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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Topic: "The Master" in 70mm in Denmark
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 05-12-2013 04:01 AM
quote: Steve Guttag
So an operator did have roughly 20 minutes to thread their movie.
But not if some of the reels were only about 7-8 minutes. With the need to deal with carbons, disks and needles it would have been tight with just two operators. If operator 1 couldn't leave his machine while it was running then he wouldn't be able to assist operator 2 with getting the other machine ready, e.g. by changing the disks. Nor would he be able to check the work of the other operator before the changeover, which I believe was normal practice, at least in major cinemas. Then there was the amplifier, probably with meters for the valve currents and knobs to tweak from time to time. Also, staffing levels generally, not just in projection, tended to be higher, sometimes much higher, than today; on the railways for example. I don't actually know, but it wouldn't surprise me if such a show involved four or five operators, including a chief to oversee all of the others.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 05-12-2013 06:11 AM
quote: Stephen Furley
The film would have been nitrate, so the previous reel would have had to be taken out to the rewind room and the next one brought in. Between reels the machine would have to be cleaned, the carbons replaced or the trim adjusted, the film laced up, the disk replaced, or turned over, the needle changed, and then placed on the start mark, film and disk checked, the arc struck and allowed to stabilise before the next changeover. I wonder how many projectionists it took to run a Vitaphone show?
There were quite a lot of technical manuals for projectionists published around the time of the conversion (many of them by someone called James Cameron - no relation, I presume!), which have detailed accounts of Vitaphone booth opearating routine. One of them (can't remember which, sorry) says that a booth with three projectors is essential for sound-on-disc presentation. A lot of theatres didn't take the author's advice, because I've seen many photos of two-projector SOD booths. But if you did have three, that would extend the time available to clean, trim, relace, replace the stylus, clean and sync the disc to 15-18 minutes. But you still needed the manpower to do all that, though.
The other gotcha with SOD was that if a section of film print was damaged, it had to be replaced with the exact same number of frames of black spacing, in order to maintain the sync. There are quite a few more obscure Vitaphone films (including several of the musical shorts that pop up as DVD extras now) which can be seen today in versions with occasional flashes of black in them, because the only element that survived to preservation was a release print that had been damaged and then repaired in that way.
The most interesting manual I've found was a 1934 French one, Le cinématographe sonore, by someone called Pierre Hermardinquer. For some weird and bizarre reason, a copy found its way into the University of Leeds library, where I unearthed it completely by accident while looking for something else. It contains a lot of very detailed information and specs about the various recording and reproduction systems that were on the market at the time, and covers everything from projection routine to theatre design, loudspeaker placement etc.
Thinking that I'd never be likely to come across it again and as the book is out of copyright, I carefully scanned the whole thing with a D-SLR and copying stand. If anyone would like a copy of the PDF, feel free to email me. Basic French is all you need, as most of the text is full of easily recognisable technical terms.
quote: Randy Stankey
Remember, it is a machine. Compared to R2R it is more a more complex machine. Therefore, if not properly used and maintained, it will damage film.
An operator who is not running reels will have more spare time on his hands. A platter operator should be taking that time he would have spent, threading, rewinding and getting ready for the next changeover to keep his platter clean and properly maintained.
The reason why platters have such a bad reputation among rep distributors and archivists in particular, IMHO, is not so much the poor operation and maintenance of the machines themselves, as widespread poor practice in preparing prints to run on them. We've all got "I ran print of [insert blockbuster name here] 1,589 times and it was as good on its last run as on the first" stories, but the fact is that so many operators handled the heads and tails poorly (touching film surface with bare fingers, tearing splices and putting a new one on top rather than carefully removing old tape, coating the edge with Tippex/Whiteout or chinagraph as a lazy form of reel end ID when breaking down ... you name it) that the myth became established that there was actually a technical (as distinct from a human) reason why changeover projection is safer for prints.
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