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Shaun, Joe is running Simplex XLs. They have a pretty good ramp down, but apparently not enough.

Richard, Joe's projectors do not have flywheels. He can only use the motor switch. It's a weird situation indeed. Regarding Strong, a minor re-design of the platter would not increase it's cost. To hell with quality anyway, right? Cheap, cheap, cheap is always the better decision.

Joe, I really think your best bet is to hit the manual motor switch, then at a predetermined point on the leader press START and release the manual motor switch. That way you don't have the first trailer exposed out of the film roll, you don't have to worry about the first trailer getting abraded while the Strong platter tries to get up to speed and you still maintain the benefit of a decent length of leader.

My projectors have a slightly "longer than normal" ramp down speed I'd say. They stop a bit slower than most projectors that I have worked with. But when the leader is motoring and the Strong motors sucking at full force due to the wimpy rings and I suddenly switch the motor off, the Strong motors simply have too much torque to stop fast enough. Never a problem with Christie platter motors.

If Strong would be willing to swap the 13 inch rings for 19 inch ones, I would be an extremely happy camper! Also, if Strong has any other solutions they want to try, I would certainly be happy to field test for them.

They are not very stable machines on start-up. Some of them will scare the crap out of a newbie when they see those things "take off" on startup.

Mine handle the ramp-down just fine, even at the very beginning. From time to time some doofus forgets to remove the DTS Logo on the movie that is moved to another house, and if I catch it, I'll motor it off manually. The platters stabilize nicely in that period of time, and the ramp down causes absolutely no problem.

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Another way to look at it...if the equipment you are installing cannot handle being turned on and off, why don't you just remove the manual motor switch? Also, what is that saying for the equipment's reliability factor? Of course any projector will last longer if it is not abused by turning the motor on and off, but what machine cannot make it through it's warranty period if someone motors down the leader on each show for the year or two warranty period? Of course Joe doesn't even have the capability to manually turn the projector over by hand, so he has to do a running start, thread on the cue frame or motor the leader down.

This is also why automations without a start cue are a foolish design that does not take into account respect to the film...and that cost excuse be damned here, it wouldn't jack up the price of an automation enough to matter for such a feature to be implemented.

In my 20+ years of showing films...I've yet to loose a motor and the bulk of my time has been in changeover booths were the starts and stops are many times more than in a platter booth...still...no motor failures and some are going on 40-50 years of service.

Steve

I know that the operators are going to let it touch the floor, so I put the framing marks -- just ONE frame for picture and ONE for sound -- very early on the leader to force them to limit where it touches the floor.

Just in case anyone is curious...If there is a need to splice the leader, there are little "tick" marks to indicate where framelines are.

The operators use the "Run Down" feature (Christie/Pennywise CA-21 automations) after lacing/threading. A foil cue stops the motor at the countdown point.

There is another long gap between the start point and the dowser open cue (another foil cue). It's all black film with white frame lines. (Don't worry Brad, now that I know about the all-black leader with the frame lines between the sprockets, I'll be switching for the next batch. The white frame lines sometimes show up in scope movies.) Basically, the idea is that the operators will be cutting a black frame each time they build-up/tear-down, so they'll need a lot of them. Also, I wanted to put just that much extra distance between a potential "handling area" and the actual trailers.

With so much leader, I have accomplished a couple of things:

1. The motor runs for a while; it isn't "bumped" on and off.
2. If there is a problem with the threading, the run-down will let the projectionist know. Same for the platter...If something isn't right, the run-down will reveal that, too.
3. With so much film between where the leader is handled and the point where it actually meets up with actual program material, it is unlikely that the program material will be molested.

~Manny (Practically Perfeckt In Every Way.)

I think Gordon's concern is for those who "bump" the motor off and on REPEATEDLY to get to a precise start point, which obviously puts considerable wear on the gear train with accelerations and decelerations against the inertia of the projector's gear train.

The larger rings helped, (elevators would still hit the top, but wouldn't pull on the film) and smoother performance overall at startup was noticed when we used them instead of the small ones. There were instances where we specifically used the small rings as a precaution on large movies. (i.e. GWTW, Titanic, any Double Feature...) They got pretty durn close to the edge!