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Topic: Lantana reel 3 -12seconds out of sync

Tom Fermanian
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 101
From: Sainte Adele, Quebec, Canada
Registered: Dec 2001

posted 04-23-2002 07:37 PM

Hi all, here in Quebec,Canada, The fine Aussie flick Lantana was released last friday on the 19th, Our print arrived late Friday afternoon barely in time for our first Friday showing, well our projectionist spliced up the seven reeler (new print out of lab)and to his surprise, when we got to reel 3 it was 12 seconds out of sync!After refunding everyone + double courtesy passes given out, we inspected the reel in question only to find out that the first 12 seconds had no sound!, the sound negative splice was sandwiched late in the printer?? in our 33 years operating, we have never seen anything this off???Well it took 4 days to get a replacement reel, anyone had any trouble with this picture??

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Gordon McLeod
Film God

Posts: 9532
From: Toronto Ontario Canada
Registered: Jun 99

posted 04-23-2002 09:06 PM

What lab did the printing?

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Tom Fermanian
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 101
From: Sainte Adele, Quebec, Canada
Registered: Dec 2001

posted 04-23-2002 09:21 PM

Prints all came from L.A.?? Sez" Spool #" on begining with no visible trace of lab , They are new Prints with leaders cut short?? Dist. says prints imported from Australia!

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Keith Davidson
Film Handler

Posts: 6
From: Vallejo, CA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 04-23-2002 09:27 PM

Tom,
I don't have an answer to your problem, sorry.
It does, however, remind me of "Enter the Dragon", (oops, I'm showing my age). The film opened on a Wednesday and the regular operator called me to describe the problem.
It seems that the soundtrack was printed heads for tails. It was on the film in the correct location but played back to front! This was the 4th reel of five.
Management decided to run it minus that reel. I came in early the next day to try a hunch. I recorded the track on a 8-track tape. (There I go again). I played it back, (non-sync), and it worked! Took a few seconds to sync it up but it ran the whole reel without a problem.
They recieved a new reel on Friday.

Keith

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 04-24-2002 02:26 AM

On a couple of occasions I've been caught out by rehearsing a print in one sound format, only to find later on that one of the others was out of sync.

This was particularly noticeable in The Land Girls. We had a showprint for a preview which was in our Dolby digital screen. It subsequently moved into an SR-only auditorium, at which point I discovered that the SVA track in one reel was about 3 seconds behind the picture. The same thing happened with Hilary and Jackie (only with a normal release print this time) which, being a film about a classical musician and containing lots of full-screen shots of a cello being played, was particularly embarassing.

The last time this topic came up, John Pytlak pointed out that all the soundtracks are now usually printed from a single interneg, and so if one is out they all will be. But after those experiences I was always paranoid about checking every format our venue could play at some point during every reel, and also looking carefully at the start marks on each leader.

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Pete Naples
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1565
From: Dunfermline, Scotland
Registered: Feb 2001

posted 04-24-2002 02:52 AM

I remember screening 'Somersby' some years ago that suffered this too. We got a replacement copy which was just as bad, and another, and another. Finally they had to have some very fast re prints done, as it appeared the whole run was bad.

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Brad Haven
Master Film Handler

Posts: 300
From: fremantle, West Australia
Registered: Aug 2001

posted 04-24-2002 05:54 AM

hi tom,
we screened lantana for a couple of months and all of the prints that i had heard of had no problems with soundtrack, although, when we first got the print we found that a couple of mins into spool 6 the image started to float around for a few secs then settled out of frame, it was a printing error!. we were able to get a replacement spool in a couple of days, only our print was affected .
the oz prints were processed by atlab!

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 04-24-2002 05:57 AM

Pete: That suggests that whoever was responsible for preparing the final mix master optical sound negative for whatever format was bad managed to put the start mark in the wrong place on one of the reels. Quite an expensive mistake to make!

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Pete Naples
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1565
From: Dunfermline, Scotland
Registered: Feb 2001

posted 04-24-2002 08:06 AM

Leo, you are telling me! If I remember rightly the DTS timecode was in the right place, but at the time the place I worked had just re-opened after a short closure, and changed hands in the process, our Westars dissapeared, as did our Dolby. We re-opened with Kalee 21's brought out of retirement from the boiler room, and Cinemec C55 PT amplifiers, which had been used to drive monitors and induction loops before the closure, so the distributors assurance that the DTS track was ok was of little consolation!

On the subject of DTS, I wander if the DTS track was out, and you knew by how much, could you make it play in snc by adjusting the reader head delay?

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 04-24-2002 03:32 PM

I guess that depends on how much of a delay (between the timecode being read and its corresponding analogue waveform being sent to the analogue preamp) the unit allows you to set, and that the same applies to Dolby digital and SDDS, too.

If the respective start marks on the leader tell you exactly how many perforations the sync is out by, then you could reset the delay to take account of this. But if the sync on the print is out beyond the limits of the system, it wouldn't work.

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Karen Hultgren
Master Film Handler

Posts: 492
From: Agoura Hills, CA, USA
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 04-24-2002 04:01 PM

To answer Pete's question - technically, yes, if you knew how much off sync the DTS track was printed, you *could* readjust the OFFSET setting. But, that is last resort and you'd have to remember to restore the OFFSET setting back to standard.

All prints should arrive pre-QC'd to spec and ready to play. If you get a bad print, you should call the distribuator and request a replacement.

Karen at DTS

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Tom Fermanian
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 101
From: Sainte Adele, Quebec, Canada
Registered: Dec 2001

posted 04-25-2002 08:05 AM

That would have worked great if we had had DTS discs with Lantana!

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