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A couple of addendums...

The speakers listed as "A-4" are actually Altec A-5/MR-94B.

The projector repair done in "Maryland" was by Cardinal Sound & Motion Picture Systems, Inc. (yes located in Maryland).

The Platter, Speakers, Soundhead (with Component Engineering ASR-30SH reader), Ultra-80 lamphouse and High-reactance power supply, Dolby CP-65 soundrack with QSC amps...etc. were also specified, supplied and installed by Cardinal Sound & Motion Picture Systems.

Nice job on the site, by the way. The theatre does look just wonderful and worth visiting by anybody near the Blacksburg area.

Steve

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quote:

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Originally posted by Scott Norwood:
Neat theatre, nice web site. I wish I'd had the chance to visit when I was at school in Virginia.

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Unless you were in school in '98 or '99 you wouldn't have wanted to visit the theater before the renovations. It was in much worse condition then I was able to capture in the pictures. At the time I had a really crappy digital camera and the resolution was terrible.

The Eastman 25 is probably the best 16mm I've ever worked with including those new xenons Elmo has out. It's so quiet and smooth running that without the lamp and blower on you would have no idea it was in operation. I wish we used it more often although it does suck stopping the movie to make reel changes but the school kids don't care, they're just happy to be out of class.

You did a great job. You've got a very interesting site. I hope to see the place in person one day. How is the on-screen presentation?

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Originally posted by Bruce McGee:
How is the on-screen presentation?

Bruce

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The on-screen presentation is fantastic. It's hard to describe how much of an improvement it is unless I describe what was there before. This is going to make a lot of you guys cringe and its something I'm not too proud of, but we had to make due for 2 years trying to run a theater with 25 year old equipment that had been idle for 7 years while raising the money for the renovations.

Film Head:
Luckily this was in fairly good shape and only needed a change of oil and a few parts replaced but it always had a problem with the intermittent making noise which wasn't fixed until the guys at Cardinal Sound got it. One of the other projectionists tried to fix it but never could.

Lamp House:
An old Peerless Magnarc Lamphouse that had been converted to xenon. I don't remember what the power supply was but it sucked and always blew fuses and once caught one on fire (that was an exciting night). The bulb had a arc stability problem and was very noticable on screen.

Sound:
All of the sound equipment was gone when we got there except for the sound head - an old RCA unit. One of the volunteers was an AV guy and donated an old PA mixer board and amplifier that we used. There was one Crate speaker behind the screen. The excitor lamp was powered by a 12v battery charger (don't laugh).

Screen:
The old cinemascope screen was in such poor condition that we tossed it and bought a roll down screen that looked pretty good but always had problems with wrinkles when the weather changed.

Masking:
None, which wasn't really a problem for flat films because the image fit pretty well on the screen. Unfortunately for scope films we still had to use the scope lense for the cinemascope screen and as a result had to crop about 3 feet off the image on either side to get it to fit using tape on the port window (don't laugh again).

Platter:
20 year old SuperPlatter - enough said.

During the renovations, the roll up screen was replaced by a frame screen with masking curtains. It is attached to hoists and can raised out of the way for stage performances. We also have new lenses and appatures for flat and scope so the image no longer has to cropped.

I think by now you should be able to appreciate what an improvment things must be without even seeing or hearing it. Boy am I glad those days are over, but it some ways it also made things interesting.

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