At one of the single screen indoor houses I worked at, the owner originally had a "rule" that the projectionist had to stay in the tiny projection room (Standard Simplex and Peerless Magnarcs). I convinced him that as long as I did a good job inspecting the print to avoid the risk of film breaks, seeing and hearing the presentation as the audience did was the best way to assure quality. He became a "believer" as we never had a film break, and presentation quality improved dramatically as I was able to catch and fix the tiny problems you couldn't see or hear from the booth.

IMHO, the projectionist should not be distracted by duties unrelated to projection. But "walking the floor" to critically look and listen in each auditorium, and to overhear what the audience is saying about presentation quality in the lobby is time well spent, and an important part of the job.

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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
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

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at the theatre where I was previously employeed, it was "policy" for all 20 auditoriums to be walked once each shift (twice per day).

As part of walking each screen, we had a daily log on which everying was observed/recorded. This log included shadows/overshoots, sound quality, screen illumination, dirt/scratches and anything else.

This log also served as a decent way to keep track of any projectionist who was "slacking" on the job.

In this 20 screen theatre, two projectionists were on duty at all times. Projectionists and floor staff all had radios, so there was communication at all times.

Furthermore, each projector was to be checked at least 3 times per show.

When I was employed at this theatre, I was older than my co-workers (including the g.m.) I also come from a no-nonsense background with a lot of mechanical experience.

I did make myself a little unpopular because, even though I was the "low man on the totem-pole", so to speak, I made it known that I disapproved of "slackers" of which there were some in the booth.

We MUST have pictures of that theater. Can you get some we can post on the Film-Tech picture page?

Will-

I don't know what Century usually pays, but I hear it's between $6 and $7 per hour for booth employees. The Century out here offered me $7.50 per hour as a starting wage. I refused because it was the lowest wage in the state. I do like the theaters they build, though.

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EDIT: Oops. It looks like my extreme sarcasm was taken at face value. The very point of my post was that the way that digital projection is being touted in the popular media is that of a cure-all requiring zero supervision and maintenance. The post I was responding to, namely a sound problem, is EXACTLY the kind of thing that will not change with digital or analog projection. In fact, my greatest fear is that such problems will actually get worse because of the 'perfect/maintanence free' mindset that gets sold with digital. I was kind of hoping that anyone who has read any of my past posts would have known that I couldn't possibly have been serious. My bad!

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'How about a movie? They're showing them in theatres now! I hear it's like watching a video with a bunch of strangers and a sticky floor.' - Xander Harris, from 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'.

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What would DLP do that would make bad digital (or analog for that matter) sound a thing of the past?!? If a sound system is not properly aligned it wouldnt matter whether you fed a mono film track, mag or the audio track from the DLP server thru it its still gonna sound like crap.

-Aaron

Storage should be interesting then too, because if BlueRAY gets off the ground there will be a non-harddrive way of displaying the movie (get a few BlueRAY disks in an array and run with it). I don't understand why Sat/Fiber distribution is so damn important with movie distribution, you can always FedEX a few DVDs and then you have a more economical medium than HDD-RAID.

Oops. It looks like my extreme sarcasm was taken at face value. The very point of my post was that the way that digital projection is being touted in the popular media is that of a cure-all requiring zero supervision and maintenance. The post I was responding to, namely a sound problem, is EXACTLY the kind of thing that will not change with digital or analog projection. In fact, my greatest fear is that such problems will actually get worse because of the 'perfect/maintanence free' mindset that gets sold with digital. I was kind of hoping that anyone who has read any of my past posts would have known that I couldn't possibly have been serious. My bad!

The short version: Of course I was joking!

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'How about a movie? They're showing them in theatres now! I hear it's like watching a video with a bunch of strangers and a sticky floor.' - Xander Harris, from 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'.

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