quote:

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Going after the Shift or Location Manager is an option. But I think the Head/Cheif projectionist is the person to talk to. Things WILL then be sorted out.

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WHAT head or chief projectionist? That's part of the problem. This theatre doesn't really have one. THe whole history of this particular theatre is one of uncaring. I have MANY examples.

Once I complained about the picture being out-of-focus AND frame being quite a bit off, I was told "it don't matter, its just the previews." As though the problem would be fixed in time for the feature. I complained a second time ten minutes later. STILL, "it don't matter."

Disney's JUNGLE BOOK, shown with a scope lens. The person I was directed to complain to didn't understand what the problem was. BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY where the cue to switch lens, apeture plate, and curtain mask open NEVER worked and was shown flat. I knew numerous people who saw this feature at various times and had to go out and complain. At both showing I saw, I also complained, and received a puzzled look by the manager, who said "it's supposed to be automatic." Well, I would THINK someone would get a clue the automation wasn't working when they had to go change it manually every single time (and this apparently went on for several weeks). And 75 percent of ALL flat films projected were badly off-frame. Sometimes I succeeded in letting them know, sometimes not.

Another time I told them to change the lens on a film to scope, and they did it manually, without bothering to check to see if the masking opened up. It took ANOTHER trip out of the auditorium to alert them to that.

This is the basic problenm. They don't bother to check and see if there are any OTHER propblems going on once they fix one.
 

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Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 02-10-2003, 04:15 PM:
 
This is similar to the botched sneak preview of "Just Married" that I posted about last month. The show was started 30 minutes early, run 10 minutes into the movie, and stopped, and restarted from that point at 7:30, meaning that at least two thirds of the people in the auditorium didn't get to see the first 10 minutes.

I'm thinking of avoiding sneak previews, since I think they're more likely to have screwups like this than normal features that are run all week.
 

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Posted by David Favel (Member # 1125) on 02-10-2003, 05:35 PM:
 
If the problems they are having are consistant, then why do you go there again & again.
 

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Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 02-10-2003, 05:42 PM:
 
I stopped going for several years. However, since Regal took over, I decided to take another chance, and the presentation was quite good for HARRY POTTER. But this last experience will keep me away for probably another few years. Unfortunately, if an indie or foreign film comes to town, this is usually the only theatre that gets it.
 

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Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 02-10-2003, 05:52 PM:
 
FWIW, Regal has fixed several issues that I've complained about at their Eugene theatres in the last couple years: shutter ghosting, light from the booth washing out the screen, and a dead subwoofer come to mind. And whoever did their upgrade to SDDS-8 for "Spider-Man" did a great job EQ'ing the place. As with most such things it probably depends a lot on the individual(s) involved.
 

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Posted by Dennis Benjamin (Member # 1137) on 02-10-2003, 05:55 PM:
 
R eally
E vil
G uys
A t
L arge
 

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Posted by Darryl Spicer (Member # 711) on 02-10-2003, 06:49 PM:
 

quote:

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After being assured several times they would back up the projector, I was now told they wouldn't. I challenged their statement that they couldn't back up the film, considering they had in fact done that to get CONFESSIONS off the projector. It was then she looked at her watch and saying it would take too long. BUT, if I was unsatisfied with the presentation, I could always get a refund.

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quote:

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Technicaly you can't back the film up. However you can Cut it and reinsert it without any problem. It all takes about two to five minutes to do this. Didn't UA used to have projectionists for there theatres. I guess they went out in favor of badly trained management.

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quote:

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The actual statement was they backed it up by hand.

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I bet there are lots of nice fingerprints all over that print now.

It's so easy to do a center drop without even cutting the film on most equipment... arrrg!

Cheap executives should be forced to sit through the presentations some of their theatres put on.
 

