Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: "The Master" in 70mm in Denmark

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Posted by Thomas Hauerslev (Member # 566) on 05-04-2013, 04:04 PM:

Last summer in 2012, all Danish cinemas switched to digital projection. Nearly all cinemas sent their 35mm projectors to the eternal film heaven.

One cinema kept the 70mm projectors. "Biffen" in Aalborg ran "The Master" in 70mm in February 2013. I was there to enjoy it - and a few beers - with Orla, the manager. With my Nikon D5000 I captured a few moments of this event. Orla ran the film in 70mm once a day for two weeks.

Here's my video report titled "The Power of 70MM": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8AXY-kq6UU

Posted by Victor Liorentas (Member # 5272) on 05-04-2013, 04:59 PM:

Thanks for making that Thomas!

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 05-04-2013, 06:52 PM:

Something wrong with your Nikon Film camera? [Razz]

Posted by Bajsic Bojan (Member # 4928) on 05-05-2013, 01:32 AM:

why does it look like a scope aspect ratio?

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 05-05-2013, 02:17 AM:

If you look at 12:28, that doesn't really look like scope to me.

Posted by Brian D. Whitish (Member # 825) on 05-05-2013, 04:21 AM:

Is that a Norelco or Kinotone platter? Now I really miss my Norelcos.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 05-05-2013, 06:44 AM:

That is a Kinoton platter. Of course, with two machines...it begs the question as to why they used the platter.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 05-05-2013, 08:45 AM:

They only have one 70mm DTS reader?

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 05-05-2013, 12:14 PM:

quote: Steve Guttag
it begs the question as to why they used the platter.

They ran the film 14 times (15 if they previewed it, which surely they did). At 14 or 15 passes, the handling wear (or chance of it) would be less with a platter than running changeovers.

Remember Steve, very few projectionists were like us and added extra head and tail leader to handle the film at. Not doing that is why the beginning and end of the reels looked bad at most every changeover theater. Since I only saw a few seconds of preroll when they fired up the projector to Weinstein logo, that tells me this wasn't a location that understood and appreciated the need for additional protection leader. For example, at Northpark we would use 100 feet of leader (in addition to what was needed to thread) which gave us plenty of "abort time" well before the actual movie, should anything not fire up perfectly. Same for the end of the movie.

Posted by Thomas Hauerslev (Member # 566) on 05-05-2013, 01:05 PM:

More heavy duty stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5TIn5JmDk4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qSVYxBNUEg

Thank you Victor, glad you liked it

Canada: 1
USA: 0

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 05-05-2013, 10:02 PM:

Hmmm no problems at the AFI/Silver and it was run much more than 14-15 times with changeovers. They also cleaned the film regularly. They would have Film-Guarded it if the studio would have allowed (they asked).

-Steve

Posted by Jim Henk (Member # 3628) on 05-05-2013, 10:05 PM:

That was fun. Thanks.

Posted by Jason Metcalfe (Member # 5739) on 05-05-2013, 10:17 PM:

Ah I wish we had had a 70mm platter system here, showing that thing changeover was a workout

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 05-05-2013, 11:20 PM:

Lazy!

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 05-06-2013, 02:51 AM:

quote: Jason Metcalfe
Ah I wish we had had a 70mm platter system here, showing that thing changeover was a workout

I once ran a 70mm showprint of Gandhi. Because it was not one of the main run of release prints, each reel corresponded to the 10-minute 35mm reels used in the editing process. That meant a 20-reel movie in total, and we didn't even have motorised rewind heads (chief didn't agree with them; said that anything other than hand winding was bad for film). Lacing, the changeover, cleaning, manual rewinding and relacing all in 8-9 minutes, repeated 18 times ... now that was a workout!

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 05-06-2013, 05:41 AM:

I would argue that the handcranking is inherently more uneven, with respect to torque/wind tension than a motorized version...especially if you had a fancy rewinder with electronic back-tension that was constantly maintained.

Did he advocate handcranking the projector too? If not, why?

Posted by Jock Blakley (Member # 6552) on 05-06-2013, 06:23 AM:

We showed THE MASTER in 70mm eleven times for a week-long season in December in change-over, although we were able to build the print up to four reels for the premiere in October and leave it built-up after that.

Luckily we've been able to keep the print for future screenings, so we've one coming up on the 16th.

On the other hand, when we first ran Branagh's HAMLET in 1996 or 1997, I'm told we weren't able to build the print up. Twenty reels in change-over was the only choice.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 05-06-2013, 05:34 PM:

quote: Steve Guttag
Did he advocate handcranking the projector too? If not, why?

