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The lessons learned are simple.... don't cut corners with an installation. You don't have to buy top of the range.... just don't buy cheap! Heat has become a big issue in recent years with larger picture and short throws, again part of the installation as a whole and should be given very serious consideration at the very start of any project and not an after thought.

The Vic's are better able to cope with heat than FP's but that is not to say they should be pushed to the limit. When you are melting runners and damaging len's with heat then you have a real problem.

We no longer have that problem and I put a lot of that down to the Vic 8's.

As I've said before everyone has an opinion and in their own way they are all correct. I consider this forum a place to share experiences, good and bad, so that others can learn from the experience of others. A lot of mistakes were made and they have on the whole been corrected by a change of equipment that was better able to cope with what it was required to do.

Please guy's don't argue over who did or didn't do a job correctly.

Just argue over the pro's and con's of the machines in question.

As for my preference, as I once worked in a Film Lab I found the FP30ST the perfect machine as it had reverse and variable speeds. The picture stability was excellent until the framing bush went ( that's fun to change ).

But, spares were expensive.

I worked with Vic 8's when I was a projectionist, a good machine and as long as you kept it clean, oiled and belts adjusted it ran and ran.

Guess it comes down to preference and money.

------------------
Les Brock
Principal Engineer
SDDS Systems.
Priestley Road Basingstoke,Hants
United Kingdom, RG24 9JP

Phone +44 1256 484924

Les.Brock@sonybpe.com

I had hoped to make the point that its not the projector alone that makes a good 'projector'!!

That aside, the framing bush is easy.... once you've done it. 30-45 min is about right if everything is to hand. Vic 8 is about the same to change the entire intermittent.

Changing sprokets is easier on the Vic's than the FP's. All in all both have things in favour.... but the Vic's are easier to maintain.

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Water cooling..... whats that? In all my time in the industry (trade?) I've only ever seen one water cooled installation. Seems we Brits don't go in for it.

This was a DP70 with 2k lamp. Seemed a bit of over kill to me.

Small world - I believe that you have worked on two of the V8's in question in a NW London location - a certain three screen with a foyer that would swallow most peoples' houses ! The other two came from the Haymarket. Out of interest, the two V4s from the same site - one is in a 16th century church in Hastings, running occasional archive stuff, the other in the Isle of Skye, in a Scottish culture centre (now if I really wanted to get bitchy I'd start on the Scots, but it would surely provoke a correspondence over which country has the best sheep so best not !)

How's Sony ?

Cheers

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The manual for the Ashcraft lamps and coolers is available on the Film-Tech site, and the coolant circuit is from cooler to positive jaws, to gate, to cooler. This surprised me, I would have expected the gate to have come first, receiving the coolest water. Any comments?

The Ashcraft coolers, like others I have seen, just cool the water in a copper coil, using air at whatever the ambient temperature in the projection box happens to be. I believe that at least the larger of the new Kinoton collers, actually has a refrigeration to cool the water. How much difference does this make when running large lamps?

How are Imax projectors, running very large lamps, cooled?

I would have expected that the design of the lamphouse and reflector would have a greater effect on gate temperature than that of the projector itself.

Peter, I know that the Empire has replaced one of their DP70s with a FP30. Do you know what lamp wattage they are running? This is the largest screen I know of running an FP. Have they had any problems?

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The water cooling on the Loews Jersey FP20's resolved the problem with the gate getting hot, but did not resolved the focus problem caused by the film buckling due to the heat. That was resolved by adding an air blower consisting of a little fan blowing cool air on the film (lamp side). The projectors now stay nice and cool and we have no more focus problems.

IMHO, for flammable nitrate prints, a water cooled gate is almost mandatory, as older prints may be quite unstable if they have begun to hydrolyze.