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Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 02-10-2003, 07:59 PM:
 
Assuming that they were running the show off a platter, the film couldn't exactly be "rewound," but it could be re-started from the beginning _if_ only a short length (roughly 20 minutes or fewer) had been run through. The way to do this would be to stop the show, unthread the projector, walk over to the takeup platter, remove the center ring (with the film wrapped around it), and carefully unthread all rollers while taking up film on the center ring. This mass of film can then be dropped back into the center of the feed platter. This takes fewer than five minutes to do and works best with two people.

This sort of screw-up is completely pathetic, and the crappy customer service that the theatre provided when made aware of the problem just makes it worse. They should have just admitted that they messed up and offered passes to the entire audience. Then, they should have allowed those who wanted to stay to watch the rest of the film.

The manager at a theatre where I fill in fairly regularly writes movie reviews as a hobby and has told me some "interesting" stories about various press screenings which he has attended.
 

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Posted by Darryl Spicer (Member # 711) on 02-10-2003, 08:03 PM:
 
It is actually harder to do that on a Specco without cutting the film because there is so much damn film that has to go over the thousands of rollers on the take-up. So cutting it on a frame line and winding it up prevents the film from touching the floor and causing unnecessary risk of scratches to the film.
 

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Posted by Jason Black (Member # 684) on 02-10-2003, 08:50 PM:
 
You guys say that you can just do a "center-drop". I'll go along with that, but it's often not as easy as you make it sound, depending on equipment.

We run the typical Christie package W/ Strong platters. The center drop method will work up to about the middle of the first reel (previews included) BUT I normally run into the problem of the film around the ring not 'dropping' in evenly. It winds up with a 'wrap' or two fo film staggered up higher than the rest. As long as the film isn't bound in any way, it will run through the payout with no problems. I did this on my Sat sneak for Chicago that went haywire in order to prove that R1 had no SR-D encoding. (after all was said and done, that is..)
 

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Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 02-10-2003, 09:03 PM:
 
There's nothing wrong with having a couple layers of film that don't fall down with the rest -- that is if somebody's around to keep an eye on it. Since the Strong control arms don't allow film to come out of the top there's not much to worry about.

BTW, I have seen someone back 20 minutes of a print up by hand on a platter. Of course there were more finger prints than sprocket holes by the time they were done.
 

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Posted by Jesse Skeen (Member # 586) on 02-10-2003, 09:21 PM:
 
While I've heard UA has some good operations, here (in CA) they're absolutely pathetic. After writing to them last year about an unbelievably bad experience, you'd think someone on the receiving end would care enough to shape things up, but the same problems keep happening. You'd think that if you gave out passes to someone for a bad experience, you'd make sure it was PERFECT when they came back!
 

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Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 02-10-2003, 09:53 PM:
 
Some time ago, I indicated I really didn't want to hammer Regal anymore just out of respect. But from what I just read, some of the Regal Cinemas theatre staffs still have their heads firmly planted in the lower portion of their body. There is absolutely no excuse for such incompetent projection and management techniques as described in some of these posts of this thread.

I get angry when I see and read of stuff like this happening.



As a passing thought, maybe one of the prerequisites for employment is the prospective employees (including the management) of the theatre (as well as other conglomerates) Paul L. was speaking of should be required to have a plexiglass belly button...so they can see what they are doing and where they are going when they have their heads up their butts.

[ 02-10-2003, 11:21 PM: Message edited by: Paul G. Thompson ]
 

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Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 02-10-2003, 10:57 PM:
 
To be completely fair to Regal, I think they inherited these problems from the previous UA management, which seems to be still in place (and need to be removed). They still welcome people to United Artists Theatres. On the other hand, the Edwards on the other side of town still exhibits good customer relations since the switch. The UA theatres in Bakersfield AND the ones I visited in L.A. NEVER exhibited good customer relations. They always spit in the face of the customer if they dared complain about anything.
 

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Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 02-10-2003, 11:13 PM:
 
If what you say is true, there is a possibily that Regal is bound to an operations agreement with UA. Some of those last about 6 months, and during that time, no changes can be made in the theatre operations policy until the agreement is satisfied. At the end of the operations agreement, the new owner or company is free to do as they choose.

