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1.37 Academy
1.66 Widescreen
1.85 Wider screen
2.39 Scope
1.33 16mm
1.33 Silent 35.

Silent though poses some issues in itself. I have found that since about 1916 the aperture is pretty uniform at around .680 x .910 inches (give or take a thousandth)...pre-1916 the aperture may be even taller. Some call it 1.25:1 even. I have one customer that I have termed one of their silent set of plates "Super-Silent" It is cut to .725 x .945.

For whatever reason, silent seems to have a bit of a following at the moment, most of my special venue theatres want the ability to play it and most often do.

Steve

In one of the first theatres I work in, the way they dealt with this issue was. a plate was attached to the floor at the rear foot of the pedestal. on the plate was an off-center cam that was machined with a handle. You moved the handle and the cam turned, pushing the rear of the pedestal just enough to move the image into the correct position. You moved the cam in the other direction, it pulled away from the pedestal and then you had to push the pedestal back into position for normal projection -- kinda crude, but it worked.

We deal with silent film programs from time to time. Lots of prints have been reprinted down to standard 1.37 sound aperture, but for the ones that are original silents, we need to reposition the projectors. Although we don't have a cam rig, we basically resolve the centerline thing in the same way -- I keep a crowbar in the booth and just move the backend of the pedestal over to a line marked on the floor.

As for mag-only prints, we've only come across a mag-only once -- SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS. Unfortunately our CinemaScope screen didn't have the extra width that the 2.55 would have given us, so we had to loose the extra image width (cropped in the aperture plates), but we still had to reposition the centerline.

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As Steve mentioned, there are the various PC-Cine adapters offered by ISCO and Schneider. Turreted machines can often accomodate the shift. Century single lens machines have an eccentric upper lens guide that can deal with it and there are other tricks.

Anytime you go above two formats, per projector, you are going to have centering issues. With just two, especially FLAT and Scope you can split the difference and no one will really notice. But beyond that and when you have desperite magnifications like between 1.85 and 1.37, you need to be able to move the lens about to keep the images centered.

Steve

Am I correct in assuming that ideally, our masking should hit the "1.85" line and the "Anamorphic" line on the RP-40?

And what about the left/right edges? This is a fixed masking operation. Should the sides of the scope masking be guided by the arrows?

What is the likelihood that I will need to use a maximizer/minimizer in order to get perfect aspect ratios with BOTH lenses on fixed masking? Is there something I should bear in mind in order to achieve this goal with primes only?

quote:

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The bulk of my installations have:

1.37 Academy
1.66 Widescreen
1.85 Wider screen
2.39 Scope
1.33 16mm
1.33 Silent 35

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"Am I correct in assuming that ideally, our masking should hit the "1.85" line and the "Anamorphic" line on the RP-40? "

Yes. The projectable area for 1.85:1 "flat" is 0.825 x 0.446 inches.

The projectable area for "scope" is 0.825 x 0.690 inches.