Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: When should you stop a movie

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Posted by Chris Hipp (Member # 1788) on 03-24-2004, 07:30 PM:

I ask this on a basis of what is most professional. (I did a search and nothing come up so forgive me if this has been discussed) :

Today I had a string from my cleaning rag attach itself to the aperture plate. I noticed it during the second or third trailer, so I waited until the trailer was over, stopped it and took care of it.

Question: Is it more professional to stop it like I did or would it be better to keep the movie running and just remove the aperture plate and have an uncropped image on screen while you fix it?

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 03-24-2004, 07:36 PM:

If you notice something caught during the trailers I would just close the dowser after a second of titles at the end of a trailer, pull the plate, clean it, stick it back in, and open the dowser. Nobody'll ever know since it'll only take four seconds to do.

Posted by Kenneth Wuepper (Member # 1174) on 03-24-2004, 07:55 PM:

Chris

You did the right thing. It is best if you can make repairs and have them in a program pause. The repairs may not be as simple as you thought, things and fingers can easily get caught in moving parts.

It is evident that there was a problem. No matter what you did everyone there would have known you were making adjustments. Stopping the show before the feature was a good place for the interruption. By stopping the machine you reduced the danger of personal entanglement in the machine or even having the string get wrapped in the shutter. A few seconds spent off the screen is just good sense as opposed to damaging a gear train and killing a machine.

I wonder about the cleaning process which placed the object in the light path. Perhaps this cleaning technique needs improvement.

KEN

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 03-24-2004, 07:56 PM:

I have an unwritten rule which says that the projectionist gets a Mulligan (for a minor problem) if the program is still in the previews. I think the audience will understand that, sometimes, things go wrong and have to be fixed.

If there is a hair in the gate or if you need to make a focus/framing touch-up or if the sound isn't quite right they can be quickly remedied without too much fuss. If the audience even notices these things they will realize that there is somebody "up there" and they will understand. If they go unaddressed through the feature customers will notice and they are likely to be peeved off!

The only thing I would add to that is that the operator should try to effect the remedy in as unobtrusive a way as possible: Wait until the break between trailers and/or shut the dowser and/or make the adjustment slowly and discretely.

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 03-24-2004, 08:51 PM:

This is truly a context-sensitive judgement call.

If I'm in the pre-show then I would do as you did and wait until the break between trailers.

During the feature, it becomes a little trickier. Generally, I would try and wait for the most opportune time, especially if I know the film and also assuming that an "opportune time" will be coming up shortly. All of this, taking into account the severity of the problem.

If film is being damaged then we are dealing with an emergency situation and the show must be stopped.

Program interruptions are among the worst things to deal with. This is why I watch the trailers very closely. For this reason, I usually object when two shows are scheduled to start at the same time or very close to one another.

Posted by Chris Hipp (Member # 1788) on 03-24-2004, 09:39 PM:

quote:
I wonder about the cleaning process which placed the object in the light path. Perhaps this cleaning technique needs improvement.

Perhaps my original wording was not so good. This was jsut a small hair sized string, as I wiped the bands off a fiber got on the aperture plate.

Posted by Bill Enos (Member # 440) on 03-24-2004, 11:26 PM:

Had a similar situation Saturday nite. A blast from aerosol canned blow dislodged a large fuzzy hair or whatever. Looked for it at the end, never found it. Shot in at the edge of the aperture plate using the wand it will move most such debris without going off the screen. Otherwise just pucker up and get as close to the hot gate as you dare and blow like hell.

Posted by Tim Reed (Member # 137) on 03-25-2004, 04:54 AM:

You should stop it when you see "Starring Jennifer Lopez".
[Razz]

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-25-2004, 09:00 AM:

Agreed with Manny: the only situation in which you absolutely must stop the show, immediately and with no questions asked, is if you are aware of damage to the print being inflicted which cannot be stopped while the film is in motion. Otherwise, as all have said, we're into judgement call territory.

99% of crud in the gate incidents can be corrected without needing to stop - you simply douse the picture, pull the plate out and clean. On an FP-20, I found that a blast of compressed air spray down the top of the pressure plate (in between the plate and the film) would usually dislodge it without even needing to douse. If you can do the douse after, say, a fade to black between scenes, so much the better. The only projector I know of which absolutely needs you to stop is the DP70, in which you need to lever the brass pressure plate back in order to get at the gate trap and aperture plate.

For mainstream print runs this simply shouldn't happen except in a completely rogue situation: if you keep the print and the film path clean, no bits of crud big enough to be visible on the screen should be able to get anywhere near the gate. For arthouse venues with a very high print throughput it sometimes isn't that easy, but I've found that with 99% of setups there is always a 'workaround' of one sort of another you can use to minimise the disruption.

