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Posted by Steven J Hart (Member # 2340) on 12-30-2005, 05:01 PM:
 
I made up a used print of Narnia today and saw something I've never seen in the eight years I've been in the business. The previous theater had place about eight inches of 1/2 inch wide foil tape at each of the three cue locations! What cue reader could possible need that much tape to set off the cues. The stuff covered about half the picture area for about eight inches and it covered the soundtrack for two of the cues! That must be a great example of "Film Done Wrong"

I didn't put this in the "You Suck" Thread 'cause I thought there might be some technical reason for doing this, and the print was otherwise in VERY good condition.
Steve
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 12-30-2005, 05:10 PM:
 
I've seen that wide tape before but never to that excess.

I haven't put tape on 3 spots in a print for years. My first cue is at the very end of the DTS tag; my last cue is at the head of a 20' piece of junk film that's attached to the end of all prints. So it's only really necessary to cue the "lights up to half" at the start of the credits.
 

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Posted by Steven J Hart (Member # 2340) on 12-30-2005, 05:43 PM:
 
Mike, thats almost exactly what I do. What a sticky mess it was to get that foil tape adhesive residue off the print.

Steve
 

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Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 12-30-2005, 06:06 PM:
 
many of the older proximity detectors required a long wide piece of tape to read reliably
 

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 12-30-2005, 10:14 PM:
 
Instead of that much tape they should have had a person on standby next to the cue sensor equipped with a 5 pound sledge hammer to just go ahead and wack the cue rollers at the correct moment...... their obviously malfunctioning cue detector would have probably read that one ok.... A good booth tool there are many other uses for too.....

Mark
 

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Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 12-31-2005, 02:12 AM:
 
..or, ill trained "booth clowns.."
 

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Posted by Steve Scott (Member # 630) on 12-31-2005, 10:57 PM:
 
Not to mention how extra wasteful the situation becomes when the foil rubs off the worthless cue detector & will no longer read. I've seen plenty of QC prints come with these long cues. It also can be attributed to slow automation systems. I've seen Xetron/Maxi "opticues" placed at 4-frame intervals over the span of five or six cues. Yuck!
 

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Posted by Wolff King Morrow (Member # 2226) on 01-01-2006, 02:34 AM:
 
I think the worst is getting a used print that had a barcode sticker set of cues, or the foil disc version too. If you're going to plant cues on the center of the frame, please put some clear tape under it first.
 

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Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 01-05-2006, 06:29 AM:
 
Didn't Kodak or was it Dolby introduce a system quite a number of years ago whereby a coating was applied to the print and it had magnetic propertied so that cues could be magnetically recorded and read. Obviously the stuff had to be transparant but it did retain enough flux so that it could replace cue foil. I wonder why it never became mainstream.....cost? unreliable?
 

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Posted by Joel N. Weber II (Member # 3530) on 01-05-2006, 08:40 AM:
 
I think if the labs were going to do an extra step to facilitate theaters dealing with cues, a better approach might be to use an extra data channel in the digital soundtrack to record where the start of the credits is, etc. The same technology DTS used to trigger strobe lights ought to be usable for a house lights half up cue at the start of the credits, etc.

Though the other interesting question is whether foil cues are more reliable than digital soundtrack reading. (Although with the digital soundtrack approach, it would probably be easy to encode things in such a way that the cue is printed over 10 seconds or more of film, so that if the digital reader drops out for a second or two, the cue can still be processed, albeit a bit late.)
 

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Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 01-05-2006, 12:20 PM:
 

quote: Frank Angel

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Didn't Kodak or was it Dolby introduce a system quite a number of years ago whereby a coating was applied to the print and it had magnetic propertied so that cues could be magnetically recorded and read. Obviously the stuff had to be transparant but it did retain enough flux so that it could replace cue foil. I wonder why it never became mainstream.....cost? unreliable?

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