession to make.... One of the reasons I love running cartoons and stuff before the feature, aside from the fact that my audience loves it, is also for showmanship as well -- with a cartoon, I can go from 1.37 to either flat wide screen or scope. It
is VERY dramatic and there isn't a show where you don't hear the audience wooing and ahhing when it changes. Why bother with ANY wide screen process at all if the audience isn't aware that they are indeed seeing a film in wide screen? We have a few multiplexes in Brooklyn where there is only ONE screen size -- everything is run in 2:1 -- both Scope and flat. The only way you know which is which is by....well, you know. What's the stupidity behind that?!

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Does anyone use lens and aperture changers on their projectors? How fast can these thing actually change from one to the other? And can you set it up for different flat ARs? Obviously lens turrets are easy, but what about the plates? Can you have a scope plates plus a variety of spherical cropped plates?

My trick with fragile 16mm was twofold: firstly to join 20-30 feet of polyester spacing onto the front. That way the projector is totally up to speed and the take-up spool is pulling smoothly (a big advantage if you're running heavy 6,000 foot spools) before the brittle stuff starts going into the mech. If you lose a loop there should be enough spacing left to safely abort the start. Secondly, if you are using a projector which advances the film using a claw in the gate (as distinct from one with an intermittent mechanism, e.g. an FP-18), manually advance the mechanism so that the claw is engaging a perforation before starting the motor. This prevents a loop being lost.

This particular short broke on the countdown, which is hardly a terrible failure, all things considered. I was thinking about replacing the countdown or adding more leader, and still might do that. Still, my first preference would be to see what can be done to reduce the jerk on initial startup, I suspect something needs tweaking...

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This was with a small plastic reel (500'?), though there are definitely issues with the takeup tension jig on the Eiki. I'll have to play around with it more.

When I did a post-mortem this afternoon, though, it was discovered that one of the rollers on the path just before the takeup had fallen off the projector onto the floor. Fixing this doubtless helps (sigh).