Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: The Marine print troubles?

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Posted by Dominic Espinosa (Member # 2122) on 10-13-2006, 07:24 PM:

Anyone else have problems with a defective reel 2 on Marine?
So far it's gone out of frame more times than I have fingers for in just the one reel!
Apparantly every time the camera shot changes...
Comments?
--dom

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 10-13-2006, 09:25 PM:

I got this picture in from a theater that was having similar issues and it looks to be nothing more than an out of frame splice joining reel 1 to reel 2.

Since certain shots are hard matted (black bars, letterboxed, etc) and other shots are full frame, that would certainly cause the issue you are reporting. If your splice is like this, remove 3 perforations at the start of reel 2 to bring it into frame. (The last shot of reel 1 is full frame and the first shot of reel 2 is hard matted.)

Also, even if the film jumped a sprocket during printing multiple times, you would see it and it would not always happen at a camera change.

Posted by Ross Oba (Member # 3433) on 10-14-2006, 12:41 AM:

I noticed the difference also. I've never seen a movie be formatted differently among reels. At first glance I was wondering if it was a defect, but soon realized that it was printed that way.

On a related note, I have no idea how I did this, but apparently I overlapped the last reel on 'Man of the Year.' Before finding the splice and correcting it checked the heads and tails to make sure I didn't cut in the wrong place. After inspecting the splice, I noticed that it was overlapped. It was a relatively easy fix. I haven't misspliced in a long time.

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 10-14-2006, 03:09 AM:

quote: Ross Oba
I've never seen a movie be formatted differently among reels.

Often, shots or scenes are hard-matted when optical or digital effects have been applied.

Posted by Dominic Espinosa (Member # 2122) on 10-15-2006, 02:31 AM:

Well color me annoyed.
After my operator reported the problem I watched some of the supposed defective reel and noticed the framing was dramatically different between shots but it certainly wasn't jumping out of frame.

Upon checking the splice it was just as Brad had mentioned.
New operators always seem to get confused when building flat features because of the difference between the full-framed/hard matted film. I often forget about it myself, it's not out of the ordinary anymore.

At any rate, he spliced it out of frame and racked the framer down. It was cutting the tops of the heads off because he went too far. No defect. Except with the operator. [evil]