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Author Topic: What's up with prints from India?? Jim Cassedy Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1661 From: San Francisco, CA Registered: Dec 2006 posted 07-13-2008 11:16 PM                     OK, so most of the Bollywood prints I get come core-less too. I just deal with it. That's part of my job. I will say this though- There's one India lab I get prints from that are always of stunning quality. I'm talking overall shapness and color almost as good as IB Tech. Much better than almost anything I've seen from a US lab in a long time. I'm also amused by the variety of shipping containers they arrive in. Many come in what look like 2nd hand fruit boxes. Most prints arrive in burlap & wax covered boxes like this: And some arrive in metal coffin-boxes like this: What can I say? ...apparantly I'm easily amused  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 07-13-2008 11:31 PM                        And how do you break down the core-less prints? Building them up is easy. The ones I get in the burlap boxes always have cores, the ones in the can like yours from Hyperbad, India do not. India needs more money so they can afford more things.  |  IP: Logged Andy Frodsham Expert Film Handler Posts: 238 From: Stoke on Trent, Staffs, UK Registered: Nov 2006 posted 07-14-2008 12:26 AM                     Yes, here in the UK most of our prints arrive on cores anyway. It is very rare for us to receive a print on spools. Most of the Bollywood films we have screened are almost brand new, on cores and with leaders and tails. One of their prints recently arrived without leaders or tails (and this is where you put yourself at the mercy of the previous projectionist) so you keep your fingers crosed that they are in the correct cans! The prints are usually in very good condition and almost always come complete with DTS soundtrack discs. As has been mentioned earlier, most of the parts are doubled-up, so you have parts 1+2 in one can, parts 3+4 in the next etc. Confusingly, the DTS unit will often refer to part 1+2 as reel 1 and parts 3+4 as reel 2!! After a while, you get the hang of it! On screen, the prints look great apart from 'flashing' on the top and bottom frameline as each of the orignal negative cuts pass through. The sound quality is usually stunning and overall I find the films quite exciting - they are very pacy (visually and audibly)!  |  IP: Logged Frank Angel Film God Posts: 5305 From: Brooklyn NY USA Registered: Dec 1999 posted 07-14-2008 01:14 AM                        Joe, best thing to do in the face of super cheap owners when they won't buy you something you need to run a show -- like a split reel -- simply say, "Hey man, sorry, this print won't run because it has no reels or hubs and you freaks won't buy the specialized equipment necessary to run it. Now split reel, no show." That's the way I got my SR cards in one booth. One day I just said, "Sorry, we can't run that print because it's got the new SR soundtrack and we don't have the SR cards necessary to play it." We got cards that week. Especially now that dumbass owners have experienced the "cyan crisis," they are familiar with the concept of: "if you don't have this piece of equipment, you can't play that piece of film." If they won't buy you cores, you don't play their coreless prints. Besides, why can't you wind onto trailer cores? You must have like a trillion of those lying around, no? Don't you have a trailer core keyed thing-a-ma-bob? One of those brass slugs the size of the trailer core with a hole and key in the middle that fits on the rewind spindle and another slot on the outer diameter that the key in the trailer core slides onto? If not, it would be a good thing to either have one machined, or make one out of wood like I've seen. It's just a wooden dowel with a center hole drilled and keyed and the outer diameter keyed as well. When prints come without a core, I just put the reel on the split reel flange that has the center spindle. The spindle is always smaller than the donut hole in the film, then pack tissue paper into the space between the film hole and the flange spindle -- however much it takes to really pack it tightly. Then just lock on the other flange and bingo -- works like a champ every time. Just rewind a little slower than usual as you get close to the center.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 07-14-2008 01:15 AM                        On the stunning print quality issue, I remember an anecdote John Pytlak told me at the AMIA conference in '03 or '04. He'd been contacted by a Bollywood DoP who was looking to carry out restoration work on a feature he'd shot back in the '70s. Apparently the standard practice in Indian labs was (and even by the early '00s, still was) to strike all release prints by continuous contacting printing the cut camera negative - no f/g interpos and then dupe neg generations were made at all! The problem was that this film became so popular that after about 300 prints were made, the cut camera negative was wearing out. So they patched it up, Scotchgarded it and made another few hundred prints. 30 years later, they were getting very poor quality when attempting to print a fine grain preservation master from this negative, because the Scotchgard coating was distorting the image on the dupe. Because Scotchgard is a completely irreversible process, there was nothing which could be done at the time. 5 years later or so I suspect that a 4k scan and then a digital intermediate cleanup would be his best bet. But if the Bollywood prints we're seeing are second generation compared to fourth for most American and European prints, that would certainly explain why they look so great! Effectively, they're all showprints.  |  IP: Logged Frank Angel Film God Posts: 5305 From: Brooklyn NY USA Registered: Dec 1999 posted 07-14-2008 01:56 AM                        Lots of the foreign prints that come thru my booth are much the same case -- very few prints struck and most are one-off EK prints. No need to strike thousands like we do here, where we need 3 or 4 thousand theatres opening all on the same day. Many of these foreign films are released regionally and they ship their prints around for months and even years. Some independents can barely afford an answer print and sometimes they go around personally booking their one or two personal prints. So yah, these are most times one off EK showprints and they look spectacular. Nice to see how good film can look inspite of the digital choir using it as a urinal.  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 07-14-2008 02:48 AM                        Now for the $24 question: Why do they call it Bollywood? Were they purposely attempting to sound like cheap, knock-off scam artists?  