This is what we did with Plitt up here, and that is what Regal did with us, also. Plitt could not dictate to us what we were going to do as far as implementing Plitt's policy until after the agreement was satisfied. He did try, but when it was called to his attention that he was in violation of the agreement, he backed off very quickly.

When Regal purchased our remaining theatre in Port Orchard, Regal honored the agreement much better than Plitt did. I recall that Regal never tried to pull a "fast one" on us that I know of. Regal honored the operation agreement to the letter.

Regal might not be able to do anything about it until the agreement is satisfied. When that happens, Regal might just step in and "clean house." It sure sounds like that place needs it desperately.
 

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Posted by Josh Kirkhart (Member # 1046) on 02-11-2003, 12:59 AM:
 
I stand by David S. and add the following:

Once and for all when you are addressing a theatre experience you are addressing one experience not the nations. Regal just like any other company has bad apples. This is a reason for the e-mail complaint box and forms. No one theatre can be watched over every day. When you have a bad experience report it, to the management, corporate, everyone. Be specific, know the names of the personel that you spoke to.

When Regal took over the two afformentioned companies they inherited more of those apples and a lot of good ones also. Obviously most of the staff at the East Hills is carry over from previous management and Regal needs to 'FIX' some things there. My local landmark and Cinemarks need heeps of help not to mention the self owned places where you would think presentation should come first. The only way to fix these problems is to identify and report.

rambling overwith
 

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Posted by Christopher Duvall (Member # 284) on 02-11-2003, 04:20 AM:
 
Paul L., I emailed you some information that may help you.
 

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Posted by Michael Gonzalez (Member # 593) on 02-11-2003, 11:09 AM:
 
In a situation where the center drop is not possible (either too much film has run through or equiptment issues) than the next best option would be to cut the film and show the movie in two parts. Although the movie will obviously stop at the point that it was cut to be rethreaded, it is still better than the audience missing any of the movie. As long as you let your customers know what is going on, there shouldn't be any complaints.
 

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Posted by Don Bruechert (Member # 1538) on 02-11-2003, 02:36 PM:
 
We started doing that if we get brain wraps. We cut the film on both sides of the brain, remove the brain and drop the film onto a reel. Then we do a quick rewind to another reel so the film is facing the right direction, splice it back on to the projector end of the cut and then run the film off the reel until it stops. Then we re-lace the brain, splice the remaining two ends of the film together and run the rest of the film normally. It works really slick and if you have a table right there in the booth by chance you can straighten the whole mess out in 10 minutes - it does go faster if a second person is around to fix any film damage while you are doing the rewind. I have thought about trying that center drop thing when I start a film out of sequence or we have a bad splice at the beginning (or have to cut out a trailer like 'the core') but I am afraid I won't get the film to go back in there where it belongs and will end up making a big mess. I would assume you'd have to remove the ring first and then kinda "flex" the segment of film a bit to get it to go back in there....
 

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Posted by Barry Martin (Member # 1376) on 02-11-2003, 04:12 PM:
 
Don, in my experience you can remove a trailer and put the trailers back in the center with plenty of room to spare, this is the easiest instance of a center drop. I would just use the platter, but in case your platter rollers don't line up in a way that you could do that, simple thread the projector and run the film so that the head of the trailer being removed is at the takeup ring. Then break the splice at both ends of the to be removed trailer (if it is one to be held onto, then just wind it up by hand) so that now you can drop the center (everything before the removed trailer) into the now larger hole (everything after the removed trailer).

As for normal drops, they were pretty easy on my Strong platters, largely due to the rings which "unlocked" and shrunk about 1/2 an inch. We would sometimes have overlap or have to finagle it in to the center again, but never had any problems with it running through the brain or damage. When I had to do center drops I could do it without a cut and pretty much the same way you suggested, Scott N. I just am not sure why you would need a second person to do it? Probably the equipment setup.
 