It's just 144 minutes [Wink]

. I guess you would not just give yourself a workout with that, but your DTS system too...

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 05-07-2013, 05:33 PM:

quote: Steve Guttag
I would argue that the handcranking is inherently more uneven, with respect to torque/wind tension than a motorized version...especially if you had a fancy rewinder with electronic back-tension that was constantly maintained.

Agreed, and I would have agreed at the time. But the individual in question was in his sixties, had been the chief at that theatre forever and was not someone to be argued with - especially by an 18 year-old new hire, which I was at the time. He was also in the advanced stages of drinking himself to death, which was why I ended running that high profile show (this was an independent in the London suburbs which got the Gandhi preview because one of the actors who played a minor part was a relative of the theatre's owner) single-handed. He simply didn't show up for work on the day of the screening, having been taken into hospital the previous evening.

It wasn't my job to ask why he refused to have motorised rewind heads in his booth, and so I didn't. If I had to guess, the only rational explanation I can think of is that perhaps the early ones weren't sophisticated and able to apply cleverly self-adjusting back tension, and tended to be unpredictable. But by the time I knew this guy, his days of thinking rationally were long behind him.

Posted by Jason Metcalfe (Member # 5739) on 05-07-2013, 06:35 PM:

It was a cool experience but it was enough of a pain as it was, if we had had to hand rewind I don't know what I would have done.

We pretty much ran this as our first run movie while it was here, 70mm in the big theater and 35mm in the other. I think we did about three shows a day in each for roughly six weeks.

Posted by Jim Henk (Member # 3628) on 05-07-2013, 09:30 PM:

quote: Leo Enticknap
But by the time I knew this guy, his days of thinking rationally were long behind him.

Rock and a hard place.. I sympathise with you. You did the difficult and right thing.

Posted by Thomas Hauerslev (Member # 566) on 05-08-2013, 01:57 AM:

When "Out of Africa" premiered here in Copenhagen in February 1986, the 70mm print was shown 750 times on change overs on DP70s. It ran for 250 days, 3 times a day. 8 months and 9 days until 30 October. The print still looks fantastic, without any significant wear and tear.

http://www.biografmuseet.dk/news/1986/out_of_africa/

Posted by Brent Francis (Member # 5008) on 05-08-2013, 04:00 PM:

I still remember breaking down reels of trailers on a handcranked flatbed. 52 trailers, I think on a roll, and 3000 + in an order, broken onto individual cores, labelled, counted and put in boxes. And we had to screen the next roll at the same time.

Posted by Geoff Newitt (Member # 6663) on 05-11-2013, 01:47 PM:

'Hamlet' on changeovers must have been fun - IIRC the shortest reel was under 7 minutes! I think a few UK houses doubled the reels up to make it more manageable.

It was the last thing I ran in 70mm, 16 years ago, alas.

Posted by Victor Liorentas (Member # 5272) on 05-11-2013, 02:17 PM:

I ran Hamlet carbon arc changeover in 35mm. The reels were the same length as in 70mm! The short reels gave just enough time to thread up and reset carbons for the next changeover.
Good workout.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 05-11-2013, 04:48 PM:

No one here has shown older Russian films? They come on 1000' (max.) reels. They are actually sort of fun to show.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 05-11-2013, 05:02 PM:

Back in college I ran a Chinese print of a movie without subtitles. It was on 15-20 reels (I don't recall specifically) and all were under 10 minutes long. Oh and did I mention the leaders were in Chinese with no hint whatsoever of reel numbers (readable to me)?

The reels came all tails out and the top reel ended with credits and the reel on the bottom of the box started with titles, so I just ran them in that order. Nobody complained, but then again I'm pretty sure nobody in the auditorium knew what was going on anyway because this ENTIRE MOVIE was 2 people sitting in a room talking.

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 05-11-2013, 05:10 PM:

quote:
'Hamlet' on changeovers must have been fun - IIRC the shortest reel was under 7 minutes!

'The Jazz Singer', the original one, would have been interesting to project. Since there was no way to edit the sound, other than by re-recording onto a new disk, a change in sound, e.g. from just music to a section with lip-sync dialogue, generally meant the start of the next reel, and the next disk. I think some were around 7-8 minutes. A reel couldn't be longer than 1000 feet or so because that was the maximum playing time of the 16 inch disks.