Posted by Jeff Stricker (Member # 224) on 03-25-2004, 10:33 AM:

The old RCA TP-66 16mm television projectors I used to operate had a button on the operating panel that would issue a blast of compressed air into the aperture area. I belive (but my memory of things 35 years ago are a little fuzzy) that a blast of air was automatically issued each time the machine was started and stopped, too.

Posted by Stewart Anderson (Member # 1809) on 03-25-2004, 11:20 AM:

In my old booth we had some small mobile air compressors that were intended for cleaning out projectors at the end of the night, but when a show was started with a hair or dirt in the aperture we could use the air compressor (very carefully) to remove the obstruction with out stopping the show or removing aperture etc... I think I might encourage my present employer to get some cans of compressed air.

NOTE: If you do this, you should start blowing the aperature from a distance because you could actctually cause a lot more harm then good.

Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 03-25-2004, 01:17 PM:

Generally agree with Manny.... Whether to stop the show for a problem depends, of course, on how bad it is. That's a relative judgement; somewhat difficult to define. But I think if you can fix it quickly (like a hair in the gate) you should go ahead and stop, even during the feature. I think most people would whatever it is fixed, rather than it bugging them the whole film long.

Well, I agree with Tim, too... [Smile]

Posted by Robert E. Allen (Member # 1351) on 03-25-2004, 04:24 PM:

I agree with what Leo said. I wonder why there was a thread in the light path anyway. A toothbrush, not a rag, should be used to clean the trap (gate).

I learned that stopping the show is also an effective way to quiet a crowd. Years ago, when I owned a 600 seat theatre in Portland, Oregon, I had a packed house of young people who would not stop talking. I was working as the projectionist that evening. I shut down the show, raised the houselights, walked down on the stage and told the crowd that the movie would not continue until they were quiet. You could have heard a pin drop. And they were quiet the rest of the evening.

Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 03-25-2004, 05:39 PM:

--"I shut down the show, raised the houselights, walked down on the stage and told the crowd that the movie would not continue until they were quiet."---

Yow, today, not only would they probably not shut up, you might get shot... [Eek!]

Posted by John Anastasio (Member # 607) on 03-26-2004, 06:44 AM:

You might not get shot here, but you'd have to clean the screen. I can remember our old AVA guy in school fingering a gob of spit onto the top loop. The hair in the gate would stick to it and get carried away. I don't even want to think of what that did to the print.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-26-2004, 07:50 AM:

I hope he had a supply of UN-approved 'Biohazard' labels to stick on the cans before he sent the prints back!

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 03-26-2004, 08:00 AM:

No worse than licking those suction-cup print keeper thingies for platters... [Smile]

I have to admit I've done that on occasion in both 16 and 35mm. It is a reasonably good quick fix if one doesn't have any air handy for blowing out the gate.

Heh heh, post #777. Another favorite aircraft of mine... [Roll Eyes]

Posted by Bruce McGee (Member # 131) on 03-26-2004, 08:03 AM:

Our TV projectionists would spit on the upper loop of 16mm prints as they ran on our TP-66's if there was something in the gate.

I have a print from 1977 that still to this day has a dark area on the image where the spit was applied. I didn't do it.

Our station didn't use air. We rigged a momentary contact switch at the switcher station that would activate a small valve that would drip a drop or two of Vitafilm on the upper loop as it played. Effective. Later, we got Piclear units. The only drawback was that the Vitafilm ate the paint off of the projector!

I started with a quartet of TP-6 projectors.

EDIT: OMG! I'm about to hit 1000!

Posted by Jon Miller (Member # 163) on 03-26-2004, 10:58 AM:

I had a nagging hair-in-the-gate issue while running a 16mm short on my Pageant 250A Marc-300 for a film festival about three years ago. Used an aerosol duster to blast that hair free and, in the process, touched off a small fireball in the gate. [Eek!]

Then I notice the "Flammable" warning on the duster can. Guess I was too used to the old Freon-based products.

Moral: Always read the label first! [Roll Eyes]

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 03-26-2004, 08:39 PM:

I just simply blast it with a compressed can of air. Usually it works. The times it doesnt, I just simply yank the plate, clean it, and stuff it back in. As someone said, it takes about 4 seconds. I don't even bother to close the dowser when I do it. The biggest thing is to get the darn hair out of the picture without interrupting the presentation. Sprocket holes and sound tracks projected on the masking is no real big deal. I would sooner do that for 4 seconds than to rin a black screen for the same amount of time, especially in the movie.