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Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 02-11-2003, 05:56 PM:
 
The second person isn't necessary--it just speeds things up and helps to avoid getting film on the floor.

I've only had to do this once (due to a management scheduling screwup) and that was with an AW3 on the non-operator side of the projector and an installation with conduit between the soundhead and the wire trough on the front wall. Different installations will obviously have different requirements.
 

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Posted by Darryl Spicer (Member # 711) on 02-11-2003, 06:10 PM:
 
An AW3 is much easier to do a center drop on without having to cut the film. Not as much film to worry about on the takeup.
 

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Posted by Kathy Roberts (Member # 1410) on 02-26-2003, 08:11 PM:
 
Hmm....are we talking about bad operations for a company as a whole or just an individual theatre? A company as a whole can not be judged by a visit to 1 or 2 or even 10 theatres. Visit 60% of the theatres...and have bad experiences and then you can say that it's a bad operation as a whole.
 

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Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 02-26-2003, 08:22 PM:
 
Weren't UA and Edwards *acquired* by Regal? Being acquired is not the same as a merger. Edwards was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and for all practical purposes, it did fail or it would have if someone hadn't rescued it. Don't know what the situation was with UA.

But you're right -- it's usually inaccurate to paint an entire circuit as "sucky" based on a small sample of poor locations. Luckily for me, the Regal and Cinemark locations in this area are pretty well-run.

EDIT: Kathy made a comment about UA and Edwards having merged with Regal, but she later deleted that from her post.
 

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Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 02-26-2003, 10:01 PM:
 

quote:

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Hmm....are we talking about bad operations for a company as a whole or just an individual theatre?

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quote:

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Weren't UA and Edwards *acquired* by Regal?

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Technically, no. UA, Edwards, and Regal were all required by the same company that bought out all three chains' debt load and renamed REGAL ENTERTAINMENT GROUP.
 

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Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 02-27-2003, 10:57 AM:
 
Maybe I'm missing out on some subtle distinction between mergers and acquisitions, or maybe I'm just splitting hairs. If two viable companies like Compaq and HP decide to join forces, that's clearly a merger. If one viable company (Regal) buys the assets of a non-viable company like Edwards, isn't that clearly an acquisition? Or if Microsoft buys some small company like Visio, that's an acquisition, not a merger. Philip Anschutz (Regal Cinemas) acquired the assets of Edwards and UA, lumped them in with Regal, and re-christened the resulting entity Regal Entertainment Group. Smells like an acquisition to me, not a merger, but then I failed Business Economics 101.

Was UA in financial trouble like Edwards was?
 

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Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 02-27-2003, 12:52 PM:
 

quote:

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If one viable company (Regal) buys the assets of a non-viable company like Edwards,

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Regal didn't buy the assets of Edwards. A new owner bought the assets of all three companies and merged them all together. The new super-chain has a number of executives from the old Regal and UA chains in place, and the name of REGAL is used, but this is still a new company.

And yes, UA was in the same financial boat. All three chains were under Chapter 11 protection.

I see what you're saying about Regal, but legally, its a totally new corporation (completely new structure) that happened after the chain was purchased by Anschutz. Anschutz bought all three individually and created a new umbrella organization for all three.
 

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Posted by Dennis Benjamin (Member # 1137) on 02-27-2003, 12:59 PM:
 
Add all United States based HOYTS theatres to the list......
 

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Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 02-27-2003, 01:58 PM:
 
To an earlier post saying it required visiting 60 percent of a chain's theatres to get an idea of their quality. That's not mathematically true, but I'm off to a meeting at the moment and don't have time to elaborate. You'd be surprised at the number of visits required to get an accurate idea within a certain percentage of "confidence".

I'll put it this way, quickly, before going to my meeting. Say there is a huge jar full of red and green (or good and bad) marbles. You dont have to draw out 60 percent of the marbles to estimate what percentage is red. The number you have to draw out is far fewer.
 