The film would have been nitrate, so the previous reel would have had to be taken out to the rewind room and the next one brought in. Between reels the machine would have to be cleaned, the carbons replaced or the trim adjusted, the film laced up, the disk replaced, or turned over, the needle changed, and then placed on the start mark, film and disk checked, the arc struck and allowed to stabilise before the next changeover. I wonder how many projectionists it took to run a Vitaphone show?

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 05-11-2013, 05:58 PM:

Most Nitrate laws required one operator per projector. A projectionist was not to leave their machine while it was running film since the projectionist was the first part of the "life-safety" systems of the day. So an operator did have roughly 20 minutes to thread their movie.

Posted by Jock Blakley (Member # 6552) on 05-11-2013, 07:45 PM:

quote: Geoff Newitt
'Hamlet' on changeovers must have been fun - IIRC the shortest reel was under 7 minutes! I think a few UK houses doubled the reels up to make it more manageable.

I'm told that we used two operators on those shows. Nowadays we own that print, so we've built it up to eight reels for a much more manageable show!

Posted by Jim Perry (Member # 4619) on 05-11-2013, 07:57 PM:

Sorry Brad, but I ain't buying yer excuse about less wear & tear on using a platter system (vs. changeovers) - if anything, it would cause MORE of that, due to the film going thru a bunch of separate rollers from the system itself - not to mention tension from the take-up platter. Sure, you can "fine-tune it" to the point of "smooth-sailing", but frankly, I always felt
(and still do) that 70mm was NEVER designed for a platter system in the first place - a recipe for potential disaster.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 05-11-2013, 08:36 PM:

The topic has been hashed a thousand times here on the forum. Believe what you want, but I have proven it to many people in the past with actual examples.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 05-11-2013, 08:47 PM:

Hashed? By whom? [Razz]

Reel-to-reel is the best and easiest. I believe a search on these forums will find many a discussion on the topic.

Oh and I'd be ashamed to build up a print to larger reels too. If you don't want to run the movie, don't run the movie.

Posted by Jim Perry (Member # 4619) on 05-11-2013, 08:55 PM:

Well Brad, we'll just have to agree to disagree then.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 05-11-2013, 09:37 PM:

Running 70mm on a Kinoton platter is like a dream.

Any competent operator (who has been trained to project 70mm) can operate that platter with minimal wear and tear on the film. At least as gentle as running reel-to-reel.

Remember, it is a machine. Compared to R2R it is more a more complex machine. Therefore, if not properly used and maintained, it will damage film.

An operator who is not running reels will have more spare time on his hands. A platter operator should be taking that time he would have spent, threading, rewinding and getting ready for the next changeover to keep his platter clean and properly maintained.

Yes, platters can damage film but, if your platters are damaging your film, you aren't doing your job right.

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 05-12-2013, 04:01 AM:

quote: Steve Guttag
So an operator did have roughly 20 minutes to thread their movie.

But not if some of the reels were only about 7-8 minutes. With the need to deal with carbons, disks and needles it would have been tight with just two operators. If operator 1 couldn't leave his machine while it was running then he wouldn't be able to assist operator 2 with getting the other machine ready, e.g. by changing the disks. Nor would he be able to check the work of the other operator before the changeover, which I believe was normal practice, at least in major cinemas. Then there was the amplifier, probably with meters for the valve currents and knobs to tweak from time to time. Also, staffing levels generally, not just in projection, tended to be higher, sometimes much higher, than today; on the railways for example. I don't actually know, but it wouldn't surprise me if such a show involved four or five operators, including a chief to oversee all of the others.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 05-12-2013, 06:11 AM:

quote: Stephen Furley
The film would have been nitrate, so the previous reel would have had to be taken out to the rewind room and the next one brought in. Between reels the machine would have to be cleaned, the carbons replaced or the trim adjusted, the film laced up, the disk replaced, or turned over, the needle changed, and then placed on the start mark, film and disk checked, the arc struck and allowed to stabilise before the next changeover. I wonder how many projectionists it took to run a Vitaphone show?

There were quite a lot of technical manuals for projectionists published around the time of the conversion (many of them by someone called James Cameron - no relation, I presume!), which have detailed accounts of Vitaphone booth opearating routine. One of them (can't remember which, sorry) says that a booth with three projectors is essential for sound-on-disc presentation. A lot of theatres didn't take the author's advice, because I've seen many photos of two-projector SOD booths. But if you did have three, that would extend the time available to clean, trim, relace, replace the stylus, clean and sync the disc to 15-18 minutes. But you still needed the manpower to do all that, though.