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 03-26-2004, 09:36 PM:

quote:
...would spit on the upper loop of 16mm prints as they ran on...

Yuck! That's disgusting, Bruce!

At least when I worked projecting porn, I used to clean the gate while the film was running with my tongue. To this day, I have a rectangle permanently burned on it.

>>> Phil

Posted by Phil Blake (Member # 2012) on 03-27-2004, 10:04 AM:

I have always believed in keeping the show rolling, Shut down only as last resort.

I remember in the old days we were running 2000 foot reels , the take up drive belt broke , I spend 18 minutes sitting on the floor winding the reel by hand , but the show continued !

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 03-27-2004, 11:49 AM:

I got that one beat: Try turning a platter by hand for an hour-and-a-half when a motor craps out during the first reel.

Let's bring this thread back on-topic. Tell us about these "last resort" situations when you actually had to shut down a movie.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 03-27-2004, 12:27 PM:

-Film break (once).
-Improperly installed belts on belt-driven "MP-30" projector (once, not my fault).
-Xenon bulb explosion (once).
-Brainwrap (once).
-Curtain stuck while opening due to blown fuse on curtain motor (once).
-Wrong films playing in wrong auditoria in multiplex due to last-minute change of schedule that didn't make it to the projectionist (once, not my fault). [Mad]

-Xenon lamphouse failsafe dropped due to broken belt on roof blower (once).
-Smoke coming out of rectifier (one days' worth of shows lost).

That's all I can think of at the moment.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-27-2004, 02:01 PM:

Incidents which were my fault:

I mislaced the film over a stop roller (or it jumped, but it was probably my fault), resulting in it putting an emulsion tramline down the print. Thank goodness, I caught it after about three adverts. It would have written off the print otherwise.
I laced a full-gate silent print up the wrong way round and it came on back-to-front after the changeover (once, after which the golden rule was drummed into me: lace up with the top of the frame pointing downwards and mirror-writing facing the lens; intertitles the right way round facing the lamphouse).
I started a DP-70 in the wrong ratio, and had to stop to change the plate.
There was once a very tight turnaround from a 70mm show to a 35 show. I therefore converted one projector and started reel 1 of the 35mm feature ASAP. Just as I was about to do the second the duty manager asks me to look at a faulty stopcock on an ice-making machine in the bar which has blown and is flooding the whole place. By the time I'd isolated it and got back to the box, I didn't have enough time to convert the other projector back to 35 and lace up before the first changeover. I should have told the manager that I was tied up, I guess.
On a 16mm sepmag show, reel 2 of the mag turns out to be completely blank - not a sound on it. We had a six-plate Steenbeck in our workroom, and I would have caught it if I'd have rehearsed the print on it.

...and ones which were not:

Manager's infant son let himself into projection box and unhooked the film from the Kinoton platter's take-up tensioner. Chief projectionist had disabled stop roller without telling me; I returned from fixing box office PC problem to find a pile of film on the floor.
Print is delivered 15 minutes after advertised start time. Reel 1 is put straight in a split spool and started (archive print, so I know there won't be a suspect join at the end of a leader). Reel 4 turns out to be from a completely different film. Show stopped, manager explains to audience that we're going straight to reel 5 and that they'll miss 20 minutes or so of the film.
Exciter bulb blows.
Show stopped automatically by fire alarm, or manually in response to fire alarm (several false alarms and one actual fire).
When double-checking a rep print for a Sunday afternoon show which had been made up by an inexperienced colleague, I discovered several of the reels to be nitrate. Show delayed while a VHS was obtained from the local Virgins, which was then projected.
Fight breaks out among teenagers in auditorium, and manager instructs me to stop the show while they are evicted.
Customer starts smoking in auditorium; ditto.

I've had two lamp explosions but neither resulted in a lost show (they were both in two projectors plus platter houses).

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 03-27-2004, 02:52 PM:

Manny I can beat tha try haveing to spin an IMAX reel for 35min when the reel unit decided to die with a full house

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 03-28-2004, 01:09 AM:

Okay, Gord.

I'm guessing that the weight of an IMAX film and the faster speed would make it a bit more challenging but, even so, I would imagine that having to spin a platter for 90mins would suck moreso than having to spin one for 35mins.

Maybe the two can't be compared. It's like trying to compare a long-distance marathon to a sprint.

How many feet/min for IMAX?

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 03-28-2004, 01:24 AM:

337.5 feet/min.