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Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 02-27-2003, 04:39 PM:
 
OK. I'm back from my meeting and now I can elaborate.

The number of visits (or samples) required to determine a mean value of some attribute of a theatre (like projection quality, screen brightness, etc.) is based on how confident you want to be of your measured average. Saying that, for example, you want to be 95 percent confident that your measure is correct. Then the confidence limits are the mean plus or minus (1.96 times the standard deviation divided by the number of visits).

So, when you take samples, you must have a way of consistently and fairly assigning a numerical value to each sample. You'll need to calculate the average and the standard deviation of the samples and you'll need to kow the number of samples you have.

Let's use a real life example. I've been to the Carmike Century 8 in Decatur 61 times and the average presentation quality score (using a straight arithmetic average like you use to average grades in school) is -6.95, with a standard deviation of 6.70 . (The same logic would apply if I'd made 61 visits to all different Carmike theatres to evaluate the chain somehow).

So the 95 percent confidence interval has maximum
-6.95 + 1.96 * 6.70 / sqrt (61)
and minimum
-6.95 - 1.96 * 6.70 / sqrt (61),
which gives us the range -5.27 to -8.63 .

Therefore, I can say with 95 percent confidence that the actual presentawtion quality score, based on my 61 visits, is between -5.27 and -8.63 .

If I want to claim that it's in a smaller interval than that, then I have to reduce my confidence. The point is, with just 61 visits (out of thousands), with 95 percent confidence, I can make this claim. If I drop my acceptable confidence level to, say, 80 percent, then my interval will be smaller (use 1.28 instead of 1.96 in the above calculation, and you'll get the smaller range -5.85 to 8.05 .

You get a "law of diminishing returns" by sampling more since the interval's width does not decrease linearly with the number of samples, but with the square root of the number of samples. That means that having 610 samples instead of 61 would reduce the interval's with to just under one third its current range, not by a factor of 10, so taking a sample of 60 percent of a large population would be drastic overkill!

Using the red and green balls in a large, large jar as an example (assume it has an infinite number of balls in it and you know they're all red or green), if you draw out just 10 balls and 3 are green and 7 are red, after drawing out these 10 balls, you can say with 80 percent confidence that the percentage of red balls is between 51 and 89 percent. In other words, you already know with a great chance of being right that well more than half the balls are red.

When visiting theatres, once I get 10 visits to a location in, I feel I have data that has enough mathematical backing to begin using.
 

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Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 02-27-2003, 05:06 PM:
 
Somewhere you've got to factor in the total number of theatres the chain has, otherwise...

Say they have 61 theatres. I visit 61 of them. They all 'suck'. I can be 95%, or even 100% confident that they all 'suck'.

Now say, they have a billion theatres in total. I visit 61 of them. All 61 'suck'. Can I really, truely, be 95% confident that the chain (all billion theatres) 'sucks' as a whole?

BTW, I AM familiar with the mathematical proof of this, I just don't have much confidence in it.
 

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Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 02-27-2003, 05:31 PM:
 
Evans' explanation is mostly over my head. But what if Acme Cinemas operates theatres nationwide, and has excellent managers and technicians in every area of the country EXCEPT the Pacific Northwest. You sample every Acme location in the Northwest and find many problems. You've now sampled a fair percentage of Acme theatres, but only in one geographical region. How can you extrapolate from that sample and draw conclusions about Acme as a whole?
 

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Posted by Barry Martin (Member # 1376) on 02-27-2003, 08:45 PM:
 
I would think you could solve it all by limiting it to something as simple as "All '******' theaters in '*******' region I have attended were terrible/excellent." Ignoring the criticizing of a whole, and just going with what you have experienced. Exceptions to this rule would include company policies which provide for "film done wrong" that are nationwide and a testimony of professionals to a forum all agreeing that they have all had terrible/excellent experiences with "******" chain.
 