The other gotcha with SOD was that if a section of film print was damaged, it had to be replaced with the exact same number of frames of black spacing, in order to maintain the sync. There are quite a few more obscure Vitaphone films (including several of the musical shorts that pop up as DVD extras now) which can be seen today in versions with occasional flashes of black in them, because the only element that survived to preservation was a release print that had been damaged and then repaired in that way.

The most interesting manual I've found was a 1934 French one, Le cinématographe sonore, by someone called Pierre Hermardinquer. For some weird and bizarre reason, a copy found its way into the University of Leeds library, where I unearthed it completely by accident while looking for something else. It contains a lot of very detailed information and specs about the various recording and reproduction systems that were on the market at the time, and covers everything from projection routine to theatre design, loudspeaker placement etc.

Thinking that I'd never be likely to come across it again and as the book is out of copyright, I carefully scanned the whole thing with a D-SLR and copying stand. If anyone would like a copy of the PDF, feel free to email me. Basic French is all you need, as most of the text is full of easily recognisable technical terms.

quote: Randy Stankey
Remember, it is a machine. Compared to R2R it is more a more complex machine. Therefore, if not properly used and maintained, it will damage film.

An operator who is not running reels will have more spare time on his hands. A platter operator should be taking that time he would have spent, threading, rewinding and getting ready for the next changeover to keep his platter clean and properly maintained.

The reason why platters have such a bad reputation among rep distributors and archivists in particular, IMHO, is not so much the poor operation and maintenance of the machines themselves, as widespread poor practice in preparing prints to run on them. We've all got "I ran print of [insert blockbuster name here] 1,589 times and it was as good on its last run as on the first" stories, but the fact is that so many operators handled the heads and tails poorly (touching film surface with bare fingers, tearing splices and putting a new one on top rather than carefully removing old tape, coating the edge with Tippex/Whiteout or chinagraph as a lazy form of reel end ID when breaking down ... you name it) that the myth became established that there was actually a technical (as distinct from a human) reason why changeover projection is safer for prints.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 05-12-2013, 12:10 PM:

But its really not. Grated most platter operators had poor film handling skills for all the reasons you mentioned above, but just how many people (literally, a show of hands please) added extra head and tail leader to their prints when running changeovers? Even those people who regularly ran answer prints and such that had super long leaders, most of those people wound it direct to the reel and STILL threaded at the starting point. Because almost every changeover projectionist operated that way, there was FAR MORE physical handling of the ends of the reels than had it been handled once and put onto a platter. (Again this argument is assuming many runs on a print, not just a couple.)

In the end it was the quality of the operator that made the most difference.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 05-12-2013, 12:31 PM:

I agree with what Leo says above but I would add that changeover operators handle every reel, thread them, run them, rewind them and store them every time they run a show. A platter operator handles the movie one time when he builds it onto the platter then only once more when breaking down.

A good operator, whether he uses a platter or reels, needs to take care of his film. The difference is only in the location of the risk.

Posted by Jock Blakley (Member # 6552) on 05-13-2013, 06:13 AM:

quote: Steve Guttag
Oh and I'd be ashamed to build up a print to larger reels too. If you don't want to run the movie, don't run the movie.

I'm not quite sure how to take that statement. Although there's certainly opportunity for a bad or slack operator to damage the print during build-up or break-down, if a built-up print gives us more time to properly clean, thread, and check the incoming machine as well as better monitor focus, framing, and sound level on the running machine, is that such a bad thing?

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 05-13-2013, 08:10 AM:

In the over 30-years I've shown movies...reel-to-reel and 70mm...I've NEVER had to build up a print nor had any difficulty in keeping the machines clean for each reel. You make it sound like it is an either/or choice when it really isn't.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 05-13-2013, 09:58 AM:

Agreed with Steve - making up prints onto 6K reels strikes me as the worst of both worlds: the risk factors involved with making up a print, and the risk factors of a changeover show. I only ever did this once in my life, when the platter in one of three screens developed a fault (it was a complicated fault in the Kinoton control unit that caused the feed plate to overspeed, and beyond my competence to fix). We had two projectors in that screen and so, in the three days we were waiting for a replacement to arrive, ran 6K reels simply because we needed to attend to the other screens (operated from other booths in different parts of the buiding) during the hour that they were running, and 20-minute changeovers would have tied us to that one booth. But I can't think of any argument in favour of showing movies that way under normal circumstances.