Long leaders whether 25ft or 33ft will prevent cinching marks and assist in keeping unwanted gunk from between the early winding layers and keep heads and tails cleaner. Its been proven to me many times over the past 30 years.

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Brad, I certainly misinterpretted you with respect to whether the 25' leaders you suggest should be left on the prints permanently, and my comments should be taken in that light.

Unfortunately, as a practical matter, I don't see how we could afford to permanently add 300' of leader (25' x 6 reels x 2 ends) to each print we show. I would not feel comfortable using trailers for a variety of reasons, not the least of which would be the resultant confusion from the trailer, even were it labelled clearly as "fill" (Frank's comments notwithstanding).

We do inspect every foot of film on the rewind bench before we run it, even for sneak previews that get only one showing.

I do have to wonder at your Telluride example; we run our trailer reel before every show, and the last two items on it ("Our Feature Presentation" and DTS#1045) should be a good example of how a tail wears; yes, those pick up dirt and scratches over time, as you would expect, but they don't look anywhere near as bad as many dirt-encrusted tails of release prints we see, nor is there an obvious case of the tail looking dirtier and dirtier as the end draws near. It's really hard to know where the dirt comes from, but I agree every little bit matters.

It might be interesting to followup with studios on this issue and see just who is speccing short tails.

--jhawk

AFAIK, the only way to guarantee a clearly visible frame line is to use an optical step printer to strike the release prints. This is slower, more expensive and the prints aren't as sharp as ones which are contact printed.

Steve

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Frank asked, "Whatever happened to those little dashes between every [fourth] sprocket that you used to see on...prints?" and John Pytlak said, "Kodak had to eliminate the inked or perforated "pinhole" framing marks many years ago, since the film edges and area between the perforations is now often occupied by digital sound data."

The print of Kate and Leopold we had this weekend was printed on Kodak 2383 (2001) stock, and has these, or something similar:

Note the region in the red circle. Those dashes last for 4 perfs and appear every 16 frames (1'), thoughout the entire print, in between the sprocket holes adjacent to the image on the side opposite the sound. In this case, they're not properly frameline-registered, so you'd have to find a frame where you can see the frameline and determine that there's an offset of 1 perforation, but it could still be useful.

So how is it that this print has them?

--jhawk
p.s.: sorry for the nasty green line. Hardware bug in the flatbed scanner I used, I'll see about getting it fixed.

I suspect the dashed pattern you see is a print-through of some kind of pattern on the negative, due to the 16-frame repeat. But I don't think it is the KODAK KeyKode:
http://www.kodak.com/country/US/en/motion/products/keykode/index.shtml
http://www.kodak.com/US/plugins/acrobat/en/motion/postProduction/keykode/35mm.pdf

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
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