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Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 02-27-2003, 10:55 PM:
 
The samples need to be random. If you sample 61 theatres, they need to be randomly chosen from the entire population of the chain's theatres.

Also, this logic assumes that the population size is, for all practical purposes, infinite (like sampling 61 showings out of thousands). If the population is small in relation to the number of samples, then, of course, the confidence would be much higher (and this method of calculating the confidence would not apply).

If a chain had 61 theatres and you sampled 61 different theatres thoroughly enough to determine their "scientifically calculated "suckiness factor", then you haven't taken a sample, but a census!

Assuming the population you're sampling to measure is infinite, then if you sample a small number of items from the population, then the standard deviation controls the confidence interval. If you sample 61 items from an infinite set, then the 80 percent confidence interval is the average plus or minus (1.28 times the standard deviation) / sqrt (number of samples) .

Therefore, if I sample just 10 entities from an infinite set, and get an average of, say, 90.0, with a standard deviation of 1.0, then my interval is 90.0 plus or minus (1.28 * 1.0) / sqrt (10) , which gives the interval 89.6 to 90.4 . With this, I could say with 80 percent confidence that the true average is between 89.6 and 90.4 . If I said, based on these 10 measly samples, that the true average in this case were between 89.6 and 90.4, I'd only have a 1 in 5 chance of being wrong! However, let's say that the standard deviation were much larger, like 10.0. Then my range would have been 85.95 to 94.05 . In this case, my statement for 80 percent confidence would not be nearly as powerful. To get the same range as I had with the 1.0 standard deviation case, I'd have to have 100 times the samples as before, meaning I'd have to have 1000 samples to achieve that same interval as I did with 10 in the 1.0 st. dev. case!

The explanation is intuitive. If something is varying a lot from sample to sample, it's going to take many more samples to get a good idea of the average. If something is being very consistent over time, then it takes far fewer samples to be confident of the true behavior on the average. The population being infinite or very large does not enter into this discussion. A small population only makes the situation better.
 

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Posted by Kathy Roberts (Member # 1410) on 02-28-2003, 12:37 AM:
 
Wow...this whole mathmatical computation for the quality of "suckiness" is very in depth. I just want to add that I was just coming up randomly with the 60% mark there. However, what someone said before about how you have to take into consideration that possibly the one region of the country is not as great as the other sections is a very viable point. I remember a long time ago someone saying how the west coast is the total opposite of the east coast. Basically I got the impression that the west coast was the worse of the two. Again, this is years ago and I have no personal experience or knowledge of this actually being true.
I had an interesting conversation one time with a GM about what each chain was known for. This person said "UA is known for a lack of customer service" "Regal Cinemas is known for projection issues and small screen sizes" and AMC just has issues with all of the above. Again, I can not say that EVERY theatre in those chains follows these problems. I don't even know if that is the reality for the three chains.
I have lost track of my point here so I am going to just post this and figure out where I was going at another time.
 

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Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 02-28-2003, 09:56 AM:
 
It's really funny that we got into a mathematical discussion of "quality of suckiness". :-)

One reason I started the mathematical discussion is when people develop an opinion that something "sucks", it has to be based on something. When asked why you believe something "sucks", I believe you should be able to back it up with concrete examples. For example, if I say that Carmike 8 in Decatur has more presentation quality problems than any other theatre in the area, I feel I should be able to provide data supporting that fact. Now, there are few people out there as eccentric or weird as me out there that would keep track of presentation quality problems and write software to collect and put them on a WWW site with statistics, but doing so gives my opinion a lot more punch, provided that I haven't faked data or been unfair (I haven't faked data and try to be as fair as I possibly can).

Many people develop an opinion too quickly and when asked about their opinion, can only cite 2 or 3 examples. If I went to Carmike 8 only three times and got an average of 7 points worth of problems per show, that's not very meaningful, but getting that result after 61 visits is about 4.5 times as strong a statement (The 4.5 is sqrt (61) / sqrt (3)).