Although I haven't hand spun an Imax platter, I have spun a (AW-3) platter deck by hand for two hours. That however is far easier than hand cranking a 6000' reel for 65 minutes, which I've done far more times than I wish to recall. If I ever find the bugger that was unnecessarily shortening the belts I'll kill him.

Posted by Brian Michael Weidemann (Member # 2243) on 03-28-2004, 01:31 AM:

IMAX film travels at about 5 feet a second, or precisely 3.75 times faster than 35mm. (15 sprockets a frame vs. 4)

I can't imagine manually spinning an IMAX platter to keep up. It's my understanding that should the reel unit fail, the console would refuse to let the projector run ... or was everything done purely manual at that point, because of the full house?

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 03-28-2004, 02:18 AM:

I think Gord's setup would let the machine jettison parts into the lake before anything even thought of shutting down. [Smile]

Posted by Manuel Francisco Valencia (Member # 710) on 03-28-2004, 02:47 AM:

Never had to turn a platter as fast as Gordon but I did have to turn two on those damn Super Platters. It was a loooong time ago at the first theatre I worked at. In fact I was still a concessionists so they figured "hey lets get this poor sucker to do this." Later I was told that it was the Variable Autotransformer that went out. Now thats a shoulder workout!

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 03-28-2004, 10:30 AM:

IMAX is 24fps? I recall seeing a show and learning in the pre-show that IMAX was 30fps. No?

Never mind. I just looked it up and everyone seems to agree it's 24fps.

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 03-28-2004, 01:28 PM:

yes it is 24fps but we can also run IMAX HD at 48fps as well

Posted by Jeremy Fuentes (Member # 2135) on 03-29-2004, 01:33 PM:

I've also had to spin a super platter for about half an hour, but then I decided to get some poor sucker from downstairs finish it for me. [Big Grin]

Posted by Chris Hipp (Member # 1788) on 03-29-2004, 05:16 PM:

Test question:

Q:What do you get when a platter goes down?
A:An usher

OR you can use a make up table to spin the platter, of course I know nothing about IMAX so that may not work for it.

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 03-29-2004, 05:35 PM:

Using the MUT assumes that the motor is still working.

BTW, I would stop a film if the REWIND platter had died. Move the print to a working platter and start again. Otherwise, you will probably wind up with film "dipping and kissing" the floor occasionally.

Spinning a platter by hand (or using a MUT) is okay for a dead payout platter.

Posted by Chris Hipp (Member # 1788) on 03-29-2004, 05:39 PM:

If only one motor goes out I either swap platters or motors real qucik. The only time that I have had to use a MUT is when the DMC takeup control board went out, twice so far.

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 03-29-2004, 06:03 PM:

Trouble with changing platter parts around is that you probably don't really know right away which part just died. I think it's best to move the print and get the show back on-screen ASAP and then try swapping parts later to find out what went wrong.

Because what if you change out the motor and then it still doesn't work? Now you could have 2 dead platters instead of just the one.

Posted by Thomas Procyk (Member # 1170) on 04-02-2004, 02:04 AM:

Stopping a show should be an absolute last resort whether it's a full house or a Monday afternoon. Bad presentation amounts to anything that takes the audience out of the story, so shutting down a show ranks way up there. [Smile]

That said, there are times when it happens...

My fault:
- Started the wrong print. (multiple prints in different aud.)
- Caught the film misthreaded on a roller or something (during the first trailer. You can "hear" something's not right!)
- I looked out the port window and saw a streak or something on the screen. I couldn't tell if it was a scratch or a stain. This was back in my "early days" so I went to check the film on its way back to the platter and (like an idiot) tried to tilt it towards the light to see, causing the failsafes to drop. [Razz]

Not my fault:
- Power failures. In the summer, 4 or 5 a week due to the thunderstorms. The stupid ushers always called up to let me know the movie had stopped. [Roll Eyes]

- Weekend cop came up to the booth once. He said that he thought he saw some "punks" run into the movie and he wanted to look from above. So he goes to look and trips over the film going back to the platter, stopping the show and bringing the lights full up.
- Fire alarms. Never a real fire, thank God, but they used to go off at random until it was traced to a smoke alarm with a short or something. It was the type of fire alarm system that would call the firefighters automatically, so that sucked.
- Various emergencies. Someone having a medical emergency in the auditorium (couple times. Once a show was delayed because it was ME!), the print about to be thrown on the shitty mistimed platter, rectifier blew a thingamajig and the bulb shut off, sound completely cut out for no reason and no format(s) would work, or a shutter gear box breaking mid-show. Fun! [Smile]

=TMP=