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 07-14-2008 03:47 AM                        Because Bombay is the epicentre of India's film industry, hence the conflation of Bombay and Hollywood. The city has since been renamed Mumbai (Bombay was the name originally given to the place by Portuguese settlers in the 17th century and retained by the British: the city was officially renamed in 1995), but the nickname stuck!  |  IP: Logged Daniel Ramirez Film Handler Posts: 2 From: Irving, Texas, USA Registered: Jul 2007 posted 07-17-2008 01:56 PM                     We show India movies. Yes they do come with and without cores. It was frustrating at first when they did not come with cores. But now I figured out what to do. I have three different sizes of cores. And that does not include the trailer cores. So putting the 'reels' onto the platter is easy. But when you have tear/break them down....well it is easy now. I either use a regular plastic core or a trailer core. And using the ELR Adapter plate makes it easy. As for the duration of the print, yes they don't last for very long. We had one special print that come back from the dead. It was released back in '78. And it was the longes movie that I had ever worked on. 4 1/2hrs long. Have pictures of it. In our area, they just had a ground breaking ceremony last week to where they are going to build their own mall with a theater in it. We keep advertising it during intermission. And that is another thing. It was very hard in the beginning. We would have to manually stop the projector at intermission. Now we have programmed the automation to stop at intermission. I've watched their own projectionists build a movie. Their methods are different. I had to tell them where to place cues at. But we are managing it so far.  |  IP: Logged Laurie Higgins Film Handler Posts: 45 From: Norcross, GA, USA Registered: Jun 2008 posted 07-18-2008 04:12 PM                        To break them down, if they have core, I have a half reel I put it on and then dump it out into the can. If they don't have cores, I use one of the black plastic cores that trailers and commercials come on and do the same thing. The reason they come in the film cans is money, if you peel the label the film company has stuck onto the reel can you will see that it is the Kodak can the blank film came to them in. I'm thinking the same for the boxes probably. Plus they are not always musicals, I can tell you this because we always have at least 1 Bollywood movie at all times. I can tell you from first hand experience that the way most movies from India are played in America is some private individual (not necessarily part of any film company or theater) will purchase the movie from the Indian film company and then this person will rent theater and show the film. Some times they are waiting just outside your door when the film ends wanting to know how quickly you can break it down so they can run it to the next theater they have rented in the next town. Sometimes they could care less and abandon the film. Like I said in a different post, I have at leat 100 if not more abandon Indian films in my storage space and back hallway. So the reason that most come with their heads and tails cut is the projectionist prior to you didn't feel like reattaching them . Why they have no cores, that beats me, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, perhaps there core hoarders out there stealing them. Also, I have on occasion put a commercial inside the core space and built and broken down on to them and then popped them out and into the film can.  |  IP: Logged Geena Phillips Expert Film Handler Posts: 198 From: Norcross, GA / USA Registered: Apr 2006 posted 07-19-2008 12:48 AM                        I handle 1-3 Indian prints a week, in addition to my normal Hollywood stuff. The ones in Hindi are now handled through traditional booking methods, and are generally uniform in quality: 3" cores for each reel, all in individual cans inside a burlap-covered box (usually two per print). Those are no big deal; a split reel and you're good to go. It's the rentals (usually in Telegu or Tamil and sometimes Kannada) that are often problematic; those prints are generally very handled, and quite poorly so, by the time they reach us. They are generally without cores, and often lack heads or tails (or, when they have them, some asshat has elected not to attach them to the reel). There will be innumerable repair splices, almost always done with something OTHER than clear splicing tape. I try to return those prints in better shape than I got them in, but time is very frequently a factor; the "print-slingers" (as my erstwhile boss calls them) who rent the theatres for their films are usually anxious to move on to the next town, a la Bill Bixby.  |  IP: Logged Richard Fowler Film God Posts: 2392 From: Ft. Lauderdale, FL, USA Registered: Jun 2001 posted 07-19-2008 06:38 AM                     There are four regions for movie production in India. The other outside of Mumbai (Bollywood) use an average print run of 100 - 150. These films including the Bollywood prints are cycled in A,B,C, and mobile cinema locations until the prints are worn out. Based on the producer and foriegn sales arrangement you may get a new or well worn print.  |  IP: Logged Michael Brown Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1522 From: Bradford, England Registered: May 2001 posted 07-19-2008 03:38 PM                     quote: Andy Frodsham On screen, the prints look great apart from 'flashing' on the top and bottom frameline as each of the orignal negative cuts pass through. The flashing isn't because they are bollywoods, it's beacuse they are shot 'real' anamorphic. You would have the same issue showing American movies that are shot in that way. You should be able to frame correctly so the the flashes aren't visible. If you can't -you are showing too much heigh on your scope image. Bollywoods are usually shot "real" anamorphic and not the cheaper 'Super 35' that many hollywood films use these days. Super 35 doesn't have the flashes, "real" scope does.  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 07-19-2008 05:14 PM                        I have had some Indian movies where there were negative splices all over the place, even in the middle of the frame. There were white flashes all over the place with lots and lots of negative dust as well. Oh, and I had to adjust the optical sound head's lateral positioning since it was reading the DTS timecode, and of course they didn't send discs and the print didn't have Dolby Digital. Stupid me forgot to adjust it back before the next showing of a REAL movie.  |  IP: Logged Geena Phillips Expert Film Handler Posts: 198 From: Norcross, GA / USA Registered: Apr 2006 posted 07-19-2008 10:21 PM                        Heads up, Joe. Indian prints (even the big-name Indian studios) seldom have both DD AND DTS. Now that my theatres are owned by Adlabs, I'm hoping to get some traction toward changing that. But this is a BIG company.  |  IP: Logged

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