To make strong backable statements about an average measurable quality of something, you must first have a fair, consistent, meaningful way of assigning a numerical value to the quality of any sample. Second, you must take enough samples so that a small enough interval for a fairly good confidence level is achieved. If you have problems with either of these, your results may not be valid.
 

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Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 02-28-2003, 02:23 PM:
 
Evans hints at an important point: is "suckiness" a binary attribute--i.e. either a theatre sucks or it doesn't--or is there more to it than that? For me, it's more subjective than that.

A theatre with a lousy building, high ticket prices, lousy management, lousy concessions, lousy seats, and lousy film presentation definitely "sucks." A theatre with an attractive, well-maintained building, reasonable ticket prices, attentive management, tasty and inexpensive concessions, comfy seats, and "film done right" clearly doesn't "suck." But what about theatres which have great film presentation and rude employees who have no idea what "customer service" actually means? Or those where the lobby is impeccibly clean but the prints are filthy?

Very few theatres excel in all of these areas, and some vary considerably from day to day based upon which employees happen to be there at any given moment. Even generally good theatres can have problems (which might not even be their fault, but which still inconvenience the customer), and even lousy theatres can put on good shows on opening weekends.

I don't have a good solution to this, but felt it was worth presenting another problem with the idea of measuring the "suckiness" (or lack thereof) of any large theatre chain.
 

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Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 02-28-2003, 02:57 PM:
 
Good point, Scott. "Suckiness" is not a binary attribute, unless you set a threshold and say all presentations that don't suck have a score above some number x and all others do. (I love this terminology, using the word "suckiness" rather than "problem index" or something).

I like for my measurements to be based on both the type of problem and the seriousness of it (how distracting it is during the movie or how much it detracts from the moviegoing experience).

I have a set of categories and the points deducted are slight if a problem is minor, and more drastic if the problem is severe. Let's say that everything is OK about an image except the aperture shadow causes, say, the entire top edge to be faded or jagged. That's a 2 point deduction. If the fading caused was very slight, or only caused a small part of that edge to appear that way, it would be a 1 point deduction. If all 4 edges looked really bad, that would be 8 points. If 2 were bad and 2 less severe, that would be 6 points. Running a movie significantly out of frame, affecting composition, is usually 10 points or more. I've been doing this a long time and have a good set of categories and point-assignment techniques for problems based on distractions. A presentation with no defects that warrant deductions gets a perfect "0" score. The worst score I've ever assigned was a "-35". See Dogma, Carmike 8 in Decatur, under the presentation quality reviews section.

So, I've got a system that gives a much smoother measure than a binary "this presentation is OK" vs. "this presentation sucks".

I've never documented this system thoroughly in a way on my site that lets site viewers understand the system very well. I keep meaning to do it, and I can't remember if I've enumerated the categories and "problem codes" that are used. I beleive I have, so I won't do it again here.

The reason you want a more continuous system is that if you have a binary attribute, every value is a 0 or 1. If you flip a fair coin enough times and get a 0 for heads and 1 for tails each time, and average this "measure", you'll get something close to 0.5 in all likelihood, which isn't close to any actual value measured. The standard deviation will be very close to 0.5, though. The wide standard deviation should be a clue that there is a wide deviation in the values.

Suppose at a company there are 9 employees that make $10000 per year and one employee that makes $1000000 per year. I can truthfully say "The average salary at the company is $109000 per year." That average isn't very meaningful, though. The standard deviation of $93920.12 should raise a big flag. A sanity check for a bunch of data is to compare the median with the average. If there two aren't fairly close, then maybe the average isn't what needs to be used for analysis. Remember, the average doesn't have to correspond with the value that occurs most frequently.

Now let's go home to our average families with 2 and a half kids.
 

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Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 02-28-2003, 09:04 PM:
 
Once again we see that digital isn't necessarily better.
 

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