Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: One Thing Digital will never Acomplish ?

This is topic One Thing Digital will never Acomplish ? in forum Film Handlers' Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Steve Matz (Member # 1890) on 02-15-2015, 10:17 PM:

DOING THIS! [Eek!]

Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 02-15-2015, 10:49 PM:

Ahhhh, the good ol' days.

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 02-15-2015, 11:16 PM:

Safety ring...or a projectionist on duty.

Posted by Ron Lacheur (Member # 1126) on 02-15-2015, 11:59 PM:

Booth Monster strikes again.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 02-16-2015, 03:16 AM:

Well... I once had to untangle a similar mess, because the manager, quite a pussy, was afraid about the consequences dealing with the distributor... We cut and spliced it to roughly equal lengths and put it back in the cans. As far as I know, we never heard anything about it. I guess most prints that came back went directly to the shredder anyway, back then.

Luckily, it happened at the end of the run. Needless to say, we never ran it again. [Wink]

Posted by Jesse Skeen (Member # 586) on 02-17-2015, 12:22 AM:

How recent is that picture?

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 02-17-2015, 11:19 AM:

If you're confronted with that situation, the key to recovering from it is:

1. Don't panic.
2. Look for the end of the film. Just look. Do not touch the film pile.
3. When you've located the end, lift it off and start winding around a core. The film will come up the way it went down - gravity. If you left the pile alone and didn't rummage around in it, the film shouldn't have tangled.

That was the advice I was given after one memorable afternoon in the mid-90s. The manager's seven year-old child was in the building, and during the morning children's show he decided that messing around in the booth was more fun than watching the movie. So he detached the film from the take-up tensioner arm (ST200), watched it feed out of the bottom of the projector and onto the floor for a few minutes, got bored and went off downstairs. The projectionist was trying to fix a problem with the box office PC at the time, and she didn't return to the booth until the movie was nearly over, and almost an entire print of Mousehunt was on the floor. She called me, and when I came in I called a friend who had much more experience with platters than I did, who gave me the above advice. It worked - we got the film off onto cores and re-plattered it, after which there was hardly any dirt or scratching on it. You wouldn't have known that it had been on the floor, looking very much like the scene in Steve's picture. The fact that we mopped that floor at the end of every shift undoubtedly helped as well, and that experience is one of the reasons I don't like carpeted projection booths.

Posted by Alan Plester (Member # 852) on 02-17-2015, 11:46 AM:

We had towers at my cinema, but that picture brings back a very nasty day I had when the booth was over 100degs. ahh happy days

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-17-2015, 01:06 PM:

We used to get this a lot except underneath the projectors instead of the platter. The reason was because we had Christie platters and they would not engage on takeup. The failsafes would drop and the CA-21 automations pretty much just ignored the failsafes. The good news is that these events resulted in lots of new firmware being written for the CA-21, new products from Christie for us to try out to solve the takeup problem, etc etc. That's when I really started learning a lot about the technical end of things.

A lot of what y'all are seeing now with Film-Tech's FT-21 automations had their genesis as a result of that film being on the floor as we didn't just suggest fixes for only the failsafes and call it a day.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-17-2015, 03:37 PM:

Another thing Digital will never accomplish: 'scope done right.

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 02-17-2015, 04:50 PM:

I've never had one that bad. But I have had the pile of film under the projector when the take-up platter didn't engage and the fail-safe failed.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-17-2015, 06:17 PM:

quote: Bobby Henderson
Another thing Digital will never accomplish: 'scope done right.

It could, though. That is if it were shot and projected with anamorphic lenses. The probability of that happening though are probably between zero and none.

Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 02-17-2015, 07:28 PM:

I had a movie do that- the film got caught in the failsafe and the lower reel arm roller and kept the failsafe engaged while film splooged out of the bottom of the projector. At least half the movie was on the floor. I got it wound back up with no cuts, splices, or creases, but some dirt which I filmguarded off, without ever stopping the movie. That was a crappy afternoon.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-18-2015, 01:41 PM:

quote:
It could, though. That is if it were shot and projected with anamorphic lenses. The probability of that happening though are probably between zero and none.

That's a big reason why it doesn't bother me at all to wait to see most movies on Blu-ray. Those 'scope movies are probably going to look better in some regards letterboxed on my 65" HDTV screen than they do in the theater -particularly when we're talking about a properly focused image.

To do 'scope correctly in d-cinema the movies themselves wouldn't necessarily need to be shot anamorphic (although plenty are with the Arri Alexa). However they would need to have enough native resolution captured in camera to be treated correctly in post production.

In post production 'scope movies would have to be rendered at 1080 and 2160 heights for 2K and 4K rather than the cropped down 858 and 1716 levels we currently have for 2K and 4K. When generating the DCP the 'scope image would be anamorphically squeezed to fit the 2048 and 4096 widths for 2K and 4K. Obviously the higher pixel counts would result in some longer render times, but I think the penalty for that would be offset by a much better looking image. Ultimately, it would be a slight change in work-flow process, but nothing too complicated to handle.

It's the same principal as anamorphic vs. non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs. The quality differences with those things were huge. An old 16x9 enhanced DVD still looks watchable on my new TV set. I can't stomach watching a non-anamorphic letter-boxed DVD like True Lies on my TV set. It's just visual torture.

The big problem is with projection, what philosophy to choose. It's very simple in principal to pair a 1.25x anamophic decompression setup with a 2048 X 1080 or 4096 X 2160 imaging chip. The problem is what to do with the "flat" movies. Do you show them spherically through a second lens on a motorized turret (like everyone did with film) or do you apply the same 1.25x anamorphic squeeze to them so every movie can be projected through the same lens?

The single, anamorphic only approach would probably work if current trends with 'scope still keep going strong. It seems like a rare phenomenon for a movie to be released in one of the flat formats.

Posted by Sean Weitzel (Member # 244) on 02-18-2015, 02:01 PM:

Another thing digital will never accomplish: a digital projector still in use more than 50 years.

Posted by Tony Bandiera Jr (Member # 2365) on 02-18-2015, 03:25 PM:

What Sean said.. [thumbsup]

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 02-19-2015, 02:18 AM:

OK, they're not quite digital, but an article in Popular Mechanics I read recently noted that a stadium in North Korea where they hold mass rallies is still using Soviet knock-offs of the Eidophor from the 1970s to project propaganda images. If true, they must be among very few video projectors to have had as long a service life as a typical 35mm film projector.

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 02-19-2015, 05:30 AM:

Well I guess back then these devices were built like 35mm projectors so they can still be serviced ;-)

- Carsten