Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Technicolor Glendale film lab to close

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 12-21-2013, 02:53 AM:

quote: Daily Variety, December 20, 2013
Technicolor’s decision to close its Glendale film lab shows just how quickly the photochemical film business is approaching extinction.

The lab, which employed 39 people, was devoted to processing 65mm negatives and striking 70mm prints for Imax and other large-format theaters. ”It’s clear the market has dropped, as you can imagine,” said Claude Gagnon, president of Technicolor Creative Services. “Imax has transformed a lot of their theaters to digital and we were even lucky to have another year, because the volume was very uncertain at the beginning of the year.”

Fotokem continues to offer 65mm/70mm services as well as 35mm and 16mm services, and Technicolor still has one film lab, in Bangkok. But photochemical developing and printing on an industrial scale is likely to vanish soon. “Is it six months? Is it three months? It’s not five years,” said Gagnon about the future of Technicolor’s Bangkok lab. Gagnon said some studios have said that sometime in 2014, there will be no more film prints.

Gagnon said the company’s HR department is working to place the affected employees elsewhere within the company but, “as you can imagine it’s very difficult to move people from a very analog activity to digital.” Technicolor employs 1,750 people in the Los Angeles area, he said.

Technicolor has been eager to shed its analog film legacy business for some time as it completes its transition to a digital services and post-production company. It even dropped any hint of film reels from its logo in favor of a logo suggesting digital level bars.

Sad but not surprising. I hope those affected manage to get back on their feet as quickly as possible.

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 12-23-2013, 08:43 PM:

I think Foto-Kem will pick up the slack on 65/70mm and I think Foto-Kem may well be the last lab standing when the dust settles.

Posted by Jim Cassedy (Member # 4115) on 12-24-2013, 09:50 AM:

Since I still deal with several 35mm theaters, I can say that lately the lab
work really SUCKS! I think anyone who knows what what they're doing has either
quit or been fired from the remaining labs. Last night I watched the last two
reels of ANCHORMAN II while waiting to go to a Christmas party with a friend.
There were several color shifts throughout both reels and either badly processed
or light-struck sections at the head & tail ends of the two reels I saw.

From what I've seen lately, I've come to the conclusion that there is no such
thing as "quality control" at any lab any more.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 12-24-2013, 01:13 PM:

Sadly, this doesn't surprise me. When vinyl LPs were in their dying days as a mainstream release format, the quality of the final issues was horrible, too: the discs were paper thin, and would frequently have up to 40 minutes squeezed onto a side, with all the low level and poor s/n ratio issues that implies. I'm guessing that the hard-nosed business decision has been made that the few mainstream theatres still running 35mm are in no position to complain about poor print quality even if they were inclined to do so, and are therefore spending the bare minimum they can on their lab operations.

Posted by Robert E. Allen (Member # 1351) on 12-24-2013, 04:53 PM:

I Just had to call for another print of "The Hobbit" after checking out a sound problem I had. It turns out the problem was a bad soundtrack. So what happened to quality control? In that same print was a frame running horizontally with the word FOOT on it that we had to splice out (it was during the scene where he is fighting the spiders so it's not at the end of a reel). BTW the sound on the replacement print was great.

Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 12-24-2013, 11:52 PM:

Yeeeeep. Our print of Bad Grandpa has several badly color shifts right at the pivotal moment before the credits... Fades from regular to VERY yellow and back half a dozen times over the course of a couple of minutes. Blarg. We don't even ask for replacements anymore, they always say 'there are none'. Whatever, I'm sure we'll be boarding up shortly anyway, unless I win the lottery for christmas.

Posted by Jeff Taylor (Member # 443) on 12-25-2013, 09:43 AM:

Dr. Kalmus would roll over in his grave.

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 12-25-2013, 09:57 AM:

You'd think there would be enough front end business for those still shooting on film, and processing preservation elements. This may have more to do with not enough profit for a big company as opposed to not profitable at all.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 12-25-2013, 10:21 AM:

quote: Steve Kraus
You'd think there would be enough front end business for those still shooting on film, and processing preservation elements.

Lab work on production and preservation elements usually isn't done by the same people and departments as the mass-production of release prints, and often not even in the same facility. Archival lab work is usually done either in the big archives' in-house labs (e.g. UCLA, the Library of Congress and the BFI) or by small companies that focus specifically on this market (e.g. Film Technology Co. in Hollywood or PresTech in London).

These guys will make you a release print if you ask them to, but they'll give the job showprint attention to detail and QC, and charge you showprint prices. Sorry to bang on with this analogy, but it's the difference between one of the last vinyl albums to be made as it was winding down as a mainstream format, and a 180 gram audiophile pressing now. The few remaining labs that are doing a 200-300 print run using high speed panel printers and virtually boiling chemistry to get them through the processing quickly are, I would guess, now not being funded well enough (e.g. staffing levels had been reduced) to QC the temperature control, chemical replenishment and all the things that need to be got critically right in order to produce a high quality and consistent result. The glitch that Robert describes sounds to me like a printer malfunction of some sort, and after it was fixed no-one discarded the section of raw stock that was being printed at the time and that could have contained a bug. In the days when that print could have ended up in a high end, first run city centre venue, that reel would automatically have been rejected as a routine precaution.

Posted by Louis Bornwasser (Member # 3063) on 12-25-2013, 12:21 PM:

I always considered the mass printing of films to be just like the purple mimeo in hugh school. Cheap and fast. Photo engraving was higher quallity.

Posted by Brent Francis (Member # 5008) on 01-01-2014, 09:44 AM:

Speaking as the former head of 35/16 quality control for Technicolor in Toronto, I can assure you we busted our ass trying to make the cleanest prints possible, 24/7. I didn't spend 25 years making crap!
Good to see some film people are getting help in their careers, though. Good luck to them.

Posted by Victor Liorentas (Member # 5272) on 01-01-2014, 10:32 AM:

I bet you have some interesting stories Brent!
Any Imax or 70mm stuff go through your inspections?
Did you have to run random film reels through projectors during quality control?

Posted by Brent Francis (Member # 5008) on 01-03-2014, 06:29 AM:

Don't know how much I can disclose with a non-disclosure clause in my contract, but:
-Every single piece of film was inspected by human eyes (usually on a hi-speed machine running appx. twice normal speed - easy to see problems when you're used to it). The picture included sound tracks & perf. edges.
-Every 10th reel or so was a "red can" - screened regular speed with scanners built into the projector to measure sound and picture density, colour levels, movement, digtal and DTS clarity, etc. etc., and the result posted to our printing dept.
- If nothing else worked, you watched it all slow speed. I vividly remember watching a not-very-good trailer for one epic 45 times in a row.

So if you've ever had to sit at 4AM in a warm chair with a machine purring behind you, watching the same thing over and over AND not only staying awake but alert to problems, I think you'll agree we did a pretty good job!

(PS No IMAX, etc. except some 35 reduction prints. We were straight theatrical release).