Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: How often does your power go out?

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Posted by Kyle Watkins (Member # 986) on 06-17-2002, 09:44 PM:

How often does your power go out? Mine to dam often.

Today only the power wen tout 5 times in 10 minutes. firday it wen tout a total of about 20 tiems in an hour. all week this has happen. we our a 15 plex with and odyssey theater. the odyssey has a nice big power back up system, but we dont. so when ther is one person on the shift it you get very tired reel quick. what takes the most out of you is how our automation is. we have to "wake up" our projectors first ( by hiting stop) then it takes 60 sec. to wake up. then you can start them. so as you RUN from one to another to "wake up" the projectors tehn you RUN back to the first one you woke up to start then the rest. sometimes we have 2 people on but still you get wore out quick. waht pisses me off after you get them all up and running the dam power goes out agian and im doing it all over again. and you get it up running and there it goes out again. so i liek to know how many of you does your power go out. thanks kyle

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 06-17-2002, 09:52 PM:

After about the third time, I'd be on the phone asking the power company what the hell they're doing and when the hell they'll be done. In just those words.

Here, I haven't had a lot of power problems. In Oklahoma, on the other hand, we got mighty powerful storms a brewin'.

Posted by Thomas Procyk (Member # 1170) on 06-17-2002, 10:19 PM:

Kyle- I understand perfectly. Florida is notorious for power outages in the summer. The worst are the brief "brownouts." Those used to throw all of our processors into Non-Sync and our turrets spinning into "Flat" with the films still running. This was at an 18.

The best thing to do if there is a storm in the area and you are expecting the power to go out, wait a minute or two before scrambling to turn everything back on after the first outage happens. It will likely go out again very soon and you'll save yourself a lot of running around. IMHO, it's better to interrupt and re-start the show once with a few minutes delay, then to have them repeatedly start and stop. We used to use the theater's emergency public address system to let everyone know what happened, and that an usher would be in the auditorium to assist anyone who needed to leave.

=TMP=

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 06-18-2002, 04:57 AM:

Power failures are a way of life here. In fact, my first movie is set during a blackout and is called "Powercut."

All of our theatres have generators that kick in 11 seconds after the power fails. The reason for the delay is that if it kicks in too soon, it makes the projectors act wierd. They try to keep going as though nothing has happened, but they make a bad noise in the transition. We kept spacing out the delay to find the minimum amount of time necessary to force the equipment to simply shut completely off.

When the power kicks in after the 11-sec delay, the projectionist has to restart the shows and cue the automation down to where it ought to be in the program sequence.

The generator disengages when the main power returns to normal. AFAIK this happens without causing the machines to act up.

Posted by Mike Williams (Member # 1140) on 06-18-2002, 05:56 AM:

Manny,

How many screens do you run and how big is that generator? Do you run the HVAC off of it also? I bet its a pretty hefty genereator.

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 06-18-2002, 06:07 AM:

I'll check on the wattage spec for you...

It's a 6-plex and I think we can continue running HVAC with it.

Yes it is HUGE and it is housed in separate building at the rear of the theatre building.

Posted by Markku Eriksson (Member # 1256) on 06-18-2002, 10:53 AM:

Not very often, just once in 13 years.

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 06-18-2002, 11:54 AM:

Here it looks like we will have rolling blackouts again this summer (our power company is on the verge of bankruptcy and was turned down on its latest power rate hike requests--vestiges of last year's California/Enron power crisis). This morning all outlying areas west and south of Las Vegas were scheduled for shutdown from 5am to 11am (when the temperatures are at their lowest, i.e. 75-95 degF). So who knows how many we'll get when it gets really hot later this summer? Even without the rolling blackouts, we can probably count on about a half a dozen failures a year in any given part of the county.

Paul
Gimpy Mercenary Projectionist/Engineer
"When the money runs out, so does I."

Posted by Antonio Marcheselli (Member # 373) on 06-18-2002, 11:58 AM:

3/4 times for year.

Do you rewind the movie a bit when you are goint to restart the projector? I can do it very quickly (I have the rewind version of Vic 5) but with platter it is not so simple like push a button.

Bye
Antonio

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 06-18-2002, 01:12 PM:

We get these annoying power "blinks" during electrical storms in the spring. Lightning will strike a substation somewhere, and the system automatically re-routes the power through another station, but that takes about 3 seconds to happen, so we lose juice for those 3 seconds. Very annoying. In a good year, it only happens a couple of times, but still a pain.

Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 06-18-2002, 01:44 PM:

Our power goes out a couple of time per year. It's no big deal. But the other theatre in town has a sign in their window that reads "No Refunds due to Power Outage. Passes will be issued." I think the incedence's are few enough not to put up a hand written sign. It gets my attention every time I go there.

Last summer, during the PG&E crisis where they didn't have enough production, There were doing rolling blackouts every week. It would hit the news and people would panic and call our theatre "Are you open today? I hear you may lose your power." Yea right! We'll just shut down and cower under our desks, waiting for the power to go out. The joke is, we were never hit with a ligitimate rolling blackout. The only time we were hit, the power went out at 11:00 AM and came back on at 12:30 PM 1/2 hour before our first show.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 06-18-2002, 01:48 PM:

It's nice to have Niagara Falls nearby! ;-)
http://www.iaw.com/~falls/power.html
http://www.niagarafallslive.com/new_york_state_power_authority.htm
http://idol.union.edu/~novotnyt/niagara_project.htm

But in March 1991, some areas of Rochester were without power for over two weeks in the "Great Ice Storm":
http://www.asylumnation.com/cgi-bin/columns3.pl?num=6

Just another winter in Western New York:
http://www.erh.noaa.gov/er/buf/winter-pns5.htm
------------------
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

Posted by Charles Everett (Member # 889) on 06-20-2002, 04:52 PM:

The only time I've seen the power go out (so far) was opening weekend of Rush Hour 2.

A heavy thunderstorm rolled through Central New Jersey in the middle of the 4:30 matinee on a Saturday afternoon. The surge was enough to stop the show about 2/3 of the way through. After a couple of minutes with the emergency lights the power came back on. We got the ad slides and non-sync for about 3 minutes while the booth staff reset all the gear. Then . . . the movie came back right on where it left off. Kind of like a "commercial break".

From these posts I find all the outages are in areas with corporate-owned power companies (FPL, PG&E, PSE&G).

Message for those who have electric co-ops or public/municipal power: Do you have outages like these as well?

Posted by Miguel Angel Martorell (Member # 1110) on 06-20-2002, 08:02 PM:

As far I can remember, in 3 years 4 or 5 times in different theatres but I will always remember the last (at the moment)when I was showing The Score in one screen theathre now closed (rest in peace)with 700 hundred seats, no emergency generator and the house was almost full. My prays were heard ´cause after eight long minutes of runs and stops there wasn´t any other shutdown.

By the way, for people who works with platter systems in multiscreens theatres. Do you contemplate the chance of rewind the film or just say to the manager "...forget about it".